Hurston “was enthusiastic about the project” and, in turn, pledged to “show pictures of the doll to the ‘well known and influential members’ of the black community with whom she had connections.” Creech submitted the idea to her friend Zora Neale Hurston, pioneering ethnographer of African American culture and premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. If this “sounds a little white savior-y,” writes Temple, “I’m with you,” but there’s much more to the story. Already a social justice warrior, as they say-“active in the women’s movements since the mid 1930s” and helping to found “an Interracial Council in Belle Glade”-Creech decided she would create a doll that “would represent the beauty and diversity of black children.” Black children had been internalizing racism-learning to associate positive attributes with white dolls and negative attributes with black dolls.īut those children (and their parents) had also been rejecting the racist caricatures and forms of erasure on offer. Temple writes of how one white woman, Sara Lee Creech “noticed two black children playing with white dolls in a car outside of a post office in Belle Glade, Florida.” She felt that they should have toys that represented their experience as well. “Those that weren’t” caricatures “were just white dolls that had been painted brown.” This had been the case for two centuries, as Collectors Weekly explains. What often goes unremarked in accounts of this research is that at the time “almost all of the African American dolls on the market were modeled after racist stereotypes,” as Emily Temple notes in an article on LitHub drawing on the work of historian Gordon Patterson. “These studies played an important role in the NAACP’s battle in the 1950s to end segregation in public schools.” The findings suggested that the children had internalized dominant prejudices against them “by the time they reached nursery school,” notes the National Museum of Play. usually chose dolls with lighter skin colors when given a choice. Got a little nurturer who loves to hug and care for their dolls? Check out our picks for the best dolls you can get your petite parent.In the 1930s and 40s, child psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark found that very young black children in the U.S. There are dolls in all of these categories at every price point on our list. Some high-tech baby dolls even wet themselves and cry until you change them - an interactive feature that kids oddly go bananas over.
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