Page 164 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Ethnically Correct Dolls . 149
Stories like the one that Yla Eason has printed onto the packaging of
many of her company's products are pervasive among minority toymakers
and emphasize the deeply personal motivation behind the corporate en-
tity. Olmec's Sun-Man figure gets his superpowers from the melanin in
his skin, and in conceiving of this toy Eason's intention was to upend
racial hierarchy by making dark skin a source of power so that her son
could no longer assume that "some dreams did not come in his skin
color." This statement effectively marries Martin Luther King's civil
rights oratory ("I have a dream ...") with the startling discoveries of the
Clark doll studies (the Negro doll is ugly/bad) to provide a powerful ar-
gument for the need of dolls that accurately and positively portray black-
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ness. Even the makers of Barbie herself have, in effect, recognized the
unbearable whiteness of Barbie as they have begun to manufacture ethni-
cally correct dolls. A more cynical assessment of both Olmec and Mattel,
however, might question which is more unbearable: the Eurocentric toy
industry that purportedly stifles children's dreams, or the untapped mar-
ket segments.
The impulse to diversify the social vision that the toy world expresses
deserves certain praise, even if undertaken for profit. Close attention
needs to be paid to the type of diversity that has developed in the toy in-
dustry. While mounting a challenge to whiteness as a norm, the diversity
currently under manufacture in the form of "ethnically correct" play-
things does not significantly transform the understanding of race, or
even racism, as it exists in the United States. Rather, ethnically correct
dolls refashion (or refashion-doll) racist discourses without challenging
the foundations upon which the notion of race, as a social or biological
reality, can be seen to exist at all.
Until companies like Olmec jumpstarted the mass production and
marketing of ethnically correct toys, mass-produced black dolls were ba-
sically made by pouring brown plastic into the same molds used to make
white dolls. This was and continues to be a powerful material manifesta-
tion of an assimilationist ethic, one that has been rejected with increasing
vehemence by minority groups. The signature aspects of ethnically cor-
rect dolls are resculpted faces, skin tones, hair types, and fashions that
are meant to reflect a particular group. With their emphasis on the visi-
bility of race as a collection of markers, ethnically correct dolls mask the
complexity of race both as a social construct and as a social experience.
These toys do celebrate and enshrine difference in a way that preceding
black dolls and toys do not, and in ways that are undeniably progressive.
However, an unintended outcome of these toys is the reification of an