http://www.publicbooks.org/multigenre/the-teflon-kid-how-annie-enables-apathy-about-inequality

That an African American child can now be presented to the public as an all-American icon of innocence feels like a victory. After all, children growing up during the Great Depression—when Annie achieved her mythic status—inhabited a society in which purity and beauty were both coded white, as Toni Morrison makes clear in her insightful novel The Bluest Eye (1970). Morrison’s African American child protagonists struggle to maintain a sense of self-worth at a time when magazines, movies, children’s books, dolls, and even candy wrappers proclaimed that white children had cornered the market on cuteness. In this context, Wallis’s donning of Annie’s famous red dress constitutes a hopeful sign that our culture is growing less wedded to whiteness as an aesthetic ideal.