Do New Black Barbies Break the Mold?

Mattel launches So In Style Barbies, but do they reflect diversity or promote racial stereotypes?

-Kim Jack Riley

Like most mothers, I dedicated years of my own life preparing for my daughter’s special day. It was not her first period, her prom or even her wedding day. No, before all that, came My Daughter’s First… Barbie! It was Christmas 2001 — I remember it like it was yesterday —and if you think selecting from rows and rows of perfect, 12-inch plastic beauty pageant queens was easy, think again. While the happy-consumer-makers at Mattel, Inc. seemingly thought of every Mom-emoticon to help trigger my ideal buy, they forgot to play one thing: the race card. No matter how long I poured over these lifelike yet flawless reflections of womanhood, there simply wasn’t one that looked like my daughter and me.

Fast forward to 2009; enter the new African-American Barbie. Now celebrating 50 years and more than 200 Barbie dolls in their current retail portfolio, Mattel recently launched the new So In Style (S.I.S.) collection. These dolls, which range in price from about $8 to $25, feature BFFs Grace, Kara and Trichelle, who are all about having a good time. Of course they wouldn’t be real Barbies without a little sister, which they each have, and their hair can be beautifully styled with the help of Mattel’s new Aqua curl technology, which allows them to go from straight to curly with a spritz of a water bottle and special hairstyling tools.

The designer of the S.I.S. dolls, Stacey McBride-Irby, is African-American, and says that her goal was to better address the needs of her community. “I wanted black girls like my 6-year-old daughter to have dolls which looked like her,” says McBride (pictured below), “and also to encourage girls to be inspired and dream big.”