Mattel released the Barbie Signature Angel Reese doll on August 3 — pink jersey, number 5, leg sleeve, headband, signature Reebok sneakers. She’s the first Black WNBA player to get one.
Then at the launch she explained why it mattered: she didn’t have a lot of dolls growing up, because she didn’t have dolls that really looked like her.
Angel Reese was born in 2002.
Marien Richardson checked.
Mattel introduced Christie — a Black character in Barbie’s world with her own face mold — in 1968. The first official Black Barbie followed in 1980, designed by Kitty Black Perkins. In 1998, four years before Reese was born, Mattel was selling officially licensed African-American NBA Barbies in team uniforms, packaged with basketballs. American Girl’s Addy Walker arrived in 1993. And in 2000, Life-Size put Tyra Banks on screen as a Black Barbie who comes to life in Lindsay Lohan’s bedroom.
Marien’s own childhood: nothing but Black dolls. Nurses, veterinarians, moms, fashionistas. Her point isn’t that racism doesn’t exist — it’s that inventing it where it isn’t belittles the places where it is.
Marien Richardson is a conservative cultural commentator and one of the sharpest online voices working right now. She joins John Amanchukwu to work through a week of it.
The flagrant foul. DiJonai Carrington was ejected after a hard foul on Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham — arm around the head, follow-through, Cunningham on the floor with blood in her mouth. Then came the white privilege framing. Marien’s response: the only privilege she can identify is that Sophie got up and walked away.
She makes the case that it isn’t white privilege at all — it’s class privilege, and always has been. Her example: a blue-collar white man in Alabama does not have more privilege than Beyoncé or Barack Obama. And her business argument is blunter. If the WNBA’s viewership is overwhelmingly not Black women, what exactly is the strategy in alienating the audience keeping the league afloat?
Then the harder question John puts to her: are we teaching young people to examine what happened to them, or to examine the race of the person on the other side?
The satire. Former NBA player Royce White went on Fox News, straight-faced, and announced he’s having a blast in his feminine era — that upon further review he’s identifying as a transgender woman, and it’s only fair he gets a shot at playing alongside his queens in the twilight of his career. Marien’s question is why the bit lands so hard, and why institutions keep treating the underlying position as beyond question when a joke can collapse it in thirty seconds.
She’s serious about the people caught in it, though — including a woman she follows who came to Christ, later married, had a baby, and posted herself sobbing because surgeons left milk ducts behind and she can’t nurse her child.
And the closer. AOC posted a video of herself starting the process of freezing her eggs. Marien’s argument isn’t a joke at her expense — it’s that a generation of women were sold a sequence that doesn’t work. Her grandmother was one of twelve and worked as a maid in South Carolina. Her father is one of seven. The Proverbs 31 woman ran a business, made the clothing, and took it to market with a house full of children.
Her advice: have the children young, get a husband who works with you, keep grandparents in the fold. And her line for husbands — if the trash isn’t out, the lawn isn’t mowed, the oil doesn’t get changed, and every conflict between the kids ends with go ask your mom, you are part of the problem.
John closes on the difference between the corporate ladder and the kingdom ladder.
