… Show me the doll you want to play with. In an interview some years later, Kenneth Clark recounts the questions the pair posed: “Show me the white doll. Stripping dolls of all indicators besides a diaper and the tint of their plastic, the couple put two white and two brown dolls on a table and asked children a series of questions.
Kenneth and Mamie Clark famously conducted an experiment with Black children and dolls to underscore the damage to self-image wrought by segregation and racism. (Not since Todd Haynes used dolls in his 1988 underground gem, “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” have Barbies been used to such pointed and anthropomorphizing effect.)īut there is pain, here, too. Davis and cinematographer Sara Garth (with the assist of Esin Aydingoz’s score) make these plastic figurines beguiling, glamorous characters. With its deeply amusing re-creations of actual Barbie dolls sauntering into white spaces or sitting at the end of a conference room table (the only BIDOC - Black, indigenous doll of color, so to speak), the movie can be wryly playful. It’s Mitchell, Perkins and McBride-Irby who make the movie’s most persuasive argument for where change must originate: in the workplace. Perkins was also responsible for hiring another Mattel change-artist: doll designer Stacey McBride-Irby. It took nearly two decades for that advocacy to arrive in the person of designer Kitty Black Perkins, who had Diana Ross in mind when she designed Mattel’s first Black Barbie and dressed her in a red gown, with a little back and a little leg showing. Mitchell was among the employees who started advocating for a Black Barbie in the early ’60s.
And she proves game as her niece gently grills her about dolls in general and Mattel specifically. Mitchell’s memories of the toy company and particularly Ruth Handler (who founded the company with her husband, Harold) are fond. “Black Barbie” offers an impressive cache of newspaper photographs, newsreels and more that augment the repressed record of Black life in the United States. Archival photos of Mitchell as a “spinner” - a person who tested the crank on a Jack in the Box - is just one of the documentary’s many archival photos that delights and instructs.
In 1953, Legueria’s aunt Beulah Mae Mitchell made her way from Forth Worth, Texas, to Los Angeles.
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