http://healthland.time.com/2013/04/03/a-mom-asks-mattel-to-make-party-supplies-featuring-barbies-of-color/
Georgia Braithwaite is a five year old African American. Like many other five year olds she enjoys collecting and playing with barbies dolls. Georgia has a total of five African American barbies, that were no easy find. Her mother had to look all over the internet in order to find them.
But finding more African American dolls wasn't Georgia's biggest problem. She has a birthday coming up, and like every young girl the perfect party is of course a barbie theme. Once again her mother went online to look up African American barbie party supplies, only to find nothing.
Her mother was shocked, what was she going to tell her daughter Georgia? There was nothing that just the Baithwaite family could do alone. So as a result started a petition on Change.org demanding Mattel (the company in charge of barbie) to feature barbies of color.
It seems to me that young girls like barbies, because they make them feel as though they are the barbie (beautiful and skinny). For Georgia and many other young African Americans this is a struggle because its hard to relate to a barbie if it is completely different race.
I think that this IS a really big issue. Young girls look up to Barbies- but if there are no featured ethnic Barbies- what are the children going to think? When i was younger I had my fair share of Barbies and it was rare to come across a doll of race. I think the only one that I saw as a child was the Pocahontas edition Barbie. I agree that something should be done about this- it does not send a good message.
ReplyDeleteI always played with white dolls growing up. I never liked black barbie. i had white american girl dolls and barbies, too. being mixed, i think this was a bad image to be stored in my head. I had tons of asian barbies, but out of all of them, i only ever had one black one.
ReplyDeletehttp://shop.mattel.com/product/index.jsp?productId=12427820
ReplyDeletewasnt so hard to find for me...
It infuriates me that i cannot find a mexican, asian, or indian barbie anywhere, and i totally agree that it's important that girls can play with whatever race they choose.
My mom was talking about this a couple of years ago. There are a lot of young african american girls who look up to white barbies. They want their hair straightened and long like the ones of the white barbies, and their entire image is ruined when they look in the mirror and do not see what they are hoping for.
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