Light Skin Barbie

VIDEO DESCRIPTION:

Play, download and edit the free video Light Skin Barbie.

A video work produced for The Color Complex Museum of Color in Austin, TX.

To be projected along with a physical copy of the pc game Barbie Sparkling Ice Show (2002) and the following write up:

I found out that I wasn’t black by playing Barbie Sparkling Ice Show (2002) on my family computer when I was about 5 years old. I should preface this by saying that, in retrospect, I’m not entirely sure how I came to the conclusion that I was that dark to begin with. A mixed child of a fair-skinned Trinidadian mother and dark-skinned Jamaican father, my brother and I came out expected light-skin in-betweens.
My parents tell this story of finding me playing my Barbie ice skating game in which you got your choice of three playable characters: Barbie, the blonde beauty, and her two non-white friends, one a black girl and one a racially ambiguous brown girl. They walked up to find me playing as the black girl and, confused, asked me who that was supposed to be. My reply was simply, “That’s me.” The way they describe it, I was affronted at the mere suggestion that it wasn’t obvious.
They joke now that they thought I had a complex. While so many girls of color have to come to a realization of their complexation and then how it will change their life experience, it appeared that I was a couple steps ahead of myself. But the truth is, I didn’t pick that character just because I thought I saw myself in her; I picked her because I thought she was beautiful.
I had so many years ahead of me to be told in a variety of ways that my blackness was not beautiful. Friends growing up telling me my hair looked better straight. Jokes about my darker skin, about my bigger lips, about my wider nose. Lack of representation in advertisements, movies, and shows. I had a whole life in store to wish I was blonde with blue eyes before I could even start to love my self not despite but because of my blackness. But I find solace in knowing that at least at the start, before I could be convinced otherwise, I knew that all of those things were the most beautiful things not just about me, but about anyone.

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