Even people like me who actively avoid watching any and all brands of football could not help but be touched by the image of Johnathon Thurston weeping tears of joy as he held his young daughter on the football field after kicking the winning goal in the NRL grand final over the weekend. The moment of tenderness between a champion athlete and his little girl would have been moving in any circumstances, but the detail that made it entirely irresistible was the dark-skinned doll in the little girl’s arms. The rugby star’s daughter’s doll made headlines around the world, with the BBC, The Independent and The New York Times all running stories about it.
It’s interesting that the sight of a black baby doll in the arms of an Aboriginal child remains such a noteworthy event. Of course, this attention is largely due to the significance of the match itself – the first time in NRL history that both teams in the final had Indigenous captains. And after all, it isn’t so long ago that the only black or brown dolls in common circulation in Australia were grotesquely offensive gollywogs. I’m certainly still recovering from my own Barbie-traumatised childhood.
Barbie epitomised the bubbly blonde adoreableness to which every little girl in my Queensland primary school aspired - an ideal that a scrawny bad-tempered half-Pakistani misfit like me could never hope to attain. I had only one Barbie of my own and I unleashed all my pent-up rage upon her - slashing her hair, dressing her in rags, and locking her in the room of the doll’s house I referred to as “the dungeon”, where she was to reflect upon her vanity, her shallowness, her blondeness, until she had reached a sufficient level of remorse to be worthy of parole.
Nothing would have warmed my angry little heart more than knowing that a streetwise multi-ethnic girl gang – aka “the Bratz dolls” - was going to come along and kick Barbie’s skinny white arse so hard that she (or at least, Mattel’s marketing department) would be reduced to a snivelling, pathetic wreck, forced to engage in desperate attention seeking stunts such as dressing like Paris Hilton and dumping Ken for an Australian surfie, only to “leak” rumours of a reconciliation 18 months later.
I made sure that my own daughter’s bedroom was filled with an array of dolls whose skin tone ranged from cream to dark chocolate. Even her Barbie house was occupied by one very happy Ken and a harem of multiracial Barbies, inherited from the daughter of my ethnic studies lecturer. There was even a “Minangkabau Barbie” that an Indonesian postgrad had brought back from fieldwork. But no matter her skin colour, Barbie remains a blonde at heart.
My daughter’s most adored dolls were bought in Pakistan, from a village craft co-operative that enables women to generate independent income, and they are works of art as well as toys. Zohra and Maryam are handmade cloth dolls, dressed in traditional costumes from the delicate silver jewellery in their hair to the leather slippers on their feet. These dolls were much coveted by our Indian neighbour’s young daughter, who would tap on the door to ask “Can we play brown dollies?” A girl after my own heart, Parvati would fling any blonde doll that gatecrashed the game clear across the room.
Parvati’s passion for brown dollies reinforced my belief that children need toys that reflect the reality of their own families and selves – and the reality of the world in which we live. It’s important in that not only are dark-skinned dolls now owned by a few dark-skinned girls (and white girls with politically conscientious parents) - they are owned and desired by girls (and boys) of all backgrounds. It doesn’t signify the end of racism, but it does allow us the luxury of a more inclusive imagination.
Shakira Hussein is a writer and researcher based at the Asia Institute at The University of Melbourne.
