by Janet Stickmon

I was sorting through Baby Girls old dolls and came across Taraji and Wangari. Taraji is a brown-skinned baby doll from Target and Wangari is a brown-skinned Cabbage Patch Kid we received as a gift. My daughter was just a baby when these dolls entered her life, so I took the liberty of giving them African names.

The Target doll was named Taraji which means hope or faith in Swahili. I cant remember what name was on the Cabbage Patch Kids birth certificate, but since Daddy had just bought the book Wangaris Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa for Baby Girl, I decided to name the doll after Wangari Maathai, the founder of the Green Belt Movement.

Before our daughter was born, my husband and I were well aware of Kenneth and Mamie Clarks doll experiments from 1939-1940 and Kiri Davis film A Girl Like Me from 2005 and knew she was prone to internalizing negative ideas about Blackness that could lead her choose white dolls over Black dolls.[i] So we decided to take preventative measures and surround her with Black dolls (light- and dark-skinned) at home and away from home.