Oprah Couldn’t Afford Barbies As A Child — Now One Is Modeled After Her

Mindy Kaling, Reese Witherspoon, Oprah Winfrey, and Storm Reid of “A Wrinkle In Time.” Image by Getty Images

By Jenny Singer February 28, 2018

The best revenge is living well. The very, very best revenge is becoming an international sensation whose name is synonymous with success and then being made into a Barbie. Oprah Winfrey had a very, very difficult childhood. And now she is getting the best kind of revenge.

You wouldn’t know it from the way Oprah Winfrey spends her time these days — walking red carpets at movie premiers in between fending off the people’s demands that she run for president — but Winfrey lived in abject poverty throughout her childhood, at one point dressing in potato sacks because her family could not afford clothing. As Winfrey’s new movie “A Wrinkle In Time” descends on theaters, Winfrey has reflected that having a Barbie doll modeled after her character is monumental for her because she was not able to afford Barbie dolls as a child.

I grew up a poor Negro child,” Winfrey told Yahoo News. “I had, literally, a corncob doll…where you take the corn, shuck it, and then you try to make a little doll and you use the silk for the hair.”

“To now have a doll made in the image of your character is a pretty phenomenal moment,” she said. “It is not lost on me that that has happened…It’s a pretty phenomenal thing.”

Oh how my mother wanted a girlie girl but she got me instead. She would be thrilled to see me with my first (and only) #barbie Only you have that kind of power, @Oprah ?#awrinkleintime pic.twitter.com/L3xlYVAS41

— Phoebe Moncrief (@PhoebeFeed) February 28, 2018

Oprah, at 64 years old and more powerful than ever, finally got a brown Barbie. And her co-star Mindy Kaling, who is Indian-American, also inspired a beautiful brown Barbie. And because of Oprah and Kaling, boys and girls who are not 64 but four, will get to play with brown barbies. Oh Ruth Handler, the Jewish inventor of Barbie who immigrated from Europe and never got to see her dark hair and dark eyes represented on her own dolls, if only you could see us now.

Jenny Singer is a writer for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Jenny Singer is a freelance writer with pieces in Vox, the Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Teen Vogue, and more. She was previously a staff writer at Glamour and the Forward, and she’s currently getting an MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO