Page 178 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Ethnically Correct Dolls . 163

ing to recruit people to get their hair braided as a sort of souvenir. What
is happening between Newhallville kids and their dolls is not, however,
directly analogous to what happens to kids on vacation in St. Croix.
The context in which heads get done matters tremendously, and so
while perhaps overtly similar, these situations are not analogous primari-
ly because the power relationships and conceptual boundaries between
white and black are destabilized as Newhallville girls braid their dolls'
hair. This destabilization is delicate, fleeting even, and is likely to have little
social impact beyond the realm of these children's own personal spheres.
In this way, what kids are doing with dolls is limited much as I have as-
serted that the self-esteem angle is also limited. Such destabilization is
not even likely to have any real or lasting impact on these kids' living re-
lationships with either white people or the idea of whiteness. It is worth
noting, and worth analyzing, because what these girls are doing subtly
works away at the constricted and constricting notions of the clarity of
race that continue to dominate current discourse on the subject. It is a
form of racial integration that for the most part has been unimagined by
adult activists, scholars, politicians, or toy manufacturers. One of the
primary differences between this precarious, temporary destabilization
and the self-esteem work made possible by ethnically correct dolls is that
the former is (as yet) not a commodity, though it is worked out on and
through commodities.
In what way can the similar hairdos of Clarice and her doll seem like a
challenge to the fixity of racial identity? Clarice, like a number of other
girls I knew in Newhallville, does not appear to assume that just because
her doll is white she must treat her that way. When deciding to do her
hair, she gives her very white, very blonde, and very blue-eyed doll a hair-
style that is worn by young black girls. She does not put her doll's hair
into a ponytail, or brush it over and over again just for the pleasure of
feeling the brush traveling the long strands. Clarice was not alone in this:
other girls' dolls had beads in their hair, braids held at the end with twists
of tinfoil, and series of braids that were themselves braided together. In
some sense, by doing this, the girls bring their dolls into their own
worlds, and whiteness here is not absolutely defined by skin and hair, but
by style and way of life. The complexities of racial reference and racial
politics have been much discussed in the case of black hair simulating the
look of whiteness; yet what these girls are creating is quite the opposite—
white hair that looks black.
If one accepts that racial divisions are absolute and unbridgeable,
what these girls are doing with their dolls makes little sense. Why put a