Page 158 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

6.

Ethnically Correct Dolls:

Toying with the Race Industry

In the late 1980s the toy industry's leading manufacturers—Mattel,
Hasbro, and Tyco—began to introduce "ethnically correct" dolls and
toys. These toys differed from their precursors in that they were designed
with skin tones, hair types, and facial features that were meant to accu-
rately represent a specific ethnic group. Mattel, for instance, introduced its
Shani line, three African American dolls, each with a slightly different skin
tone and with newly sculpted faces. These faces were purportedly more
realistic in their representations of black features than those of other
dolls. The Shani dolls provided unequivocal contrast to Mattel's first black
doll, "Colored Francie," introduced in 1967. Unlike the Shani dolls, with
their variety of facial features and skin tones, Colored Francie came in one
color and was literally formed in the same mold as the white Barbies on
the shelf. But ethnically correct toys hardly originated with the industry
leaders, and their political roots are located in the urban communities of
Los Angeles and New York, tied to the civil rights movement, urban riots,
and, more recently, to rising nationalist sentiments. At the time that Shani
and her compatriots were introduced to the market, ethnically correct toys
were not a new idea: minority-owned toy companies had been making
such dolls for over twenty years. Early manufacturers of ethnically correct
dolls such as Olmec or Shindana had a focused social and political agenda
aimed at undermining the racism endemic to an industry that seemed to be-
lieve that all baby dolls and Barbies—and, by implication, people—ought
to be white. By the early 1990s, however, this agenda seemed to have its
greatest potential in its ability to generate profit rather than social change.
Ethnically correct toys have been designed and marketed specifically
to reshape a territory dominated by an assumption of whiteness, an as-
sumption embodied most powerfully in the icon of the Barbie doll. While

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