Black children playing leap frog on a Harlem street ini 1935.
In the United States between 1850 and 1950, both the material construction of dolls and the scripts of doll play were influenced by how society viewed children at this time. The “beautiful” dolls, like the American bisque doll or the doll referenced in Toni Morrison’s novel, were overwhelmingly white. Black dolls were either completely caricaturized or made so that white children could inflict racialized violence on them. The at-large societal belief in racism perpetuated the notion that white children were beautiful, and thus more ideal than black children. This belief trickled down to children through how they learned about black people and then were perpetuated by how they played with black dolls.
Dolls are not an outlier in the historical geographies of American childhood, but rather they are just one lens through which these inequalities can be seen. Whether it be playgrounds, school, or the home, there was a child held up as the ideal in that space and one seen as less than. The design and treatment of dolls showed that white, specifically blonde and blue-eyed, children were the ideal. Black children had to wait until the 1949 for a baby doll that accurately looked like them to be sold in U.S. stores. The social inequalities in dolls and doll play affected how black children saw themselves and how others saw them, thus impacting their entire lives by perpetuating the belief that black people should be treated as less than.