“If you’ve gone your whole life and you’ve never seen anything made in your own image, there is damage done,” says Shonda Rhimes in the film’s trailer
Margot Robbie’s Barbie made film history last year. But in the Eighties, three Black women revolutionized the doll brand when they helped push for a Black Barbie. On Tuesday, Netflix released the trailer for Black Barbie, a new Shondaland-produced documentary set to explore the impact of Mattel’s first Black Barbie, out June 19.
The film will feature interviews with numerous women, including Shonda Rhimes and the two women who helped design the first Black Barbie doll, Kitty Black Perkins and Stacey McBride Irby. The film will explore the “magnitude” of not just introducing a Black Barbie, but the long history of Black dolls, their effect on civil rights, and how crucial they are to the formation of peoples’ identities as children.
“If you’ve gone your whole life and you’ve never seen anything made in your own image, there is damage done,” Rhimes says in the trailer. “I thought Black Barbie felt magical.”
The film is produced, written, and directed by Lagueria Davis, the great niece of Beulah Mae Mitchell, a Black employee at Mattel who asked the creator of Barbie, Ruth Handler, to “make a Barbie that looks like me” in the Sixties. According to Variety, Mitchell landed a job at Mattel in 1955 and was one of the first to start advocating for a Black Barbie in the early Sixties. It took nearly 20 years for Black Barbie to arrive.
“This is a celebration of Black culture over the past 70 years, and of the specific influence of the Black Barbie doll on the diverse array of dolls we’ve come to love today,” reads the film’s synopsis.
Black Barbie is the newest Shondaland-produced project on Netflix after the likes of Bridgerton, Queen Charlotte, and Inventing Anna.