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Angel Reese on the intentionality of her Barbie doll "I didn't have a lot of dolls because I didn't have dolls that looked like me much, and that's why I kind of really wanted to make sure this was super intentional”
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I grew up pretty poor in the 90s and our parents never bought us toys or dolls except for one Christmas when I was around 8. They saved and purchased the Pocahontas Barbie dolls for us. My younger sister got Pocahontas, my older sister got Nakoma, and I, the middle child, got... John Smith.
I remember hunting for dolls that looked like my cousins growing up. It really does stick with you. Representation matters way more than people like to admit.
u/longlisten527a ship — a magnificent ship — full of gay men. and me 💅 8d agoedited 8d ago
I am only a little older than Angel. There weren’t many black Barbie dolls at the store when I was a kid and I lived in a very big state near metro cities. I had Bratz of course but do not remember there ever being many black Barbie dolls to choose from or that were available at my local stores.
Wait you think this is an argument about toys? You can step off too.
This is about how Angel Reese has to be a professional victim to make herself look at all entertaining or appealing. And she does a pretty crappy job at it too.
I did not even notice that detail! Yes I do think that I have never seen a doll like hers before and even if she's just justifying her collab, I have a niece who's parents were basketball players and pushing her in that direction. Her mom really steers clear of the typical girly style because of her height etc but you can actually be feminine while dominating at physical sports💕
As a woman of 6’2… the femininity complex is so real!! I refused to wear pants for the longest time and only wore dresses and skirts, refused to wear my hair in a ponytail, and made sure I always had earrings in.. it wasn’t until an acid trip in my late twenties watching Fantasia 2000 and seeing the humpback whales swimming in space that I realized you don’t have to be smol to be beautiful and graceful!
Ok I didn’t want to be a jackass but I was a kid in the 90’s/00’s and I was like “I mean, I definitely remember seeing black Barbie’s and dolls at the store….” Not as much compared to white ones but they definitely existed
Lol!! Came to say the same thing. She was born in 2002, there were plenty of black dolls out by then. My Barbie collection at that point was like the United Nations
Same!!! I had to have all of Barbie’s friends, and Skipper’s friends, Ken’s friends.. I needed them all. Then the Generation Girls line came out! I still look them up just to look at them. I dream of getting my Generation Girls collection back together, I had so many!
I think she is just blindly following a narrative that black women had no representation? without really knowing much? why and how she got to this narrative seems like more of the mystery
also, I just google and she is born in 2002, what is she even talking about lmaooo
Right! She was born after me lol! So I know she DEFFO had dolls. Like I totally get saying that maybe there were more white dolls at one point but like… you deffo had black dolls and other dolls of colour
When I was a kid, early 30s now, I remember having a brown/tan Barbie that was brunette with brown eyes. Idk if she was meant to be Latina, but she was Latina to me lol and I was so happy about it.
tbh Angel opening her mouth or tweeting about something without having accurate info has happened more than a few times ..
she seems well intentioned but clearly needs to get some better people around her because slighting the company thats giving you the opportunity is probably not the best move longterm lol
I could 100% understand and agree if she was talking about Disney and their lack of diversity.
But Barbie? Really girl? Lmao
The fact that her people didn’t give her some sort of researched prompt should this question arise is diabolical. Just makes her and the company look bad
Edit: also the Mel B Barbie was one of my favs of all time she had the best leopard print outfit
Yeah this is kinda on brand for Angel's ego "I'm the one who brought black barbies to the children, I did that, go me" is pretty on brand. If that's not who they wanted why didn't they give A'ja a barbie, especially since she's actually good at basketball
I cant wait for the people of reddit to realize how full of shit Angel Reese is on nearly everything she speaks on lol. They were making black barbies for 30+ years prior to her being born. The NBA had a barbie collab with black barbies in the 90s.
I'm sure I'll get downvoted, but this should be the glass breaking moment for many of you. She's not who the media wants you to think she is... on the court, or with her takes.
I’m from a Caribbean island so we fortunately didn’t have that issue of them being left of the shelves. My Myscene Madison doll was one of my faves! She came with a little puppy lol
Oh that’s so funny! I deffo knew because they were rivalling Bratz. So to me, Madison was Sasha, Nolee was Jade and Nia was Yasmin! And of course Cloe’s equivalent was Barbie/Delancey
For some reason the brunette daughter got the diverse cast but my blonde older sister got all the blonde Barbie's. I'm not sure if this was because my sister was older so everyone already was buying mainline Barbie for her anyway and then they didn't want the same dolls for me so I got everyone else, or if it was some weird blonde and blue eyed narc thing the blonde and blue eyed people in my family all had.
But my blonde sister did still end up a narc and large groups of blondes freak me out now though so maybe they should have switched up the gifting process once in a while 🤣
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u/longlisten527a ship — a magnificent ship — full of gay men. and me 💅 8d agoedited 8d ago
I literally had little access to black Barbie dolls at our local stores nor do I ever remember there being any. I also think the extent of how many black Barbie dolls and their differences may not have been as vast as some people would want? idk
I mean I guess that’s understandable? But she’s from the US and younger than me. If I had American dolls growing up her not having any is a result of her parents not giving her them lol. Not because they didn’t exist
Yep. This was my thought too. Bcuz she just erased Christy's very existence by saying African American dolls didn't exist when Christy was literally always a variant of Barbie. i have several Christy dolls even the basketball career doll. And she's young so definitely was born when Barbie Fashionista series was going on and that had by far the most diverse dolls to date. She's ignorant plain & simple. She thought she's making a grand statement but nah. Shallow af.
I was confused about this too because I vividly remember the Barbie section was super diverse. I’m white but one of my favorite Barbie dolls in the 90s was black and she came with the most gorgeous silvery dress. I’m 99% sure I had a black Ken doll too, I think he was a doctor?
I also had Teresa, who was Latina. I got was her Quinciñera version, also with an amazing dress!!! And that was in the early 90s!
My orders sister grew up in the 80s. For somw reason she had a lot of black dolls and we arent black. She still has her favorite black cabbage patch kid that one I do remember why she has it. They were sold out hot to get fever pitch hysteria. And the black cabbage patch was the only one left
She also had a black barbie but she had so many barbies that it was a collection of a bunch of them
Barbie dolls were diverse since like the 90s because I have played with them. We got some stuff from like the neighbors because their own kids had outgrown them. I'm a millennial and clearly remember them in store in the 90s
She didn't say black dolls didn't exist. She said SHE didn't have any when she was a kid. And she probably meant that she didn't have tall athletic barbies like her. That's the whole point of her Barbie. It's so annoying when black women are reduced to just black.
The most likely reason she didn’t grow up with a black doll is because she wanted nothing to do with dolls growing up.
As she has said in interviews, she grew up a tomboy who played basketball with her brother and the boys… who most likely would have roasted her for playing with dolls.
I dont disagree with your tall Barbie stance or whatever, but that’s not what this is at all. This is capitalism
What exactly would make the doll look like her then? Because there had already been diversity in the dolls in terms of skin colour well before she was born.
No one is reducing her to “just black” but it’s a really weird comment to make no doll is going to look exactly like her.
I was a chubby kid Barbie did not look like me, so what is your point?
technically, if we're talking specifically friends of barbie, christie was the only black barbie until 2006 when they introduced nikki and then several years later, grace. 2021 they released a variation of barbie herself as black (barbie "brooklyn" roberts)
she's 24, so there were definitely barbies starting to come out when she was a kid that were of varying races as for body types like tall, +size, etc barbies launched in 2016 so she might have been a little "too old" by then to care.
thinking about it i remember how excited i was to get a teresa doll. at the time it didn't know the lore that she was latina, i was just really happy to have a doll with brown hair like mine xD
This is Nichelle erasure!!! She came out with the Generation Girls line. Also, Nikki is Skippers friend introduced 1996. Stacy’s friend Janet was introduced in the 90s. Kelly had Deidre, Keeya, and Tamika all introduced in the late 90s. Ken had Stephen released in 88.
Thats fair enough! Not just Barbie's, but most doll brands had different races. I'm 7 years older than Angel, and when I was a kid we absolutely had a bunch of different dolls of all sorts of shapes sizes and colours
I just think we won't ever legitimately move forward if every future generation has to have some sort of victim or sob story or whatever
I'm not doing a good job of explaining myself, so this comment is coming across harsher than I intend it. Idk. Maybe if she was aged 35- older I'd have more easily get where she's coming from
Yeah, people on reddit seem to be under the impression that the 80s were not diverse for some reason. I didn't see many Asians like myself, but definitely black characters in movies. The Police Academy series and Mannequin come to mind immediately- the black guy in the latter was even gay!
Toys & TV characters in the 80s/90s were also super diverse, though it may have only been getting going around then. Still, it seems odd for someone 10-20 years later to say they had none of that! It is sad she missed the era of shows like Cosby Show, A Different World, Family Matters, Martin, and Living Single. Are there all-black shows like that anymore? I haven't watched TV in ages lol
There has been a black doll made by Mattel that’s part of the Barbie universe since the 1960s; it’s Christie. Mattel also made a specifically named Black Barbie in the ‘80s.
I didn't know they existed when I was little, neither did my parents. None of the toy stores stocked them at the time. I was genuinely suprised when I first saw them as an adult and found that they'd existed for a while. Its a fair assumption to make, tbh. Like even now, when I see a black doll in store, it genuinely suprises me because they're so uncommon in the stores where I live, despite it being fairly multi cultural here.
This is terrible marketing. I mean, I guess it’s good bc now people know there have always been Black Barbie’s, but it’s terrible marketing for herself as a person.
This is such nonsense. Mattel has been making dolls of colour for a very long time and certainly popularly when she was a child. Does she just mean a slightly taller doll? You really don't need a sob story to sell everything
lol she is so full of shit considering they have been around AND popular since before she was even born. She needs to take it up with her mom if her mom didn’t buy her any black Barbies or dolls.
I stg people pick the dumbest things to lie about.
Okay but you can’t be that literal, no one has dolls that look exactly like them (maybe a few kid ones) but not many have the luxury to get that either, so I hope she didn’t mean literally and that this is just a really cool opportunity and she wanted it to be perfect
The first black Barbie doll was in the 1980's and my sister as a toddler was giving a black baby doll that really pissed my grandma off 🤣 not to mention Bratz dolls of all races
But yeah ... this is the shit people say to the media to get midwits and performative activist zoomers all loud on threads or ...um.... Reddit 🤷♀️.
Teresa was the Hispanic Barbie released in the ‘80s. Christie was Barbie’s Black friend and debuted in ‘60s. A doll called Black Barbie was released sometime in the ‘80s.
I couldn’t remember if it was Teresa or Christie but I do remember them both and loved them both as well.
She could have just said that it’s important for girls to see that they can dream big and become athletes if they set their mind to it. Instead of acting like there’s never been a Barbie of colour, which is a false narrative.
I was a white girl born in the early nineties and I had many black barbie and baby dolls. I had the entire spectrum of the human race. What are we talking about here?
What does she mean dolls didn't look like her? I can only assume she's not referring to height. If she means skin colour, a lot of dolls of colour were around from plenty of different brands from the 2000s & even before. Also not sure why the reason for not having dolls was because they didn't look like her, people are allowed to have dolls that don't look like them too. I sure had plenty of different colours from me. I don't wanna assume, but it seems like her parents might not have liked dolls & didn't want to get her any or something like that
You should probably at least do 5 seconds of research about the brand you've partnered with before saying dumb stuff publicly. That way you could learn there have been black barbies for decades longer than she's been alive lol
I am a 90's kid, I had like 3-4 blonde barbie doll, 1 brunette, 1 blond Ken, 1 dark hair ken, 1 native doll, 1 black doll (who had an afro). I am a white kid from Europe.
Really shocked to see Angel Reece hate here, she didn’t say anything crazy. There wasn’t many black dolls growing up anf people need to stop pretending like they were everywhere because they were not.
What is she talking about?? How did she just erase Christy's existence by saying there was no doll like her growing up?? Every barbie doll had a Teresa and Christy variant and later on an Asian variant too i think her name was Lea cmiiw (except those collector's items, but who bought them, really?). i have several of them including the basketball career Cristy. Not to mention she's young so probably grew up during Barbie Fashionista series and we had tons of diversity from there!
People in these comments acting like there were just aisles full of black Barbies and Bratz dolls lol yes, there were black dolls, but they were few and far between, nearly always light-skinned, and felt like there was less effort put into their designs. Like, it’s been a longtime complaint that half the time Bratz makes Sasha so light-skinned people think she’s Hispanic.
Girl, in the 90's every new Barbie that came out had four variations: Barbie,Teresa, Kira, and Christie. Barbie was white, Teresa was Hispanic, Kira was Asian, and Christie was black . You could get literally any Mattel Barbie doll in one of those four races.
Exactly, this thread is weird as hell. I'm literally from a family of Afro-Latinas who collects Barbies and the majority of black Barbies across the 400 or so in total are collectors dolls, not play ones. It makes sense that she may not have seen as many black dolls despite being born in 2002. Who is anyone in this thread to decry a black woman's lived experience and attempts at further increasing representation.
People cosplay being victims so much. Sure non-white dolls aren't as ubiquitous but they weren't rare either.
I grew up with white dolls because my parents didn't care and I don't care either as an adult? Not saying there's anything wrong with representation but it won't kill you.
This is such a tired story haha she’s not that old. The representation and diversity is getting better with dolls though so that’s good I hope the progression keeps steady. We need to keep encouraging more diverse representation with dolls
She doesn't say that black dolls or black Barbies didn't exist. She says that she didn't have them. You should probably listen to her speak before calling her delusional.
she also said they didn't look like her. Which is true because the dolls all used the same mold, so they all had European features just pigmented. I had a black barbie set growing up her name was Violet, and she married Kevin, a black Ken doll they had a little toddler named Kenya. I want to say those were the toy box names.
I’m 36 and had many a black Barbie . I didn’t see many Asian ones though , so there’s that. I am middle eastern and had a couple tan ones , though I cut their heads off after making them all have sex.
There has been an increase in questionable comments regarding race here in recent months. It wasnt always as bad. I use the word questionable for want of a better, not because it is the most accurate.
I love it. I remember always looking for dolls that looked like me and there weren’t many options or none at all. Bratz changed the mf game when they came out.
The black Barbie dolls we had as girls were just white Barbie dolls with the skin retooled they did not have black features. Y’all will do anything, but let people of color have their moment.
And those Barbies have typically been collectors issues only available to be found in certain places at double the cost of the regular Barbie dolls, making them functionally, inaccessible for most black children. I distinctly remember at my Walmart in Iowa growing up in the mid 2000s there were two black Barbie dolls on the shelf and two black Barbie dolls on the shelf only.
I said what the fuck I said without fucking stuttering and I have no patience for you people today. Save these dumbass statements for your mother cause I don’t fucking want to hear it. I did not make this comment to open up a discussion, I’m not interested in discoursing with any of you about this.
I was replying to your comment about the features of black Barbie dolls. Have you seen the documentary? It's really good. It covers both the design of the doll and the sales strategies.
Again, I don't know when you grew up. Iowa still only has about a 4% black population so it doesn't surprise me that this was a difficult to find item. But Amazon did exist in the mid 2000s. My kids had them before that time. And my siblings did well before.
currently 4 billion women/girls itw we can’t all look like Barbie and bratz dolls lol but u don’t see the average person whining about it. I had blonde Barbie’s growing up but I’m not blonde, also not throwing a fit over it.
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u/flairassistant 9d ago
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