“My parents made sure to get us a lot of black dolls in a wide variety of hues and shapes,” Samantha Knowles says. What the Brooklyn filmmaker didn’t know was that her mother felt so strongly that her daughters, Samantha and Jillian, have 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. 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 honors thesis, Knowles, now 22, completed a documentary called “ Why Do You Have Black Dolls?” to articulate the answer. Somebody took the time to make a doll in your likeness.”īut that question stuck with her, and in college, she started to consider how she would answer as an adult.
“When you see a doll, it’s such a wonderful reminder of your beauty. So when Knowles was 8 years old, and one of her friends innocently asked “Why do you have black dolls?”, she didn’t know quite what to say. But black dolls were not common in her upstate New York hometown, whose population remains overwhelmingly white.
#Black baby doll with blonde hair Patch
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.
0 kommentar(er)
