'She's a pretty girl:' 2-year-old defends black doll to cashier

A South Carolina mother was proud of her daughter when the 2-year-old defended her choice of a doll to a Target cashier last week.

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Brandi Benner took to social media to share an experience that she had at the store when the mother and daughter went to purchase a gift for Benner’s daughter, Sophia.

According to Benner, Sophia recently completed a month of successful potty training. Benner took Sophia to Target to pick out a toy as a reward for her accomplishment.

Benner said she wasn’t surprised that Sophia picked out a doll because her daughter has an “obsession” with dolls.

But when it was time to check out, Benner was taken aback by a question that the cashier asked her daughter.

“While we were checking out, the cashier asked Sophia if she was going to a birthday party,” Benner wrote on Instagram. “She then pointed to the doll and asked Sophia if she picked her out for a friend ... I let the cashier know that she was a prize for Sophia being fully potty trained. The woman gave me a puzzled look and turned to Sophia and asked, ‘Are you sure this is the doll you want, honey?’”

The cashier told the girl that the store had dolls that bore more of a resemblance to her than the one she had chosen. Sophia, a white girl, had chosen a black doll.

Before Benner could reply, Sophia answered the cashier:

“She’s a doctor like I’m a doctor. And I’m a pretty girl and she’s a pretty girl. See her pretty hair? And see her stethoscope?” she said.

Benner told CNN Sophia that likes to play doctor with her dolls and enjoys the cartoon show "Doc McStuffins," from which she learned the word "stethoscope."

"She kept going back to the doctor doll because in her mind, she is already a doctor," Benner said. "She loves giving checkups, and if you come in the house, she'll tell you that's the first thing you need."

“This experience just confirmed my belief that we aren’t born with the idea that color matters,” Benner wrote on Instagram. “Skin comes in different colors, just like hair and eyes, and every shade is beautiful.”

Her post has been liked on Instagram nearly 3,000 times and more than 500,000 times on Facebook.

Benner later said she doesn’t think the cashier was intentionally offensive.

"The cashier was an elderly woman, and I believe she was completely ignorant to what she was truly saying," Benner wrote in a follow-up post on Facebook. "I feel like in her mind, she was being helpful and making conversation with my daughter. I'm not saying her ignorance makes it OK, just proves her white privilege."

This wasn’t the first time that Benner has encouraged her daughter to play with dolls of diverse representations. A photo posted on Benner’s Instagram account a year and a half ago shows Sophia sleeping beside a brown-skinned baby doll.

Cox Media Group