The Problem with Biracial Baby Dolls
I had a major American Girl phase as a kid. My mom used to take me to our town’s public library, a slice of heaven on earth, and look through cookbooks and CDs as I ran through the children’s section. I flew through the stories about ten year old girls placed in different historical moments. This was in the mid-2000s, before I was old enough to notice the whitewashing of the stories, pick up on how the only girls of color featured at the time (Addy, Josefina, and Kaya) got significantly less press than the others. All I knew was that the stories were cool. Naturally, for my tenth birthday, I asked to go to the American Girl store in the city. While the experience gave me some major elementary school clout, its aftermath was more meaningful.
My parents budgeted for me to have an American Girl birthday experience with a friend of my choosing. I was allowed to choose two dolls to bring home, too. I chose incorrectly for both. The problem with the dolls I chose was that they were white.
I got home and showed off my new books and dolls. My dad was livid. Thinking about it now places me back on our couch, legs swinging as I held my dolls and listened to him argue with my mom about his daughter bringing two white dolls home. I had simply chosen the girl of the year (because having the girl of the year was a major flex) and the doll attached to my favorite books, Kit. Why my favorite books were about the girl living through the Great Depression, we can talk about at a different time. What matters here is that neither of them was Black, and it took me a while to understand why my father was so upset.
I didn’t notice at the time, but most of the dolls I had up until that point were Black. My favorite doll was the Padme Amidala one because why wouldn’t it be, but Black dolls were the overwhelming majority in my toy box. My parents had made a concerted effort to give me things that looked, more or less, like me. And despite all that, I still chose the white dolls.
The odd thing about the night of my tenth birthday is that I also recall justifying my choice to my mom. I said something about the black dolls not looking like me, which was true. I thought they weren’t as appealing as the white ones, too, but I think I knew not to say that. I hated Addy’s hair, which I had internalized as bad. If you google Addy, you’ll see that her hair is just a thicker version of the straight hair the white dolls have. It’s just a bit more textured. They didn’t even give her an unrelaxed curl pattern.
This stuff is important—beauty standards matter whether we want them to or not. And Black women have a special position at the shit end of that stick. So when Khloe Kardashian tweets asking for “sweet looking biracial baby dolls” like her daughter isn’t smoothly brown-skinned and already on the receiving end of anti-Black commentary about her “too dark” skin, something needs to be unpacked.
Colorism, defined by Alice Walker (who has her own problematics to deal with) as “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color” is an old and ever-present tool of anti-Black racism. The way the color scale goes, the darker one is, the less likely they are to be good, basically. Darker-skinned people are systematically denied empathy, opportunity, and things that, in this context, lighter-skinned Black folks are privileged to.
The reason Jesse Williams, Yara Shahidi, Zendaya, Tessa Thompson, and [insert light-skinned and/or biracial activist or entertainer] get the platforms they do is in part because of colorism. I don’t say this to downplay the nuances of their experiences, but we’ve got to highlight the facts. And then you gender colorism, and it gets even worse. Look at the casts of classic shows like Martin, The Cosby Show, The Proud Family. Earlier this year, Grown-ish aired an episode on colorism but failed to acknowledge that there were no dark-skinned Black women in its principal cast. For every Living Single or Insecure, there’s an Atlanta or The Bold Type which seems to cast its Black women only after they pass a brown paper bag test. Every time Amandla Stenberg or Alexandra Shipp is cast to portray a dark-skinned woman in a book-to-movie adaptation, a Nina Simone record cracks
Colorism is both an in-community and out-community thing. I don’t know if Walker’s quote expresses that well. My junior year of college was spent reading lots of literature by people of color, and I’ll always be grateful for that. My friends, roommates, and the five people who watch my instagram stories through will also recall how much I complained about the mulatto representation in the books I read for 18th and 19th Century African-American Literature. I would sit in Bobst with Clotel or The House Behind the Cedars on my lap and just rage out. I was so upset about how the only Black people worth caring about in these stories were the ones who looked white or close to white, the ones who had straight hair and were pure as the driven snow—until they stood in the sun for any length of time.
The readings from my London semester weren’t much better. Taking Postcolonial Indian Literature meant trudging through Arthur Conan Doyle’s descriptions of South Asian characters as “black devils” and Gandhi's thinly veiled racism for four months. There was also Wuthering Heights, which hurts to love so much because the darkness of Heathcliff’s skin (I firmly assert that Heathcliff was of color) codes him as inherently sinister. Not to mention cute extracurricular things like the loud colorism displayed in British newspapers on a daily basis, and the comments made about and around the darker skinned Black women I befriended while abroad.
The experiences I had moving through Europe alone were markedly different than those I had with my non-Black and darker-skinned friends. While traveling with my Black friends, a group in which I was almost always the lightest member, we were screamed at for going into a bank in Monaco, kicked out of a bookstore in Paris, ogled and recorded like zoo animals in Wales. Nobody messed with me when I was alone. And going anywhere with my white/white-passing friends came with a slimy kind of safety. This, of course, isn’t exclusive to Europe. I’ve got tons of stories about how uncomfortable certain spaces are in the states that I’m just not in the mood to get into.
The grain of salt I have to give, and take myself, is that I’m privileged here. I benefit from looking the way I do, and while I try to use that to do good things and write thousand word blog posts about colorism, that won’t solve the problem. Honestly, I don’t know if representation will solve it either. But I’ll refrain from being a downer and spotlight some dark-skinned women doing cool things to add a some relief.
Kiki Layne was amazing in If Beale Street Could Talk. Noname’s Room 25, was the “best-reviewed major album” of the year. Her first album, Telefone, the soundtrack to my sophomore year, is one of the best rap albums of all time. Jackie Aina continues to give makeup pro-tips on her YouTube channel while also being one of the funniest and most meme-able influencers alive. Tomi Adeyemi’s novel Children of Blood and Bone is dominating the children’s literature market—JK Rowling is about to be smoked. Academy Award-winning actor Lupita Nyong’o is about to become a scream queen. Here’s the trailer for Us, just so you can watch her snap on the 1 and 3.
I don’t know what else to say. Support women of color. Support Black women. Support dark-skinned Black women. It’s not hard, I promise. And, you know, if you happen to have Black children buy them Black dolls. A humble suggestion to keep you safe from smoke you probably don’t want.
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