The Barbie Illusion: How a Toy Shaped My Perception of Beauty and Power
I got my first Barbie doll at an age I don't remember clearly. But I was young and very impressionable. My ideas about beauty and perfection had not yet fully formed, so they were subject to whatever I consumed.
My Barbie doll was tall, blonde, skinny, and white. She featured in so many movies, always had a pretty smile on her face, and had everyone starstruck by everything she did. She could be anything she wanted: a doctor, a lawyer, a mermaid, a princess, a fairy, or anything at all. She had a boyfriend named Ken who was obsessed with her, and she was super rich; with all the clothes she she could ever need, I could tell from long hours of watching "Barbie: life in the dreamhouse". If Barbie was not perfect, who could be?
At that period in my life, there were a number of adults who would ask me if I was mixed. I don't look mixed; I'm just light-skinned, but you know how colorism works. And they always made it sound like a compliment. like being mixed with white makes you automatically pretty. So when I was like 7, I felt like that was the only quality that made me attractive: my skin color.
Somehow it had been ingrained in us, adults and children alike, that white people were the beauty standard. And I believed it; of course, you also had to be blonde, skinny, and sometimes tall. But that was just my personal preference because I was always made fun of for being short. I also wanted to have magic powers. Magical powers meant I could manipulate and change things according to my will. That was true power to me—make everyone like me, have all the money I could want, have everything I could want.
I imagined that, just like Cinderella, I would also have a fairy godmother that would appear to me in the middle of the night and transform me from a short, black, and ordinary girl into a tall, white, blonde girl. Being white meant that I would be automatically attractive.
That mindset followed me until I was 12. I wanted to be white so bad. I even lied to my friends that I was from Austria when I changed schools in primary 3, and they believed me.
It did not help that whenever a white student attended any school I had been to, they were always treated better. Always called attractive, always exempt from punishments and rules. It made me watch them with jealousy, wishing I were them.
I think I only truly grew out of my internalized racism towards my race when I noticed how beautiful and healthy the natural hair of girls in my boarding school was. My relaxed hair could not do the same things as theirs or look as good as theirs did. I wanted to be like them. So I cut my hair. I had finally believed that I didn't need to have waist-length, blonde, silky hair growing from my scalp to be beautiful.
I don't blame my earlier perception of skin color and beauty on Barbie, at least not completely. I would rather blame it on the people who forced that standard of beauty down my throat.
We can't ignore the effects that the lack of positive representation of young black girls and boys in the media causes. when your role models are white, blonde girls (Barbie, Hannah Montana, and Cinderella). There is no way to escape the distortion of the true meaning of beauty.
My perception has changed now. But not many people grow out of that phase.
