• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 739 0

of the African-American Studies Program and an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University, is a severe critic. After studying representations of race in fashion dolls for over a year, she feels that the dolls reflect a sort of "easy pluralism." "I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I'd rather see no black dolls than see something like Shani or Black Barbie," she told me, "but I would hope for something more—which is not about to happen." Nor is she wholly enamored of Imani and Melenik, Olmec's equivalent of Barbie and Ken. "Supposedly these are dolls for black kids to play with that look like them, when in fact they don't look like them. That's a problematic statement, of course, because there's no 'generic black kid.' But those dolls look too like Barbie for me. They have the same body type, the same long, straight hair—and I think it sends a problematic message to kids. It's about marketing, about business—so don't try to pass it off as being about the welfare of black children."

Lisa Jones, an African-American writer who chronicled the introduction of Mattel's Shani dolls for the Village Voice, is less harsh. Too old to have played with Christie—Barbie's black friend, born in 1968—Jones recalls as a child having expressed annoyance with her white classmates by ripping the heads and arms off her two white Barbie dolls. Any fashion doll of color, she thinks, would have been better for her than those blondes. "Having been a little girl who grew up without the images," she told me, "I realize that however they fail to reach the Utopian mark, they're still useful."

People who accuse Mattel of having lacked a multicultural vision may not know about its relationship to Shindana Toys—a failed yet prescient experiment. To appreciate why Shindana was a breakthrough, one has to look at the history of American toys, which since the nineteenth century have been used to caricature immigrants. One shoo-in for the Toymakers' Hall of Shame is a common late-nineteenth-century bank called the "reclining Chinaman." It depicted a Chinese man with playing cards sprawled against a log. At the log's base was a rat—alleged to be a staple in the Chinese diet—and a lever which, when pulled, caused a coin to fall from the man's hip into the bank while his hands moved to reveal that the cards were all aces. The toy promulgated the notion that Chinese people were shifty and— because they accepted jobs at lower wages than less-recent immigrants— stole money from "American" workers.

The 1924 "Chicken Snatcher" is another stunningly awful plaything. This wind-up toy, which, according its advertisement, "will delight the kiddies," featured a "scared Negro" who "shuffles along with a chicken dangling in his hand and a dog hanging on the seat of his pants." But even when toys weren't poking malicious fun at unassimilated foreigners or African Americans, they were erasing them through omission. Until the civil rights movement of the 1960s, dolls were predominantly white; black children couldn't play with little effigies of themselves. The effect of this invisibility was quantified in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when two African-American social scientists, Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, did a study using dolls to investigate black children's self-esteem. Given a choice between a white doll or a black doll, 67 percent of the black children they surveyed preferred the white doll. They dismissed the black dolls as ugly and bad.

The Clarks' troubling findings were not without impact. In 1954, Thurgood Marshall, arguing for the plaintiff in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, used the Clarks' testimony to document the psychological damage that had been suffered by blacks because of segregation. Marshall won the case, which resulted in the Supreme Court decision to integrate public schools.

To set the scene for Shindana's launch, we must return to the 1965 Watts riots, which broke out in midsummer after a Los Angeles coroner's jury excused as "justifiable homicide" the police killing of an unarmed black teenager carrying