Page 173 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

158 . Ethnically Correct Dolls

Barbie and Shani from behind.

Deciding I had to see for myself, I pulled my Shani doll off my office
bookshelf, stripped her naked, and placed her on my desk next to a
naked Barbie doll that had been cruelly mutilated by a colleague's dog
(her arms were chewed off and her head had puncture wounds, but the
rest was unharmed). I have to say I felt like one of those anthropologists
who, wielding a pair of calipers, had set out to codify racial difference in
a scientific manner. Try as I might, manipulating the dolls in ways both
painful and obscene, I could find no difference between them, even after
prying their legs off and smashing their bodies apart in an effort to isolate
their butts from the rest of them. As far as I have been able to determine,
Shani's bigger butt is an illusion. 6 These ethnically correct dolls demon-
strate one of the abiding aspects of racism: that a stolid belief in racial
difference can shape people's perceptions so profoundly that they will
find difference and make something of it, no matter how imperceptible
or irrelevant its physical manifestation might be.
The faces of Shani and Barbie dolls are more visibly different than
their behinds, yet still, why these differences could be considered natural
indicators of race is perplexing. As a friend of mine remarked acidly,