Page 181 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

166 . Ethnically Correct Dolls

Tionna and Natalia with Tionna's doll.

while also demonstrating their nearness to me both physically and emo-
tionally. Rather than my practical buns and messy ponytails, they'd
yank and gel and twist my hair into sleek topknots with long, twirling
curls just in front of each ear, or part my hair into five or six sections and
braid each one. One rainy afternoon Nyzerraye spent five hours meticu-
lously putting my hair into over sixty braids, their ends sealed closed
with bits of aluminum foil that made a scratchy, musical sound when I
shook my head. These girls were changing my head around on days like
this, and when they had finished their creations and sent me into the
bathroom to look at their work, it seemed that it wasn't quite me in the
mirror. Their work of transformation here was not to rearrange my race
or racial identity in some biological sense; nevertheless, they were work-
ing to make me more like them just as they did with their dolls.

Dolls and the Discussion of Race
Implicitly or explicitly, most contemporary discussions about dolls and
race make reference to the landmark studies conducted in the 1930s and
1940s by the psychologists Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark
(Clark and Clark 1947, 1950). Although the Clarks used a number of
techniques in their investigations, it is the doll studies that are invariably
mentioned as their most striking work. In the doll studies, which were