Page 160 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Ethnically Correct Dolls . 145

the Clark studies to the moral force of the civil rights movement in pro-
ducing ethnically correct dolls whose ostensible purpose is to make kids
feel better about themselves as they play with toys that look like them.
Embedded in these toys is a set of assumptions that hearkens back to the
Clark studies, but with a commercial twist: preventing the kind of self-
hatred observed in the Clark studies can be accomplished by having
children play with dolls that resemble themselves. The message that
manufacturers impart to concerned parents is "Buy toys that represent
racial diversity and your children will be empowered as racial beings,
not overpowered by racism."
These products are often described or marketed as multicultural, but
the vision of multiculturalism as it exists in the market seems to rest pri-
marily on market segmentation and the carving out of separate ethnicity-
and race-based niches; in the end many cultures are represented in this
multicultural market, but they do not mix. The paradox is that while the
introduction of ethnically correct dolls has significantly expanded the col-
ors and backgrounds with which dolls and toys may be imbued, this has
been accomplished through the commodification of race and the con-
sumption of racialized commodities. In the process, racial boundaries are
represented as ever more fixed and as increasingly unbreachable. Treat-
ing race and racial identity as a commodity thus has been accompanied
by the emergence of products like ethnically correct dolls whose market-
ing appeal is based upon problematic ideas about race and ethnicity. In
the realm of childhood, ethnically correct dolls have proven to be a power-
ful medium through which notions of race have been mass-marketed by
both mainstream and minority manufacturers, without seeing significant
challenge or remolding in either literal or figural terms, except, perhaps,
among children themselves.
In the early 1990s racialized commodities in the form of ethnically cor-
rect playthings were poised to take up residence in children's rooms,
imaginations, and hearts, and were generating millions of dollars in rev-
enues. The industry took little interest in just whose rooms, imagina-
tions, and hearts these products lodged, as long as the products were
leaving warehouse and store shelves to lodge somewhere. One thing is
certain: few of these toys were coming home to Newhallville. In this
neighborhood, the presence of these products was uncommon at best. In
a framing of the problem that rested almost exclusively on the recogni-
tion and reproduction of racial difference, toymakers assiduously avoid-
ed the problem of class.
For residents of Newhallville, taking part in the benefits offered by