goodies for my brown skinned babe

I was browsing the card section looking for a birthday card for miss Sophia Mekdes, when I saw a card adorned with a cute, brown faced girl. Behind the duplicate stack of cards, was a sign that said ‘Ebony’. “Wow, they have a section of cards for my sweet, brown baby”, I thought. I looked for more cards, and to my dismay, I didn’t find any. The entire section of girl’s birthday cards had ONE card with a little girl who had the same color skin as Sophia’s. ONE out of probably 50 cards. Now, many of them were bears, elephants, Dora, etc. They weren’t all little white girls, but you get the idea.

What really makes me sad…I never would have noticed this prior to our Ethiopian blessing. Never. That is embarrassing and I don’t really feel like I can complain, when I think about my previous lack of awareness. I do, however, wonder if there is a need for an ‘Ebony’ label, especially for only one card. Shouldn’t we just mix all of the cards together like one big {expensive} paper world?

I am noticing these types of situations more and more. I am fine with Sophia having both white and brown dolls, after all both colors exist in her family. However, I would like to have as many options for brown as there are for white, or at least somewhat close to the number of options. It seems like most clothing items with little girls on them, only have white girls. My sister was able to find a really cute ballerina shirt with a sweet brown girl on it. I love it. Yay, Old N*vy! (her legs are longer than two inches...she is somewhat squating in the picture)

Don’t forget about Sophia’s birthday celebration benefiting the Linck family. You can read about it in the previous post. Thank you to those of you who have posted about it on facebook and your blog. I really appreciate it!