Page 185 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

170 . Ethnically Correct Dolls

doll can have an effect upon the child's relationship with the world at
large remains especially fuzzy in toymakers' assertions about the value
of these objects, often being summed up as "they have more fun when
they play," as Olmec packaging states. If, as in Hartford, kids play with
ethnically correct toys but attend racially and economically segregated
schools, the consumption of racialized commodities seems unlikely to
change children's perceptions of themselves or the world around them in
any meaningful way.
Kenneth Clark closed the text of the report upon which the Supreme
Court based the Brown decision with these words:
Our society can mobilize itself to wage a dramatic and successful war
against racial prejudice and its effects upon human beings. In doing so
it will eliminate the situation where the prejudiced individuals are the
ones who have higher status, and where they compel others to con-
form to their prejudices. A mobilization of the total society against
prejudice will be successful to the extent that it gives moral, legal, and
social status to unprejudiced individuals, making them unafraid to
express their belief in decency and justice and to behave in accor-
dance with their belief. (1955, 139)

While manufactured with consistent references to the work of the
Clarks, and in particular their "doll studies," ethnically correct dolls
embody a fundamentally different social project. The effort to manufac-
ture racial diversity in the form of ethnically correct dolls is not in the
end an effort to transform the assumptions and beliefs that dominate
racial discourse. Far from being significantly transformed by the com-
modity diversity that ethnically correct dolls offer, the market has gone
multicultural only insofar as store shelves can now boast themselves to
be as surely segregated as are residential neighborhoods and school sys-
tems throughout the nation. As a result, market segmentation and the
social barriers of race (and class) become mutually legitimizing and
more deeply entrenched, and appear to be increasingly real and perma-
nent, rather than less so.
Yvonne Rubie, president of the International Black Toy Association,
was quoted as saying, "If children grow up with things that are like
themselves, they will tend to like themselves or at least identify them-
selves with that positive image" ("New Boom in Ethnic Toys" 1993, 66).
The most startling thing about this quote is Rubie's assertion that it is
children's relationships with things rather than people that is most criti-
cally important for their sense of self. This understanding certainly fits in