The beauty of this cartoon is that it shows Black girls in an empowered position (yes, even at 6 yrs. old) and shows them envisioning themselves in doing something great.

 

I love the idea of Doc McStuffins and wish there were more characters and more series like it.  The show's creator Chris Nee, who actually isn't Black, discussed arriving at the decision to make the central character Black and female.

 

"It was definitely a choice. It was the very first conversation after Disney bought the show. I had felt strongly about making sure that Doc was female, and a lot of people said, “Well, you created the show for your son, why is it a female lead character?” And I just thought that nobody needs another male doctor or another male leader in a group. What we needed was a female character. And Disney, in the first conversation that we had after they bought the pitch said, “We’ve been looking for a good character to bring some ethnicity into them, how do you feel if she’s African-American?”  I said, “Fantastic!”

 

For me, I am always looking for ways to shine a light on people who don’t get to see themselves represented on TV. I think it’s one of the most powerful things we have in working in especially preschool television. Unfortunately–like everyone else–we really lag in our representation of people who are in the mainstream. It just seemed like a great choice. And that was it. It was probably just a two minute conversation at the beginning. I look at the amount of positive impact that that one decision has made, and I think about how easy it was.

 

I encourage anyone else to make the same decision. It’s so powerful to show representation of somebody who’s not usually on TV.