Page 179 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

164 . Ethnically Correct Dolls

black hairstyle on a white doll? And yet, if these dolls belong to these
black girls, and live in the worlds they inhabit, how inflexibly white are
they? Remember Asia and Natalia's ruminations on Barbie. Their com-
ments most urgently pointed out that the main difference between them
and the doll could be summarized with a nod to race, but really rested
on the way they lived, the way they spoke. They wondered why there
was no fat Barbie, no abused Barbie, no pregnant Barbie, and these criti-
cisms apply as much to Shani as they do to any white dolls. What these
girls are doing seems to recognize in multiple ways the socially con-
structed nature of race, the ambiguity of a racialized existence, and the
flexibility of racialized expression: it is not always or only the color of
their dolls that makes them hard to relate to or identify with. Their at-
tention focuses both on appearance (hairstyle) and social factors. More
than the bald recognition of racial difference, it is the social factors that
seem to delineate the chasm for these girls between a doll to whom they
can relate and in whom they can see themselves versus one who repre-
sents a whole world to which they cannot belong. Moreover, what these
girls are doing emphasizes that they do not need to buy racial difference,
or even to buy dolls that look like them; they can create dolls that look
like them in fundamental ways through their own imaginative and ma-
terial work.
The argument for the ethnically correct doll is often reduced to the
maxim that children play better and feel better about themselves when
they have dolls and toys that look like them. This assumption limits it-
self quite overtly to visual indicators of race and carefully evades ques-
tions of social difference and inequality that relate to class, economy, or
region. For Newhallville kids, though, the equation was not quite so
simple. They did not seem to accept wholesale the notion that they
could not relate to dolls that were apparently a different race from
themselves on that basis alone. Moreover, their interactions with these
dolls do not seem to indicate that in giving attention—or even love—to
white dolls that they are rejecting their own blackness as worthy of re-
spect, attention, or love. Quite the contrary, in fact. These girls seem to
be working in very complex and subtle ways to transform whiteness, to
bring their white dolls into the existence they know and understand.
They are not in these instances working to enter some fantasy world in-
habited by Barbie and all her bourgeois accouterments, represented best
of all, perhaps, by Barbie's dream house. These efforts bend notions of
race without threatening to break them, but in this very bending demon-
strate that the fixed ideas about racial difference that permeate ethnically