Page 184 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Ethnically Correct Dolls . 169

who replicated the Clark studies focus their attention on ways that par-
ents can intervene in children's play to reinforce positive self-image, by
noting that their children are beautiful or nice. Few could take issue
with this suggestion, but social change as an equally important avenue
through which to address the problem of systemic racism receives much
less emphasis. In their book Different and Wonderful: Raising Black
Children in a Race Conscious Society, the Hopsons write, "You do not
want your child to grow up thinking that only White dolls, and by ex-
tension White people, are attractive and nice" (127). In contrast, the
point that the Clarks made in their studies of children's self-concept was
quite the opposite: that children chose the white dolls as being beautiful
because they knew that whiteness was valued by the society at large.
The idea that children benefit by having a doll that "looks like me"
to love and play with is not what I am criticizing here. The move away
from insisting on massive restructuring of society to intensive remolding
of self may stem, in part, from the successes of the civil rights move-
ment: with many of the legal and social barriers to participation in
American society at least lowered, if not (officially, at least) removed,
more energy can be aimed at individual, rather than collective, needs.
And yet this emphasis on issues such as self-esteem may also stem from
the failures of the civil rights project. With affirmative action under at-
tack and extensive restructuring of federal entitlement programs, the
gains of the civil rights movement seem incremental at best. Lisa Sullivan
writes that this problem is in many ways generational, and that "many
believe that traditional Black leaders lack the capacity, desire, and inge-
nuity to address the contemporary crises that destabilize Black working-
class life and destroy Black neighborhoods and families" (1996, 7).
Whatever the cause, there is currently a greater emphasis on an inward
attention to the destruction that racism can produce. Whereas the Clarks
pointed to the larger society as the most problematic element in chil-
dren's self-image, the problem has come to be seen as being located in
the toys themselves: that is, interpretations seem to assert that minority
children's self-image suffers in part because of the toys that they play
with. A strategy that emphasizes the consumption of racialized com-
modities reverses the direction of causality from that suggested by the
original Clark studies: it is now the toys that are culpable in shaping
children's self-concept, not the society that produces them.
Manufacturers of ethnically correct dolls and toys argue that by pro-
ducing culturally appropriate products children can purchase the tools
of self-esteem. The way in which the relationship between a child and a