Page 161 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

146 . Ethnically Correct Dolls

market multiculturalism required material and economic resources often
beyond their reach. This hardly meant that themes of race and racism
were absent from children's toy kits. Newhallville children's commen-
taries about race and its boundaries did not conform to the limits pro-
posed by toy manufacturers. Looking closely at children's interactions
with their toys, and especially in girls' relationships with their dolls—
who were often white—children's understanding of the complexities of
race in society continually surfaced in acute and perceptive commen-
taries that took note not just of race but several forms of inequality, in-
cluding class, gender, and age. These children thought about, used, and
spoke about their playthings in ways that directly challenged the assump-
tions about the fixity of race evident in ethnically correct toys. These chil-
dren did not appear to view race as a range of solid, immutable cate-
gories. Likewise, children's commentaries reveal their understanding
that racialized commodities can only incompletely embody the experi-
ences of kids who are racial beings, but also poor, working class, young,
ghettoized, and gendered.
In looking at these girls' relationships with their dolls, some thorny is-
sues are raised in relation to the claims and assertions made by producers
of ethnically correct dolls about the power of self-esteem through con-
sumption of racial signifiers. Large numbers of girls in Newhallville had
white dolls, not ethnically correct ones. In their interactions with these
dolls, girls seemed to be engaged in a project whose progressive potential
was much greater than the one offered by producers of ethnically correct
toys. While toymakers commoditize racial difference but pay little atten-
tion to issues of social class, Newhallville girls seemed to have relatively
flexible notions about the barriers posed by dolls' skin color, as well as
other racial signifiers, especially hair. These girls also did not limit their
view of difference or inequality to race but remained keenly aware of
class difference. These children's interactions with their dolls reveal their
sophisticated but rarely enunciated understanding of the intertwined na-
ture of forms of social inequality.
In Newhallville commodities have become racialized, and the discus-
sion of race has become commodified as well. The complex commen-
taries on race that I argue take place among Newhallville girls are not
speech per se. This is in large part because speaking about race in words
has taken on manufactured forms akin to the ethnically correct toy. This
process has not curbed the power of race to shape the consciousness of
kids, but the modes used to speak about race are often formulaic and
constrained by the sound-bite format. Newhallville kids are enormously