MassChallenge finalist challenges beauty standards
The 21-year-old founder of Healthy Roots — a MassChallenge startup
out to empower the next generation of black girls — is launching a Kickstarter
campaign to raise $35,000 to manufacture two dolls that break the
mold.
It starts tomorrow and the first dolls being rolled out are Zoe, an African-American, and Gaiana, a Haitian.
If company founder Yelitsa Jean-Charles raises another $35,000, her company will make two more dolls — Marinda, an Afro-Brazilian, and Dara, a Nigerian — as well as a storybook about Zoe’s “big chop,” the day she cut off her permed hair to let it grow naturally.
These dolls are not simply dark-skinned Barbies, with hair as straight as straw. Instead, they sport Afros, bantu knots and Havana twists, and come with “The Big Book of Hair,” a how-to guide for girls of color who want to trade their perms and flat irons for a natural do.
“I want to combat negative stereotypes about black women, who are told they’re not beautiful or professional-looking unless they have straight hair,” said Jean-Charles, a self-described “visual activist,” who used to straighten her own hair with a flat iron before she opted for an Afro with twists. “No one should feel ‘less than’ because of the color of their skin or the kink of their curl.”
Orly Clerge, an assistant professor of sociology and Africana studies at Tufts University, calls Healthy Roots’ goal of making dolls that accurately reflect girls of color a “statement that is long overdue in a world that values white beauty standards.”
“I think it could be revolutionary, not only for black children, but for what it could teach white children, as well,” said Clerge, whose research has explored black identity. “It turns the politics of beauty on its head.”
“What we’re telling girls and boys when we don’t have dolls or movie stars who look like them,” she said, “is that who they are is inadequate, that something is missing for them to be beautiful … And that has repercussions for their identity and self-esteem in the long term.”
The younger of Kayana Scott-Brown’s two daughters — 5-year-old Annis — has asked why her hair is different from her doll’s and her white schoolmates’ hair.
“She wanted to know why her hair isn’t straight,” said Scott-Brown, 31, of Dorchester. “So I showed her that her hair actually is long. Our hair is just more kinky and curly. At first, she still wasn’t happy.”
But when Annis saw a picture of one of the Healthy Roots dolls last week, something changed.
“She looks like me,” she said. “I want to be like her.”