2-24-10

Barbies for most women are synonymous with the essential feminine child hood. Lord knows I had so many of them. I never felt the need to look like them, because they were just toys. I guess some girls did, but not me as much. I needed to have a barbie of every color, for variation. They were play things, not idols.
As I come to think of it, the way the non-white barbies were marketed, was extremely racist:


This is the Mexican Barbie. I had this exact same doll when I was little. And if I remember correctly she came with marimbas. I also remember I had a black barbie (couldn't find a picture of it) and it looked like she had on modernized tribal gear. Either way, the way they marketed both was extremely racist.
I'm pretty sure that all Mexican women don't wear folkloric flowery dresses and carry marimbas around. And the last time I checked - an African American didn't have to dress like they could be part of the zulu tribe. Little things like this show that we don't live in a post-racism society. We know that the concept of racism is fucked (for the lack of a better word) so we just say what we want to say and think what we want to think behind closed doors. Racism is a stain ingrained into the very fabric of our society, and its gonna take a lot more than the detergent of the civil rights movement to get it out.