Page 174 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Ethnically Correct Dolls . 159

"They still look like they've had plastic surgery," and even with their lips
widened by a millimeter or so the African American faces of the Shani
dolls still conform to a white-dominated norm of beauty. The most
telling difference between Shani and Barbie is at the base of the neck,
where Shani bears a mark that looks a lot like the scar left by a branding
iron: © 1990 MATTEL INC. Barbie's head reads simply © MATTEL
INC. I am unsure why Shani requires a copyright date and Barbie does
not (perhaps Barbie's beauty is timeless?), but this difference has an ab-
solute and clear-cut quality to it that other changes do not. However,
Barbie's and Shani's torsos bear nearly identical inscriptions: © MATTEL
INC. 1966. (Barbie's torso was made in China, Shani's in Malaysia.) I
looked carefully for a butt copyright, but could find none. It seems to me
if Mattel's big coup in designing Shani was giving her a distinctively
African American face, with its own copyright, the purportedly equally
distinctive derriere also deserved a copyright. Because Shani's derriere
shows no copyright, I'm inclined to believe that Shani and Barbie are
really the same from the neck down. Although DuCille asserts that
Shani's legs are shaped differently than Barbie's, their legs bear the same
part numbers, which would indicate identical molds.
Literally and figuratively, the differences between Shani and Barbie
are primarily from the neck up (witness the copyrights) and these differ-
ences are overwhelmingly cosmetic. Race, as embodied in the redesigned
faces of the Shani dolls, in addition to becoming a commodity, has be-
come material for corporate proprietary control. Mattel's mix-and-match
approach to combining differently copyrighted body parts suggests that
some parts are more racialized, more commodified than others. Mattel
has copyrighted their ethnically correct African American faces but
leaves them to share the same torso Barbie has had since 1966.
As for the hair, the claims for differences in texture did not seem to
hold water when I scrutinized the Asha and Nichelle dolls in my office.
Like Shani, they had long, silky "Barbie-doll hair," styled in ways simi-
lar to those typical of white Barbie dolls: curls for Nichelle and Asha
and a crimped style very much like that found on "Totally Hair Barbie"
for Shani. In what seems a somewhat half-hearted stab at African-
Americanizing this hair, my Beach Dazzle Shani dolls come not with the
brush that my white Barbie has but wide-toothed implements that
might be hair picks. Aside from facial features and skin tone, blackness
seems to be signified more by accessories than anything else, at least in
the hair department. DuCille describes the situation in these terms: "In
today's toy world, race and ethnicity have fallen into the category of