Meghan Markle said her dad once made her a custom Barbie doll family with a Black mom and white dad to help her celebrate being biracial

• Meghan Markle once wrote about how her dad used a Barbie set to help her celebrate being biracial.
• Writing for Elle in 2016, Meghan said her dad made a custom Barbie set with Black and white dolls.
• At the time, Meghan wrote that you could only buy Black or white dolls for the set she wanted.

In the Barbieland of Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" movie, the dolls represent a range of skin tones and sizes.

And in real life, Mattel has made efforts to make its dolls more inclusive in recent years. But for decades, there were only white Barbies.

Meghan Markle — whose mother, Doria Ragland, is Black, and father, Thomas Markle, is white — wrote about her experience growing up in a 2016 op-ed for Elle UK titled "Meghan Markle: I'm More Than An 'Other.'"

The now-duchess said she could only find white or Black dolls in the Barbie collection she wanted, so her dad got creative and customized a set of dolls to create a family that looked like their own.

Meghan explained she was a fan of Mattel's The Heart Family collection as a child, a collection created in 1985 and featuring a family of four, according to The Strong National Museum of Play.

"This perfect nuclear family was only sold in sets of white dolls or black dolls. I don't remember coveting one over the other, I just wanted one," the former actor wrote in the op-ed.

"On Christmas morning, swathed in glitter-flecked wrapping paper, there I found my Heart Family: a black mom doll, a white dad doll, and a child in each colour," Meghan continued. "My dad had taken the sets apart and customised my family."

Meghan wrote that her parents encouraged her to celebrate being biracial, even though she says she sometimes didn't feel represented.

"I was too young at the time to know what it was like for my parents, but I can tell you what it was like for me — how they crafted the world around me to make me feel like I wasn't different but special," Meghan wrote.

In her essay, Meghan wrote about completing a mandatory census in her English class at school. She wrote that the census only had four options for ethnicity — white, Black, Hispanic or Asian — and she didn't select any of the options after her teacher instructed her to select Caucasian. 

"When I went home that night, I told my dad what had happened," she wrote. "He said the words that have always stayed with me: 'If that happens again, you draw your own box.'"

Meghan and her father have been estranged since he staged paparazzi photos ahead of Meghan and Harry's royal wedding in 2018.

Nonetheless, Thomas has continued to speak publicly about Meghan through the years. 

In a video shared to YouTube in 2022, Thomas said he once argued with a doctor about how Meghan's race should be listed on her birth certificate.

"I even had to argue with the doctor, and have him write that she was mixed on the birth certificate, because he wanted to mark down 'Black,'" Thomas said in the video. "I had no problem with Black or white, but in my mind, it should have been mixed." 

Mattel now lets customers mix and match Barbie dolls

While Meghan wrote that her dad customized her Barbie family by buying two sets in the '80s, today customers can choose from dolls in a "mix up the toy box" section on Mattel's website, which offers mix-and-match toys from various sets representing a range of skin tones, abilities, and sizes. 

However, Mattel's offerings haven't always been as inclusive. As a timeline of the doll's evolution on Barbie Media shows, the brand's first Black doll, Christie, debuted in 1968 almost a full decade after the first Barbie was released, and it wasn't until 1980 when the first Black Barbie and first Hispanic Barbie were created. 

On its website, Mattel credits itself as having "the most diverse doll line" with 35 skin tones, 97 hairstyles, and nine body types as of August 2023.

Representatives for Mattel and the Duchess of Sussex, respectively, did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.