It’s a part of American lore on race and progress: Within the Forties, Kenneth and Mamie Clark got down to research the psychological results of segregation on Black youngsters. The psychologists carried out a collection of experiments famously referred to as the “doll take a look at,” wherein they requested lots of of kids, between the ages of three and seven, about dolls of various colours. Probably the most well-known and damning revelations from the take a look at — which performed a serious function within the Supreme Court docket ruling on Brown v. Board of Training — got here from the responses to the query of choice. After figuring out the Black dolls as unhealthy and the white ones pretty much as good, many of the Black youngsters stated they most popular the white dolls to the Black ones.
Director Lagueria Davis repeatedly references the doll take a look at and its ends in her energetic and informative, if uneven, documentary Black Barbie: A Documentary. The experiment anchors her movie, which explores the historical past of Mattel’s first African American Barbie doll earlier than broadening its scope to have a look at the cultural significance of toys in America, how they’ll perpetuate — and typically debunk — stereotypes. Davis, who admits a wholesome skepticism towards dolls early on, makes use of her doc to attract consideration to the assorted layers of an current dialog.
Black Barbie: A Documentary
The Backside Line
Compelling materials undermined by a meandering imaginative and prescient.
Davis opens Black Barbie with a frank admission: Earlier than transferring to Los Angeles in 2011 to pursue her filmmaking desires, the director hated dolls. It wasn’t till she lived together with her aunt Beulah Mitchell, an older relative who collected them and spent many years working at Mattel, that she started to understand their complexity. Black Barbie is loosely organized round Davis’ journey from skeptic to low-key admirer. Her curiosities information the documentary, one thing that proves to be a double-edged sword.
Accessibility is the first good thing about this strategy. Black Barbie begins from a nonjudgmental place; it doesn’t disgrace viewers for his or her dubiousness, dismissal or misunderstandings with regards to the sociocultural significance of dolls. Davis’ interviews with specialists and fanatics anticipate questions {that a} extra insider-y mission may need thought pointless. Together with her aunt Mitchell, Davis will get an oral historical past of Mattel and a portrait of the joys of seeing a Black doll as an African American lady dwelling within the lengthy shadow of Jim Crow, at a time when some locations banned them. With Dr. Patricia Turner, an African American folklorist and the dean of UCLA Faculty, she goes over the enduring legacy of the Clarks’ research and its nationwide implications. With public historian Yolanda Hester and others, the movie presents a quick historical past of different doll firms — just like the Black-owned Shindana Toys — and the cultural impression of Mattel’s Black Barbie.
One of many earliest iterations of Black Barbie was Christie, a pal of Barbie, launched within the late 60s. A decade later, Kitty Black Perkins was tasked with creating the primary Black doll to truly be referred to as Barbie. Davis interviews her aunt and Perkins to get into the nuts and bolts of making the doll — discussing the imaginative and prescient behind her appears and clarifying the excellence of a Black doll being referred to as Barbie.
The documentary jumps from these interviews to ones with an eclectic group of writers, actors (together with Gabourey Sidibe), historians, public intellectuals, psychologists and Davis’ family members to survey the curiosity in and response to Black Barbie through the years. For many of the contributors, the doll is a supply of satisfaction, and even doubters can admit to its significance. Mattel makes an look too, within the type of a DEI government whose slender speaking factors embody defending the company’s incremental progress towards range.
The movie hits a snag when Davis tries to widen her thesis, turning a private story into an mental research. She replicates the doll take a look at for the movie, together with a extra various group of kids and asking them about their emotions relating to the current line of Barbies that embody dolls of various races, talents and physique sorts. The children are pragmatic of their expectations of Mattel, not anticipating an organization to actually meet their wants or mirror their world. There’s a lot to unpack in these interviews, which the documentary appears to learn as disheartening. I discovered them unusually hopeful — an indication that companies might want to work more durable to impress newer generations. (It is going to be attention-grabbing to see how Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Barbie movie handles problems with range and inclusion.)
Black Barbie doesn’t spend as a lot time because it may with these youngsters. It pivots towards the tip, specializing in a roundtable-style dialogue amongst adults about Mattel’s current makes an attempt to maintain up with the instances. Subjects of dialog embody the Barbie vlogs on racism throughout the top of the 2020 protests and feeble makes an attempt to offer Black Barbie her personal tales. Fascinating as these topics are, there’s a breathless high quality to their unfolding right here — an comprehensible effort to say as a lot as attainable inside a restricted working time. The knowledge overload in the end weighs down the doc, which wanted a sharper focus to really soar.
