MULTICULTURAL PRODUCTS: Brown Fairies, Mermaids, Princesses, Ballerinas, Ice dancers & more!

My daughter was recently asked to draw a princess at school and, despite all my careful promotion of brown princesses, such as Jasmine from Aladdin, Princess Tiana from The Princess and the Frog, and Pocahontas, she drew the archetypal white girl with long blonde hair. I commented 'That looks like Rapunzel, you like her, don't you?' just to draw her attention to the fact that she had selected particular characteristics. But it did remind me that the bombardment of white images, particularly in regard to princesses and fairies, is very powerful and that I need to continue with my efforts to present my children with other ideals of beauty in the home.

This morning on the school run we played a game I invented on the spot, called 'Name a Princess'. My daugher picked Cinderella, I said Jasmine, she said Ariel, I said Princess Tiana - at that point, she said that she'd wanted to pick her, which I was rather pleased about! But the aim of the game, as you may've guessed, was to remind her that lots of beautiful brown characters are princesses, as well as all the lovely white ones :-) So to continue from my last post on trying to find brown Barbie dolls for my daughter, I thought I would see what other products I could find that represent my children's skin tones! I mentioned that it is extremely difficult to find brown fantasy figures, such as fairies and mermaids, but this seems to be changing, at least with fairies, so I'll start with them.


FAIRIES

'Rainbow Magic' produce modern fairy stories and take care to include all skin tones and hair types among their many series. And luckily for us, these books are also available in French! Check out cool Ashley the Dragon Fairy with her gorgeous afro, which my daughter is reading at the moment:



I also discovered this story about a little boy and his very funky tooth fairy at the local library:



Disney includes the cute black fairy Iridessa in their film 'Tinkerbell & the Great Fairy Rescue', but I did find that this fairy gets a bit lost among all the other white fairies and my daughter only seems to remember Tinkerbell, the star and main focus of the story.



Then I uncovered a brown-skinned Barbie fairy (try typing 'Barbie Fairy Doll African' into Google):




MERMAIDS

Mermaids are trickier! Although mermaid myths are told around the world, in the West the image of the Caucasian mermaid brushing her long blonde hair is strong. However, I did uncover 3 Barbie mermaid dolls, though being fairly rare, they are quite expensive.

Fountain Mermaid Barbie - African American (loving the fabulous pink hair!):



Barbie Sparkle Lights Mermaid Doll - African American:



Jewel Hair Mermaid Barbie - African American (with mermaids, it's all about the hair, and this doll has it all the way to the tip of her tail!):



Dora the Explorer, with her pale brown skin and big brown eyes, has a mermaid version!



For stories about non-white mermaids, I had to spend quite a bit of time on Google! Here are the results, I am going to check some of these out and report back:








PRINCESSES & FAIRY TALES

There is now a nice mix of skin tones in the famous Disney Princess line-up, which includes:
Princess Tiana
Princess Jasmine
Mulan
Pocahontas

Here they all are:



As my daughter is quite keen on Cinderella and Rapunzel (as well as Princess Tiana, Princess Jasmine, etc!), I wanted to offer her an alternative to the blonde blue-eyed ideal of beauty. There are some great story books that offer alternative tellings of Rapunzel et al, with brown-skinned heroines.













Here is a wonderful version of the Cinderella story, with a brown-skinned Cinders, Whitney Houston as fairy godmother and Whoopie Goldberg as Queen Constantina. It's only available in Region 1, though, so we'll have to watch it on the computer!



BALLERINAS
As always, there is a Barbie for every occasion!





Here's a ragdoll from Dolls Like Me for a softer look:



As for the all-important dancing ballerina jewellery box, I could only find one featuring a brown ballerina, a luxury and therefore expensive one, from US site Music Box Attic:



And for inspiration, some real-life dancers! This is Aesha Ash, a ballerina who danced with the NYC ballet:



And another ballerina, Tai Jimenez who danced with the Boston Ballet:



And finally, Whoopi Goldberg has produced a whole series of books about ballerinas, with brown-skinned girls taking center stage:




ICE SKATERS

As always, Barbie has the doll!



Winx are a series about fairies, who include some brown-skinned characters and who sometimes dance on ice!



And here is one of the tie-in Winx dolls:



And, just for fun, a couple of shots of one of the most famous ice skaters ever to come out of France, the astonishing Surya Bonaly:





BIG GIRL DOLLS

Brown baby dolls and ragdolls are fairly widely available, but older girl dolls a bit less easy to find. This one from Argos has long luscious locks just like my daughter and will probably be her Christmas present!



DOLLS HOUSE DOLLS

Again, not as easy to find as brown baby dolls or ragdolls, but there are still some good sets out there. I love this one from Kids Like Me:




BOOKS

My favourite baby book of all time, partly for the utterly gorgeous illustrations, partly for the hilarious message to both parents and babies (please, please, let me sleep!):




For younger readers, 'My Two Grannies' is great for representing our kind of family!



and it's follow-up, 'My Two Granddads':




'What Will I Be?' for girls and 'Choices, Choices' for boys show all sorts of job options.






Mary Hoffman's 'Grace' series of books includes picture books and follow-on tales for ages 7-10.



Another writer, Malorie Blackman, has quite a few books for older readers:


I've listed some good places to source multicultural children's products on the right of this blog.

But how about the boys? Now that my son is getting older (now aged 4), I am becoming a bit concerned that all his favourite characters, such as Batman and Spiderman, are white - not that he knows it yet, not having seen them without their masks! He is also very fond of Ben 10 and Buzz Lightyear - again, white heroes. I will make this the subject of my next post!