Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cycle Legal Pop podcast. This is a podcast where we talk about

popular culture through the lens of an attorney and a therapist. I'm Brooke Brigham. I'm the attorney.

And I'm Tess Brigham. I'm the therapist. And today we are going to be talking about the Netflix

documentary Black Barbie. This is a film by

a woman named Ligeria Davis and the impetus for it was that her aunt worked in the

Mattel toy factory in Texas, and she was the person who suggested to somebody,

the lore goes, that, you know, maybe you should make a Black Barbie. So it starts from there.

I'm going to read a quick synopsis from the film, the official synopsis of the film.

Okay, Black Barbie celebrates the momentous impact three black women at Mattel had on the evolution of the Barbie brand as we know it.

Through these charismatic insider stories, the documentary tells the story of how the first Black Barbie came to be in 1980,

examining the importance of representation and how dolls can be crucial to the

formation of identity and imagination. Love her or hate her, almost everyone has a Barbie story.

For filmmaker Legeria Davis, it all started with her 83-year-old Aunt Bula May, and seemingly

simple question, why not make a Barbie that looks like me?

Black Barbie is a personal exploration that tells a richly archival, thought-provoking story that

gives voice to the insights and experiences of Bula May Mitchell, who spent 45 years working at

Mattel.

Upon Mattel's 1980 release of Black Barbie, the film turns to the intergenerational impact

the doll had, discussing how the absence of black images in the social mirror left Black

girls with little other than white subjects for self-reflection and self-projection.

Buley, Mitchell, and other Black women in the film talk about their own complex,

varied experience of not seeing themselves represented and how Black Barbie's

...