---

@papermoon.lady wrote:

 

However, I have seen explanations of why they are offensive that in themselves sounded pretty racist instead of against racism, like that they are ugly caricatures because they have black frizzy hair, fleshy lips, scary round eyes rimmed in white... I don't know, but I think that saying that all these features are ugly sounds racist in itself to me.

So yes, it is definitely a difficult issue.

---

Not really - they are called ugly caricatures because they are caricatures of black-faced minstrels, not even black people directly. There were minstrel dolls before the golly, but the golly made them even more cartoonish and was originally drawn with animal features, like paws instead of hands. Plus over time they were made more and more grotesque, and were often depicted as mean-spirited and / or villains in books etc. 

It's not just "here's a black doll with over-pronounced features of a black person", it's "here's a black doll that's a cartoon version of white people making fun of black people at a time when they weren't really considered human, and let's put them in children's books where they're horrible creatures and one of them is called the n word" (Enid Blyton, not Kate Upton's original stories).