Page 183 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

168 . Ethnically Correct Dolls

With the Brown decision, the notion that separate and equal were
compatible notions under the constitution was soundly rejected; the de-
cision was one of the major turning points in the civil rights movement
and held great promise, or so it seemed. Today, the doors that the
Brown decision promised to open seem to be rusting on their hinges,
and despite the illegality of government-supported segregation, public
school systems across the nation have been largely unsuccessful at inte-
gration. In 1992 a suit was filed against the Hartford, Connecticut,
schools arguing that the state had allowed a de facto segregation of
school populations to arise, and that this could not be tolerated under the
Brown decision. In the Connecticut governor's State of the State speech
early in 1993, Lowell Weicker announced statewide restructuring of
school bureaucracy, hoping to head off a court takeover of Connecticut
schools. His speech all but acknowledged that the de facto segregation
did indeed exist:
Eighty percent of the state's minority students live in 18 urban school
districts. Hartford public schools have a 92 percent minority popula-
tion. Bridgeport is 86 percent, New Haven's 82. At the other extreme,
136 of 166 school districts have minority-student populations of less
than 10 percent; 98 have minority populations of less than 5 percent.
("Segregation of Public Schools Threatens Connecticut's Future"
1993)
Despite Weicker's efforts, the schools were unable to accomplish deseg-
regation: in 1996 the state court ordered the Hartford schools to allevi-
ate the situation. While perhaps a telling example, Connecticut is hardly
alone in its struggles with segregation. For many, the vision of an inte-
grated society now often seems like a sugarcoated dream, and even the
NAACP is showing some strain, being pressured by significant portions
of its membership to back off its integrationist stance to support new
versions of the separate but equal scheme. The language of social change
has changed along with the strategies for accomplishing it. If integration
and desegregation were the call to arms of the civil rights movement,
self-esteem claims equal prominence in contemporary discussions of
racial problems and their solutions.
The commodification of race and the racialization of commodities
have come hand-in-hand with a turning away from the emphases of civil
rights-oriented movements. Ethnically correct dolls neatly transform the
Clarks' program of social transformation into a commodity aimed at in-
fluencing individuals. Thus, psychologists (Hopson and Hopson 1991)