Page 188 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Ethnically Correct Dolls . 173

consumer items that address issues of race but not class. In making their
white dolls live in black worlds, they similarly reconfigure the boundaries
of race, which minority toymakers portray as being immutable. In so
doing, these girls demonstrate and fashion an understanding of the social
construction of not only their own blackness, but of whiteness as well.
The more rigid understanding of race evidenced by toymakers is, in com-
parison, one based on notions of the fixity of genetics, an attempt to turn
racism on its head but not an attempt to reimagine race itself. Toymakers
have remolded their products, but not the parameters of the debate.