Page 159 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

144 . Ethnically Correct Dolls

ostensibly part of a progressive social vision, these toys have integrated
the toy world while simultaneously more firmly fixing racial boundaries
in ways that are surprisingly regressive. This chapter examines the com-
plexities and paradoxes of ethnically correct toys through looking at the
toy industry, focusing on Mattel's Shani dolls and Olmec, a manufacturer
of ethnically correct toys. These paradoxes can be seen in analysis of the
toys themselves but emerge with greater clarity when close attention is
paid to the ways in which the children for whom the toys are supposed to
mean the most actually play with and think about them. Children's use
of and relationships to these toys, as well as the discourses of race, go be-
yond the packaged messages of manufacturers and challenge popular
conceptions of racial boundaries in potentially radical ways.
The primary appeal toymakers offer with their ethnically correct
playthings is the idea that such toys can help minority kids to feel more at
home in the world through allowing them to play with toys—and espe-
cially dolls—that look like them. The statement on Olmec toy packages
asserting that "Our children gain a sense of self-importance through toys.
So we make them look like them" bears a heavy debt to the revelations
that emerged from the groundbreaking "doll studies" conducted by psy-
chologists Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark in the late 1930s and early
1940s. These studies used black and white dolls as a way to unearth
black children's views about race, asking them to point out, for instance,
which doll "looks nice." In a series of devastating publications, the Clark
studies revealed that black children often thought the white doll "looks
nice" while the black doll "looks bad" (Clark [1955] 1963; Clark and
Clark 1939, 1940, 1947, 1950). Despite ongoing debates about prob-
lems with the methodology and interpretation, the doll studies remain
among the most compelling bodies of data demonstrating the negative
effects of racism on black children's self-concept or what is more often
now referred to as their self-esteem. 1
The doll studies gained additional clout when they became associated
with the landmark civil rights ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in
Brown v. The Board of Education ofTopeka, Kansas, the case in which
segregated schooling was declared to be unconstitutional. It is a testa-
ment to the emotional power of the doll studies that, although they were
never directly referenced in the court's decision, it is often asserted that
it was these very studies that convinced the Supreme Court justices that
segregated schools caused what were then referred to as "Negro chil-
dren" unconscionable damage.
Makers of ethnically correct dolls attempt to harness the power of