Page 169 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

154 . Ethnically Correct Dolls

make enough money to keep itself afloat, and it is unfair to single out
minority toymakers for not participating more fully in their stated social
agenda. The entire toy industry, not just minority-owned companies,
grapples with the tensions generated by being a business that makes
money from providing the well-being tools for enjoyable childhoods;
the larger companies, such as Hasbro, run their own foundations fund-
ing community projects, and the industry as a whole funds several foun-
dations devoted to providing toys, clothes, and services to needy chil-
dren. Nevertheless, the degree to which business realities are at odds
with the claims toward improving self-esteem among minority children
has been steeply underplayed. A few months after my exchange with
Eason, she was quoted in a leading toy-industry publication as saying,
"For us, it's not just a stream of revenue. It's an issue of self-esteem. Our
mission is honestly to make black children feel good about themselves,
to feel good in the skin they're in" (Shapiro 1993). As long as they can
afford it, that is.
Consumption has been examined by several scholars as a profoundly
4
feminized, and thus gendered, activity; looking at ethnically correct
toys is one way to understand the ways in which consumption is also an
experience that is also deeply "raced" and "classed." For Newhallville
kids, the whole sphere of consumption is itself often conceptually
"white," other, and suffused with the attendant pain of inequality based
on discrimination due to race and economic background. When I asked
a group of kids one day to tell me how white people talk, a twelve-year-
old boy not only began talking the way he thought white kids did, but
moving like them. "Let's go to the mall and buy some rags," he drawled,
adopting a clumsy, gangling walk. For him, the mall was the province of
white kids, and shopping one of their signature activities. By implica-
tion, this world was not one that included kids like himself.

Shani and the Marketing of Blackness
The commodification of race and the introduction of racialized com-
modities have not erased the color line so much as they have replaced it
with lines of color, an array of products intended for minority con-
sumers. The Shani line of dolls introduced by Mattel in 1991 illustrates
the way in which ethnically correct dolls solidify racial categories in
problematic ways. Developed in consultation with African American
psychologist Darlene Powell Hopson, the dolls are designed to represent
African American variety. Hopson had advocated that the dolls also
have different body types and different hair textures (DuCille 1996, 50),