Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [80]
Although even competitors applauded Shani's introduction, the line has not been without minor slipups—among them, in 1992, the design of Shani's boyfriend, Jamal. "They didn't make Jamal look sweet enough," Eason said. "Ken is just an arm-piece, an escort—he's not to look sexually threatening or even interested in sex." But with Jamal, "It was like uh-oh, don't come near my daughter; I know what you're interested in." Mattel has since shaved off Jamal's David Niven mustache and eliminated what Ann duCille referred to as his "terribly tacky yellow suit." He now looks more like Eason's Melenik doll and less, said duCille, "like a pimp."
I interviewed Powell Hopson in her Connecticut office just after the 1993 introduction at Toy Fair of "Soul Train" Shani, linked to the television dance program. With restraint and diplomacy, Powell Hopson confessed that she would have preferred a more scholarship-oriented line that year, and a wardrobe without "the hot pants and the high boots and fishnet stockings." And while both she and her husband thought the idea of using Kente cloth—a traditional African fabric—on the dolls was good, they felt it might have been done with greater decorum. "He didn't like the fact that it was being used for a brassiere," Powell Hopson said. "As a blouse, fine; but not as a brassiere."
The point of this chapter is not for scholars or rival toymakers to snipe at Shani, but to understand why, despite the best intentions, mainstream manufacturers sometimes produce objects that are less than ideal. Jacob Miles, whose recently established Cultural Exchange Corporation is best known for its "Hollywood Hounds," anthropomorphic stuffed animals with multiethnic personalities, thinks that minority-run companies are by definition more in touch with their audience. "I'm an African American," he told me. "An ethnic consumer making product for the ethnic consumer—making product for myself. Our products become the community's products—so they're essentially buying from themselves. It's not something coming to the community, but something coming out of the community."
Miles is no stranger to the toy business; he was an executive at both Kenner and Tonka before striking out on his own. He remembers a pattern behind the scenes at the big companies: toning down ethnic extremes to avoid alienating the white majority. "What we've learned as educated blacks is that you can't buy your way out of racism in this country," Eason told me. Even the late Reginald Lewis, the Harvard-educated chairman of TLC Beatrice and one of the nation's most successful African-American entrepreneurs, "with his billion-dollar company and his $400 million income and his $12 million penthouse, couldn't stand on the street in New York and catch a cab easily because he was black." This is why she feels consumers of color won't desert minority-run corporations; she and her audience are linked by a subtext of slights, often invisible to the white majority. (In case she's wrong, however, she has entered into a limited financial relationship with Hasbro.)
Regardless of its limitations, Mattel's Shani line is an attempt at inclu-sivity— at making consumers of color part of the company's imagined "America." Its Dolls of the World Collection, in which diverse cultures are also represented, seems to have the opposite goal—which brings us back to the Mattel pattern of contradictory messages. Far from authenticity, these dolls have the theme-park bogusness of the "foreign lands" at Disney's Epcot Center, where the world, a set of dangerous, polyglot, disease-ridden, poverty-stricken countries, has been sanitized into the "world," a set of safe, monoglot, hygienic, affluent simulacra. Without jet lag or lost luggage, "international" tourists can purchase souvenirs, sample ethniclike