Posted by Yolanda Webb on August 26, 2009 at 11:46pm
Last year, Italian Vogue shook the fashion world with its “All Black issue, which sold out on many newsstands. This year, the July issue features Kristen McMenamy on the cover, but comes with a delightful supplement devoted to black Barbies.Well, it is Barbie’s 50th birthday (Barbie and I are excatly the same age...but I'm not sure they would put me on the cover of any Vogue!) and Mattel does have those new black Barbies to promote. And while this supplement is not full-sized like a regular magazine (it’s about 6 inches wide; 7.5 inches long) somehow the doll scale makes sense.I remember when I was about six years old my sister and I both got Black Chatty Cathy dolls for Christmas. Now remember, this was about forty years ago and my sister and I were totally taken aback by our fortune (or misfortune as I remember I wanted to instantly remake her face with my Barbie makeup kit I also got for Christmas).While it was great to have a doll that looked like me (Chatty Cathy was quite plump), the reality was that it was the only doll I ever had that looked like a real sister. When my daughter was born twenty five years ago I remember one Christmas going in every toy store to find a Black Barbie for her (we ended up starting a collectors to die-for collection which she still has today for her daughter). But that Barbie was based on a very European idea of what women (not even close to most Black Women) should look like.Barbie black or white gives little girls dangerous ideas about what a woman’s body should look like, and what was/is considered beautiful. Before writing this post, I asked my daughter about her Barbies when she was little. Her response shocked me. As tall and thin and chocolate as my daughter is she simply said..."mom did you realize that I never even played with those dolls. No she wasn't a tomboy..she said, "they simply didn't look like her or any of her friends,"I was amazed. Here I am concerned about what it taught my little girl about having a positive self-image and she was taking her cues not from Barbie but...you guessed it...from ME. She said her play dress up and how she wanted to look was not as a result of those Barbies but of watching me get up every morning, dress, fix my hair and handle my business as a single working motherr.As a result, she makes it her responsibility to teach her daughter about how special and beautiful she is as a black girl. She will become the role model for her own daughter...who will want to dress, walk, talk and be like Mommy!So, no I don't agree with Mattel or Vogue about the images and messages they send to our girls, but there is no substitute for showing our girls the "REAL" us by modeling YOUR positive, self-affirming, beautiful self before your daughter every morning and telling her "SHE" is Beautiful because she looks like Mommy and that more than anything she is and always will be... "More Than Enough"
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