Why black dolls matter

As a little girl, Samantha Knowles didn’t stop to consider why most of her dolls — her American Girl dolls, her Cabbage Patch Kids, her Barbie dolls — were black like her. But black dolls were not common in her upstate New York hometown, whose population remains overwhelmingly white. So when Knowles was eight years old, one of her friends innocently asked “Why do you have black dolls?” And she didn’t know quite what to say.

But that question stuck with her, and in college, she started to consider how she would answer as an adult. Finally, as an undergraduate film student at Dartmouth, she connected with a small but passionate group of black-doll enthusiasts, who gather at black-doll shows around the country, and for her senior honours thesis, Knowles, now 22, completed a documentary called Why Do You Have Black Dolls? to articulate the answer.

What the Brooklyn filmmaker didn’t know was that her mother felt so strongly that she and her sister Jillian had dolls of their own race, that she would stand in line at stores or make special orders to make sure they got one of the few black versions. “My parents made sure to get us a lot of black dolls in a wide variety of hues and shapes,” Samantha Knowles says.

Many black-doll enthusiasts, such as Debbie Behan Garrett, the author of Black Dolls: A Comprehensive Guide to Celebrating, Collecting, and Experiencing the Passion, feels the same way as Knowles’ mother.

“I’m emphatic about a black child having a doll that reflects who she is,” Garrett says. “When a young child is playing with a doll, she is mimicking being a mother, and in her young, impressionable years, I want that child to understand that there’s nothing wrong with being black. If black children are force-fed that white is better, or if that’s all that they are exposed to, then they might start to think, ‘What is wrong with me?’ ”

Why Do You Have Black Dolls? debuted in October at the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival in New York City, where it won the Reel Sisters Spirit Award. It has also been selected for the Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival and the Hollywood Black Film Festival in Beverly Hills. In the film, doll-maker Debra Wright says when little girls see her dolls, they’ll exclaim happily, “Look at her hair! It’s just like mine.”

In fact, Knowles says that Wright gave a quote that best sums up her answer to the question posed by the film: “I think women know that they’re beautiful,” Wright says. “But when you see a doll, it’s such a wonderful reminder of that beauty — because somebody took the time to make a doll in your likeness.”

Among Knowles' interviewees were Barbara Whiteman, a longtime black-doll collector who runs the 25-year-old Philadelphia Doll Museum, where she has a rotating display of 300 of her collection of 1000 black dolls. On Saturday, February 23, 2013, Knowles’ documentary screens as a part of the Black History Month programming at the National Black Doll Museum in Mansfield, Massachusetts.

Five black-doll collecting sisters, Debra Britt, Felicia Walker, Celeste Cotton, Tamara Mattison and Kareema Thomas, opened that museum in the summer of 2012 to teach black history and showcase their collection of 6200 dolls.

The only black girl at her school in 1950s Dorchester, Massachusetts, Debra Britt grew up carrying the vinyl white Baby Bye-Lo doll. “I didn’t have a lot of self-esteem with it.” Britt says. “I had big issues because I was black and fat, and kids were teasing me. And I had to ride a bus with nobody on it. When I would get to school, the other kids shook my bus every day and called me names.”

Britt’s grandmother stepped in and started dip-dying store-bought dolls brown for her granddaughter. She also taught Britt how to make African wrap dolls from a gourd, an apple and vines. These dolls were made by slaves on plantations in the South, who would have their children put in a pebble to represent each fear or worry and relieve them of the burdens. “My grandmother kept saying, ‘You don’t know where you’re coming from and you need to'," Britt says. “And so she made this African wrap doll and gave me the history."

Dolls — handmade to look like the children who love them, or the deities their parents worshipped — have been found all over the world, in all cultures, and all races, since ancient times. In early America, everyone, including slaves, made their own dolls. A controversial homemade doll that’s often found in the South is the “topsy-turvy doll”, which had, instead of legs, another head that could be hidden under the doll’s skirt. One head and set of arms would be white; the others would be black. Early doll manufacturers Albert Bruckner and E.I. Horsman later produced a topsy-turvy doll as a novelty toy, Garrett says.

The topsy-turvies existed, Britt says, because the slave masters actually didn’t want the slave children to have dolls that looked like themselves, which would give them a sense of empowerment. “When the slave master was gone, the kids would have the black side, but when the slave master was around, they would have the white side,” she says.

Research shows the bias about dolls is real. In 1939 and 1940, black psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted a study wherein they presented black children with two dolls — almost identical, except one was white with blond hair and one was brown with black hair. The researchers asked the kids questions including which doll was nice, which doll was pretty, which doll was smart and which doll would they rather play with.

The kids overwhelmingly chose the white doll as the one with positive attributes. When student filmmaker Kiri Davis conducted a similar doll study in 2005, and when CNN asked black children about cartoons with varying skin colours in 2010, they both got almost identical results. But a 2009 replica of the original doll survey by ABC’s Good Morning America came up with more black children favouring black dolls.

Although the National Black Doll Museum wasn’t anything Britt ever set out to do, her museum employs dolls to educate visitors about both the painful and inspirational moments in black American history, which hold lessons for Americans of any race. The message is similar to that of Why Do You Have Black Dolls? That is, dolls tell us who we are.

“People just think of dolls as a plaything, and really, they’re not,” Britt says. “You can do so much more with dolls than just play.” 

This story, first published on Collectors Weekly, is republished with full permission. Click here to read the full version.