Page 168 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Ethnically Correct Dolls . 153

of revenue." Companies like Olmec marry the corporate cachet and
know-how of a Harvard MBA (founder Eason has one) with Afrocentric
themes and a nationalist program in a strategy that might be called cor-
porate nationalism. Even the company's name points to a corporate na-
tionalist position: the Olmec, a central American culture, have a signifi-
cant place in Afrocentric scholarship. Ivan Van Sertima has advanced
the theory that the massive sculptures attributed to the Olmec are actu-
ally monuments to visiting Africans, who traversed the Atlantic ocean in
reed boats (Van Sertima 1976). Corporate nationalism, in "creating eth-
nic streams of revenue," does not challenge the inequities of the market
so much as it diverts minority money into its own coffers. In critiquing
this strategy, I do not intend to say that it has been either ineffective or
unproductive. On the contrary, corporate nationalism has forced larger
companies to begin producing their own racialized commodities. Re-
gardless of who is making the money, the effect on the diversity repre-
sented in dolls and toys has been undeniably positive. And yet, while
manufacturers of ethnically correct toys often point out that kids of
color are a growing proportion of the population, they never mention
that a significant portion of those minority kids are also poor. The
speedy, if as yet incomplete, integration of the shelves of Toys-R-Us has
been a major accomplishment of companies like Olmec and an admirable
one. However, transforming the population of the store's shelves has not
changed the larger context that denies many children access to the store
in the first place.
In a critique of the supposedly positive role-model aspects of Mighty
Morphin' Power Rangers, Peter McLaren and Janet Morris write, "This
statement exhibits the common logical error that many people tend to
make: Equality is based on the extent to which females and people of
color have the opportunity to adopt the dominant Euro-American ideolo-
gy" (1997, 120). This observation may also be applied to manufacturers
of ethnically correct toys, and especially minority toymakers who utilize
the moral force of racial solidarity as a marketing tool. One wonders
how much cultural and nationalist concerns have actually transformed
these companies' corporate behavior, one that oppresses children like
those living in Newhallville regardless of whether a white Barbie or an
ethnically correct one is being produced for their consumption. When I
asked Yla Eason what her company was doing to make toys available to
the large numbers of minority kids who were unlikely to have access to
them, she reminded me that her company was a business, not a charitable
3
organization. No one could be expected to run a business that doesn't