Let's have a conversation about Barbie....

I remember walking into Target or Walmart with my dad, trailing behind him to the media aisle. I happily followed him and waited for him to pick out a new movie to watch or a video game to play. I always knew by the end of his search I was going to convince him to take my favorite detour in the store, where everything was pink and I could scope out the new Barbies. I loved them all, at least looking at them all. I knew that my dad would not always buy me a new Barbie every time we went to the store. Due to this, I realized that I had to check them out and see what they did and who they were before the lucky moment in my childhood when my parents would say I could pick out a new toy. When I think back to these moments, I can pinpoint two observations I have now as I get older and think about the conversation of Barbie.

First, hardly any IF any of those Barbies ever looked like me.

Second, by my childhood, yes, there were more diverse Barbie friends. However, none of them was ever the main character. They were just Barbie’s friends. Something about my consciousness in my youth knew that just being Barbie’s friend meant just being a side character. I wanted to be the main character and the main character is Barbie.

As a child, it never resonated with me that most of my dolls were white, blue-eyed, and blond. I just thought Barbie was pretty, and she gave me an outlet to play out the creative scenes my mind would make up. I would replay TV show episodes or something I heard or something said that left me curious. Here's the thing about Barbie; She gave kids like me an ability to talk about what was happening around us as if we were the main characters. It was creative child play where I reenacted society, and what was expected of others as if it were me, and how I would expect to react in those moments. Being a bilingual Hispanic female growing up in America in the early 90’s and 2000’s, not only was navigating life in itself difficult but finding a representation in the media of my personal experience was difficult. Still, it never occurred to me at the moment how this sort of socialization has perpetuated a bigger identity in my journey in life. 

Linda Christensen brings up conversations had by Ariel Dorfman, about the “secret education” that is being “delivered by children’s books and movies” on sort of understanding of how this world is represented by “one sex, one race, one class or one country over a weaker counterpart” (Christensen, 175). This notion is that our understanding of society begins at a very young age, and this type of schooling then defines our identity and what society expects of us. This critical thinking being placed on Disney now is unraveling experiences we may have had in our own situations that could be traced back to a type of socialization that was taught to us at a young age during our childhood. This conversation has caused Disney to step back and reflect on how they have added to this narrative of socialization and explicitly address it with a Racism Warning prior to the beginning of some worst-case movies. While this self-reflection is necessary, there needs to be more of an impact to create social change. Christensen teaches this critical thinking of the impact this has on our lives. She also emphasizes that “if the race of the character is the only thing changing, injustices may still remain” (Christensen, 180), emphasizing that there is a bigger agenda at hand and as members of society, we need to continue to be critical thinkers of what is being presented to us and its future impact.