Kristi Noem is Cold as Ice. She’s No Barbie.

Barbie has always been woke. Please stop defaming her with comparisons to the heartless MAGA secretary.

By Shalise Manza Young

When the Barbie doll was created over 60 years ago, she was revolutionary: until then, the toy aisles only offered baby dolls. Barbie was a young woman, beautiful, sure, but also helping teenagers imagine what they could be as they grew up. Despite her impossible body measurements, Barbie was marketed as ambitious, and basically has always been woke.

She was not then and has never been a sociopathic shrew.

A collection of Barbie dolls. (ivanastar/iStock)

So please, I am begging everyone: Stop calling homeland security secretary Kristi Noem “ICE Barbie.”

I get where the name came from — like Barbie, Noem loves a costume. From her Lara Croft-inspired tight white long-sleeve shirt and equally tight khaki pants for her photo-op stop at the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador to full tactical gear in April when she accompanied Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to arrest an undocumented immigrant (with a rifle pointed up and directly at the head of one of those agents, natch), to her oversized cowboy hat on Jan. 7, when she instantly proclaimed slain Minnesotan Renee Good a “domestic terrorist,” ostensibly framing her execution — three shots to the head, recorded by a thug holding a phone in one hand and his gun in the other — as justified, she seems to spend an inordinate amount of her time cosplaying.

Noem also loves a hat, usually with her long, wavy weave – an essential part of the Mar-A-Lago makeover — cascading past her shoulders from underneath it.

Barbie may have a walk-in closet filled with clothes for any occasion, many of them bright pink, but she is the everywoman.

Noem, on the other hand, wants every woman with an accent, Hispanic last name, and/or even a whisper of brown skin to be caged.

Barbie is a trailblazer. She became owner of the fabulous Dreamhouse in 1962, more than a decade before American women were able to secure mortgages without a husband. She became an astronaut in 1965, 18 years before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. She first ran for president in 1992, 24 years before Hillary Clinton became the first woman to top the ticket for a major political party.

Noem is a firestarter. As governor of South Dakota, she claimed that tribal leaders in the state were too busy profiting off Mexican drug cartels running rampant on their lands to parent their children and ignored their requests for help during states of emergency; all nine of South Dakota’s indigenous tribes voted to ban her from their reservations.

Over the decades, Barbie has held roughly 250 jobs, allowing children to dream and envision themselves as Olympic athletes, teachers, doctors or nurses, pilots or flight attendants, or animal-loving veterinarians.

For reasons still unclear, Noem happily told the world in her memoir that she shot her family’s rambunctious puppy and a goat on her farm on the same day, apparently believing that advertising her abject cruelty would paint her as a strong leader — a “doer,” as she wrote.

Barbie’s first Black friend, Christie, debuted in 1968 and was just as stylish. She had large brown eyes, fuller lips, and rocked a brown bob — a more authentic portrayal of Black womanhood than Mattel’s first, failed attempt to introduce a Black character by simply darkening Barbie’s skin.

Noem and the rest of this white nationalist regime seemingly won’t be satisfied until every non-white person in the country has been deported, imprisoned, or otherwise disposed of.

Despite coming of age, so to speak, in an era when women felt even greater pressure than they do now to become wives and mothers, Barbie has never married Ken. They dated for 40 years before breaking up in 2004, only to reunite on Valentine’s Day in 2011. She has little sisters but has never had children of her own.

Noem, on the other hand, has demonstrated her commitment to women’s rights by defending South Dakota’s complete ban on abortion in 2022, even in cases of rape or incest. One tragedy should not lead to another, she reasoned.

By now you get the point.

We can argue about Barbie’s body and whether it has had a negative influence on young girls (in 2016, Mattel added curvy, tall and petite dolls to the Barbie universe, and has since expanded to dolls with prosthetic limbs, vitiligo, autism, and Down syndrome, and other “differences”), but it’s been clear for years via the myriad commercials, television shows and movies that she is an independent woman, a true friend, and someone interested in people of all backgrounds.

Based on the many examples of Noem’s behavior and ideology we’ve been privy to, she is as far from the Barbie ethos as one could possibly be.

Barbie leads with love. Noem’s heart is cold as ICE.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

---