Jennifer Pierre is on a mission to change the way that boys of color view themselves in an unconventional way—through toy dolls.

Pierre is the founder of Melanites, a toy doll company whose mission is to celebrate brown boyhood and empower children of color.

“You can’t be what you can’t see and our stories, our lives, our history everything that encompasses who we are it needs to be accurate, it needs to be out there, that’s why I decided to do Melanites, Pierre told the Huffington Post.

Pierre’s motivation to create Melanites stemmed from her work with boys of color, a group whom she felt is blocked from reaching their full potential by a glass ceiling.

“I have seen firsthand the way many of the boys maneuvered through life and it put into perspective how different society cultivates children based on race and gender,” Pierre states on her website. “Many of the kids I mentored dreamed and inspired within a bubble because of circumstance and environment. ”

Before Melanites, dolls for boys were limited to action figures that communicated messages of violence, hyper-masculinity, and aggressiveness. The four dolls in Melanites’ line each have a persona that individually represent one of four themes: thinker, maker, doer and performer. Each doll also has a different skin color, reflecting our multi-cultural society.

“I’m creating dolls for boys because I want them to have a space that’s free of the pressures of hyper-masculinity and any other stereotype that tells them that they have to be this way or they have to express
themselves that way.”

Learn more about the doll line and how the idea came about.

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