Page 175 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

160 . Ethnically Correct Dolls

precious ready-to-ware [sic] difference. To be profitable, racial and cul-
tural diversity—global heterogeneity—must be reducible to such com-
mon, reproducible denominators as color and costume" (43). The empha-
sis given to these sorts of markers is part of the commoditization of race
and the racialization of commodities.
Among Newhallville children, and among my own African American
students at the college where I teach, the phrase "Barbie-doll hair" de-
notes a specific phenomenon—long, long silky hair. There are at least
three types of Barbie-doll hair: the kind that grows out of the heads of
"white" girls, the kind implanted to the head of a Barbie doll, and the
kind someone can buy at a beauty shop and add on to his or her own. I
am loath to pronounce this last type of Barbie-doll hair as incapable of
being conceptually black because it is one of the main ingredients of a
prodigious range of hairstyles that are nearly impossible to achieve
using actual white-girl hair. The problem is more complex than that of
long silky hair being an absolute signifier of whiteness: when purchased
Barbie-doll hair is used in distinctively black hairstyles, it is not just an
exercise in reproducing whiteness upon the heads of black girls. While
actual white-girl hair might be appropriate for use in styles that do repli-
cate the head of whiteness, it does not serve at all for a whole range of
other styles for which the synthetic hair serves beautifully. Some styles
call for melting the ends of synthetic hair, which would be a smelly disas-
ter with white-girl hair. While synthetic hair may be metaphorically
white, it literally is Barbie-doll hair: both are made from the same mate-
rial, known as Kanekalon (Jones 1990, 290). The now-common joke is
when someone asks you if that's "your hair" to respond, "Sure it's mine.
I bought it!" This reference alludes not only to plain old race but to
good old consumerism, and elides the absolute difference between
what is white and what is black. Ultimately, it may be the reference to
consumerism that is more important for the girls and women sporting
Barbie-doll hair on their heads. Can one reasonably argue, in the face of
that kind of statement, that the braid-ins, extensions, or weaves are "real-
ly" white rather than black? As with determining Asha's race or Shani's
racial mixture, the question is not so easy to answer definitively.
What is black hair or white hair anyway? DuCille seems to assume
that black children do not have the kind of silky hair represented by the
Barbie doll, essentially drawing a clear line between "black" and "white"
hair when she writes, "[F]or black girls the simulated hair on the heads
of Shani and black Barbie may suggest more than simple hair play; it may
represent a fanciful alternative to what society presents as their own less