Page 187 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

172 . Ethnically Correct Dolls

Natalia and Asia's request that they be given the opportunity to play
with dolls who are like them not in looks, but in life, is more radical
than the demand for equal opportunity representation of skin tones on
the toy store shelf.
Similarly, many girls in the neighborhood played with their white
dolls in ways totally unanticipated by the idea that white dolls limit
black children's fantasies. These girls did not allow their dolls to remain
white. From Cabbage Patch Kids with their yarn hair strung with beads
and wrapped with foil to long-haired blonde dolls sporting intricately
braided 'dos, white dolls in Newhallville were, over and over again, not
quite recognized as such. They were still white, of course, and kids knew
that, but the whiteness of the dolls did not stop girls from integrating
them into their worlds. In so doing, these children failed to commemo-
rate the boundaries of racial difference.
Manufacturers of ethnically correct dolls add selling appeal to their
wares by embedding a social message in their products—the notion that
these toys can help to correct social ills. In the case of ethnically correct
dolls in particular, their benefits are metaphorically connected to civil
rights issues such as enforced school segregation through references to
the Clark doll studies. Yet, as these manufacturers have reminded me
when pressed, they are businesses, not social service agencies. Their aim
is to sell their products, not to distribute them in acts of charity. Their so-
cial conscience is a market-driven one—and one that sometimes drives
them to contradict their own agenda in ways that, if not exactly startling,
are worth noting.
The notion that the toybox is or should be a democratic space mir-
rors the commonly held notion that the consumer world is similarly
democratic—a place and sphere of equal opportunity for anyone with a
few bucks to spend. Makers of ethnically correct dolls do little to dis-
courage this notion of the democratic marketplace, emphasizing instead
the growing power of minority consumers as part of the buying public.
For poor minority children, the entry of minority toys and toymakers
into the industry has made little, if any, impact on their own toy collec-
tions or, for that matter, their self-esteem.
These children have diversified the social world their playthings rep-
resent in ways that are ultimately more radical than those proposed by
the makers of ethnically correct dolls. In confronting the market itself as
an exclusionary sphere, describing Barbie as "nice" to the public at large
and then wondering why there is no abused or pregnant Barbie, these
girls reject the notion that their "self-esteem" can be boosted through