Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse is a latest Barbie series of 3+ minute shorts that are very, very good. They poke a little fun at what is ridiculous about Barbie but never in a malicious way. The jokes are good, the characters fun, the animation/art brilliant, etc. Of course, this being Barbie, about half the cast (the main half) consists of blue-eyed, blond-haired white people and the other half of an assortment of POC(ish?)s. Not a deal breaker to me if at least there’s a fair role division and there aren’t any jokes at the expense of POCs… and that last part in particular came squarely back to bite in “Day at the Beach”.

Barbie and Raquelle have a surf competition. When back at the beach, the ever-perfect Barbie just has to shake her head and her hair returns to its long, slightly wavy, Caucasian ideal. The joke here of course being that Barbie is always perfect.

Raquelle, jealous, shakes her head too, but the result is a little different.

Raquelle’s hair turns into an afro. You know, because afros are funny (Ken and Raquelle both call her afro “wacky hair”. And no, that’s not because of the surprise-fish) and, like, the opposite of that perfect Caucasian hair like Barbie has.

One little joke, so much racist propaganda. Raquelle’s inferiority to Barbie, itself already a bit ‘meah’ because I have no clue what she is but she sure doesn’t score as many Caucasian points as Barbie, in this joke is manifested through the use of white hair vs black hair, with white hair being presented as the good option and black hair the undesirable one. On top of that, it plays into the racist myth that black hair is unkempt, as the fish is clearly absent from Raquelle’s hair when it still resembles the Caucasian look.

I’m no expert on afros… but that looks like a very pretty afro to me, the way it is both big and 'whole’. Still, Raquelle’s is severely distraught to find her hair shaped like that, instead of the 'pretty’ (white) straight hair she was expecting. I’ll not enter the territory of speculating if this is supposed to be Raquelle’s natural hair and if she has a case of self-loathing, but yeah, that.

I’ve found myself enjoying the series less for this joke alone, with the note that I already had to break through my since-childhood 'white character’-dislike to appreciate the series at all. Barbie’s ultra-femininity and the series’s acknowledgement of her uncombinable history in the franchise won me over, but the series better not pull another race-centric 'joke’ like this. It’s not funny - it’s insulting and damaging.

PS, about the Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse website; I know little about the Barbie cast’s history so perhaps there’s an excuse, but preferably I’d not found the word “sassy” in Nikki’s character description. I also notice that Nikki’s description is the only one that starts with (and one of the few that does at all) just throwing some traits at the reader instead of working out an actual description.