Hey everybody, this is Kai. I want to share something cool with you from my colleague Tracy Hunt.

Tracy is a correspondent here at WNYC Studios and she's been working on a project about modern

day beauty standards and how they came to be. You may remember hearing from Tracy on an earlier

episode of our show in conversation with sociologist and New York Times columnist

Tressie McMillan-Cottom. Reclaiming beauty would not be about making black women as beautiful

as white women. It would be about divesting beauty from capitalism so that it is democratically

available to all people in a way that does not foreclose their individual ability to flourish.

That episode is called Who Gets To Be Beautiful in America and you can find it in our archives.

But today we're going to hear Tracy talking to someone whose place in history is coming into

to clear a focus as a huge brand works overtime to reinvent itself.

I would take a crayon and change the skin color on my paper dolls.

You would just color them in with like brown crayon? Yes, because I wanted them to look like me.

Growing up in Spartanburg, South Carolina in the 1950s, Kitty Black Perkins had never even seen

a black baby doll. In the doll she did get to play with were hand me downs from her mom's

employers who were white. Even years later when she did come across black dolls,

they didn't do much for her. They were not pretty dolls. They were just kind of

nothing exciting. It's kind of hard to relate to a white doll when you're black.

It's amazing how much power one doll can have. Or in Kitty's case, the absence of one.

Hi Barbie. Hi Barbie. Hi Barbie. Hi Barbie. Hi Barbie. It's something we might take for granted today,

but Kitty's experience of growing up as a black child in the United States was nearly universal.

We know that because in the 1940s, two psychologists, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, designed a series

of experiments known as the doll test. They would present white dolls and black dolls to black

...