Finally, Black Barbie is going to be able to tell her story. Get your popcorn and wine ready for Netflix’s newest special, Black Barbie: A Documentary, premiering on Juneteenth. Produced by Shonda Rhimes, the documentary will dive into the creation of Mattel’s first Black Barbie doll in 1980.
“I think it was important because the idea that you’re creating this iconic Barbie, this iconic woman and she’s only one color and everybody else has to be named something else, was a very interesting thing,” Rhimes discussed the importance of having a Black Barbie during an interview with The Today Show. “There was a woman working at Mattel named Beulah Mae Mitchell who said ‘why don’t you make one that looks like us.”
Below is everything you need to know about Black Barbie before watching the documentary.
What will Black Barbie be about?
Black Barbie will tell the complex origin story that resulted in our mothers scavenging every major store in the city looking for a brown-skinned, blonde look-a-alike in the early 90s.
Lagueria Davis is the director. Davis wrote and directed Black Barbie. After its successful run at SXSW in 2023, it was acquired by Shondaland.
“Telling Black Barbie’s story has been such a personal journey and it warms my heart to celebrate the legacy of my aunt Beulah Mae Mitchell, Kitty Black Perkins, and Stacey McBride Irby in our film,” Davis said in a statement. “We couldn’t have asked for better collaborators than Shondaland and Netflix to bring this story to the world.”
The documentary will look at the history and the people who changed a culture for a generation of Black girls
Special guests will include Kitty Black Perkins, the designer and creator of the first Black Barbie; Barbie designer Stacey McBride-Irby and Beulah Mae Mitchell, the aunt of Davis, a longtime Mattel employee and Barbie lover.
“Our documentary celebrates the momentous impact three Black women at Mattel had on the evolution of the Barbie brand as we know it,” a statement on the Black Barbie website reads. “Through these charismatic insiders’ 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.”
Other special guests will include Misty Copeland, who has two different dolls under Mattel and Ibtihaj Muhammad, who collaborated with the company to release the first Barbie with a hijab.
How to watch Black Barbie
Black Barbie: A Documentary will premiere on Netflix on June 19.
