Attempting equality
My life is insane lately, and I really don’t have much time for blogging. I’ll hopefully be back for real in mid-to-late August. In the meantime, I thought you readers would find this image (from Fail Blog) interesting:
Two dolls for sale, identical in every way except skin and hair color—and price. The black doll is about two dollars cheaper than the white doll. Ridiculous! I was glad to see such a picture identified as a “fail.”
It got me to thinking, though, about the studies cited in Brown v. Board of Education and recreated by ABC News and others, which I read about not too long ago at Sociological Images. While it maybe less universal than it was a few decades ago, many black children will simultaneously identify a black doll as the one that looks like them and identify a white doll as the one that looks “nice” and “pretty.” You might expect that children would typically want to play with dolls that look like them, but white dolls tend to sell faster to people of all skin colors. (I remember an essay written by a woman who worked in an upscale toy store about how she had an easier time selling the broken, scuffed, white demo doll than the brand new non-white versions of the same doll. If I can find a link to that, I’ll stick in an update here.)
So what should we make of this? Is it the store’s fault that there is higher demand for one product than another? It makes a twisted kind of sense to shift prices like this, if your goal is to move more of the black dolls in your inventory. Higher demand of any product leads to higher prices for it, and lower demand encourages sellers to lower their prices. I still think the message that it sends, that depicting a black person is worth less than depicting a white person, is far too repugnant to justify the pricing. What do you think?
UPDATE: A commenter over at SocImages, in a post of theirs about this one (thanks for noticing, guys!), figured out the source of the story I had forgotten above. It’s from “This American Life,” by Chicago Public Radio, in an episode from January of this year. Go here to read about it or listen to the recording.
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4 Responses to “Attempting equality”
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Unless the white Doll’s wholesale cost was $1.78 more than the black doll, there is no reason for the dolls to reflect a price difference. If there was a price difference, I can’t imagine that the retailer couldn’t shame Hasbro the manufacturer of Baby Alive or the distributor and or wholesaler into issuing the same price for the exact same product. And if the retailer could not, the responsibility was on them NOT to make the same unconscionable mistake. If this is real, I’d say Hasbro should be putting out a damage control press release. Regardless, this reinforces the important mission of The Black Dolls.
When I read this article, it made me think about my role models when I was in middle school…and to think of it….none of them were black…I mention this because, socitey molds our perceptions into our reality. For centuries, fair skin individuals has been glorified by the younger and older generation of many races/cultures, even if, they weren’t physically attractive. Black women today, bleach their skin lighter to define themselves as “Pretty”…in societies eyes. They lose their identity in the process. Black children…especially black girls, need positive reinforcement and positive role models…that look just like them, to break the viscous cycle…that “being white or have lighter skin”… is more beautiful and attractive…then there are. Unfortunately, I had to find this out in high school….when my older sister became my role model…and I wanted to her “black nose” and features…..
I think this is more innocent than we’re giving it credit for – it’s more likely just a misplaced doll or else staged simply for the humour.
[...] at It’s The The Thought That Counts says that the prices reminded her of a short video about children and their doll preferences. In [...]