Why a Video of 2 Girls Playing With Dolls Is Gaining Attention

A video of two girls playing with their dolls has gotten more than 3 million views on Facebook. Why? Likely because the footage, “Two White Girls Happy to Get Black American Girls for Christmas,” intended as an inspiring call to action about teaching children tolerance, has sparked significant conversations about race, kids, and parenting.

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“There is a video going around with two little white girls getting black baby dolls for Christmas and then crying about it while their mom laughs in the background,” Katie Nachman, a mother of three, including daughters Aden, 8, and Phoebe, 4, shown in the video, wrote Jan. 3 in a lengthy caption explaining her post about the offensive footage (since removed). “This is NOT that video, and I’m not reposting it because it’s a great (racist) example of how NOT to parent your kids.” Instead the Madison, Wis., mom shot and shared the footage of her “two little white girls” because they “got black American girl dolls for Christmas, and were positively thrilled, so I thought I’d make a little replacement video right quick.”

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Nachman told NBC15, “I just thought it was really awful to see, even as a white woman, it bothered me so much. I mean, I can’t imagine being a person of color and seeing a little girl throw a black baby doll on the floor in disgust.“

The mother explained that her girls have white dolls, black dolls, Hispanic and Asian dolls because she believes it’s “important for my kids to have dolls who don’t look like them because for one, it teaches them that all skin colors are beautiful. Two, it demolishes the expectation that in order to love someone, care about someone, be a friend or play with someone, the other person has to look like you.” Her girls — who have carried around their dolls “nonstop” and “lovingly put [them] to bed every night” since Dec. 25, she says — explain that they “like the way [the dolls] look” because they “have hair and they have eyes.”

“It may seem trivial or silly, but it’s not,” Nachman explained about the toy choices she’s making for her daughters. “Our kids learn about race from us, their parents, first. And white parents have an obligation to teach our kids about race from a young age, so they won’t grow up to perpetuate the cycles of institutional racism and injustice that are eating away at our country from the inside.”

The simple message has sparked complicated conversations in the more than 13,000 comments on the post, ranging from remarks that the race of a child’s doll doesn’t matter to stories about how important others think such teachable moments are. “A doll is a doll,” wrote one reader. “I’m black but as a kid all the dolls I had were white. I didn’t even notice that they were white or black … Let’s not make a big issue out of this.” In response, another woman shared that her 3-year-old didn’t like the black doll that she’d given her for Christmas. “She told me she didn’t like it because it was ugly,” explained the mom. “When I asked her why she said [because] it was black. It’s a great place to start a conversation and it was a great opportunity for me to teach my daughter. She did notice, and she’s only 3. It is kind of a big deal.”

And while yet another commenter weighed in, insisting that letting the kids pick their own dolls is the best way to go — “Let everyone be equal. If they don’t like a colored baby doll, it doesn’t have to be because of the color. Kids don’t see a difference unless you point it out in any way, doesn’t matter if intentions are good or bad. You’re still pointing it out” — most respondents applauded Nachman’s intention. “Children who are people of color are surrounded by positive images of white people,” offered yet another mom. “They often have white dolls (because so many dolls are white), read books with white heroes, watch TV shows about white characters, etc. White parents, on the other hand, have to make a conscious effort, because it is so easy to expose our kids to only or mostly white faces/dolls/characters without even intending that.”

But no matter what people think of Nachman’s mission, she, for her part, isn’t done trying to teach tolerance, one toy at a time. “Children use toys as learning tools to develop their imagination, self-esteem, and beliefs about themselves and others,” she wrote in a Change.org petition aiming to get American Girl doll creators to make their "Girl of the Year” an African-American. “Dolls are a very important type of toy because they represent people. If our girls play with dolls of different ethnicities, love them and care for them, and treat them as friends, they will begin to learn a very important lesson on how they view and treat real people who look differently than they do.”

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