It is a part of American lore on race and progress: In the Nineteen Forties, Kenneth and Mamie Clark got down to examine the psychological results of segregation on Black kids. The psychologists carried out a collection of experiments famously known as the “doll test,” wherein they requested lots of of kids, between the ages of three and seven, about dolls of various colours. The most well-known and damning revelations from the take a look at — which performed a significant position within the Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education — 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, a lot of the Black kids stated they most well-liked the white dolls to the Black ones.
Director Lagueria Davis repeatedly references the doll take a look at and its leads to 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 generally debunk — stereotypes. Davis, who admits a wholesome skepticism towards dolls early on, makes use of her doc to attract consideration to the varied layers of an current dialog.
Black Barbie: A Documentary
The Bottom Line
Compelling materials undermined by a meandering imaginative and prescient.
Davis opens Black Barbie with a frank admission: Before shifting to Los Angeles in 2011 to pursue her filmmaking goals, the director hated dolls. It wasn’t till she lived together with her aunt Beulah Mitchell, an older relative who collected them and spent a long time 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 method. Black Barbie begins from a nonjudgmental place; it doesn’t disgrace viewers for his or her dubiousness, dismissal or misunderstandings in relation to the sociocultural significance of dolls. Davis’ interviews with consultants and fans anticipate questions {that a} extra insider-y challenge might need thought pointless. With her aunt Mitchell, Davis will get an oral historical past of Mattel and a portrait of the fun of seeing a Black doll as an African American lady residing 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 College, she goes over the enduring legacy of the Clarks’ examine and its nationwide implications. With public historian Yolanda Hester and others, the movie presents a short historical past of different doll firms — just like the Black-owned Shindana Toys — and the cultural affect of Mattel’s Black Barbie.
One of the 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 really be known 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 seems to be and clarifying the excellence of a Black doll being known 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’ circle of relatives members to survey the curiosity in and response to Black Barbie through the years. For a lot of the members, the doll is a supply of pleasure, and even doubters can admit to its significance. Mattel makes an look too, within the type of a DEI govt whose slender speaking factors embrace 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 examine. She replicates the doll take a look at for the movie, together with a extra numerous group of kids and asking them about their emotions relating to the latest line of Barbies that embrace dolls of various races, talents and physique varieties. 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 firms might want to work tougher to impress newer generations. (It shall 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 kids. It pivots towards the tip, specializing in a roundtable-style dialogue amongst adults about Mattel’s latest makes an attempt to maintain up with the instances. Topics of dialog embrace the Barbie vlogs on racism through the peak of the 2020 protests and feeble makes an attempt to present Black Barbie her personal tales. Interesting as these topics are, there’s a breathless high quality to their unfolding right here — an comprehensible effort to say as a lot as potential inside a restricted operating time. The info overload finally weighs down the doc, which wanted a sharper focus to actually soar.
