Our children are still being fed racist messages by toy manufacturers and stockists. A recent browse through Northlands K-Mart toy department led me to wonder: If all Baby-Borns are white, where did Wrestler Action Man come from?
Despite catering to one of the most multicultural parts of Melbourne, Northlands K-Mart does not have a single non-white baby doll in its massive display.
The most common of the few non-white dolls are futuristic aliens including fearsome black-armour clad figurines; male action dolls and swap cards depicting violent sports; Black fashion dolls with the obligatory chemically straightened hair, who are seldom marketed under their own names but bear the name of their more “accepted” blonde sister Barbie; and “exotic” Disney princesses and gypsies from long ago and far away.
Few of the toy packages depicting children at play use non-white child models or drawings of non-white children. The only consistently healthy exception to this trend seems to be the Latina Dora the Explorer and lovable Jeff from the Wiggles.
Where toy manufacturers depict their toy range of Black and white dolls of the same series, these universally feature the white figures in the foreground or centre-stage. For example “Tinkerbell V.Smile Motion Active Learning System” has the blonde Tinkerbell character in the foreground, with her darker counterparts off to the sides.
It’s the same with “Barbie Mermaid” doll series.
The Barbie Mermaid packages also feature a Black version of the Ken doll. The Black male character is also pictured at the very back of the group behind Barbie’s blonde, white boyfriend. The Barbie Mermaid series were also graded by colour on the toy shelf, with the fairest skinned doll on the left, at the head of the aisle, and the darkest skinned doll at the right hand end of the collection.
Other Barbie products, for example the Barbie dress collection, also depict the blonde Barbie as the more prominent of the multicultural group, with the brown eyes of her non-white companions adoringly trained on her.
There are no brunette “Black Label” Barbies sporting the coveted Little Black Dress — only those with straight blonde hair make the grade.
The same goes with the male dolls. All the tradesperson dolls at Northlands K-Mart are white and male. Northlands is situated next to a secondary, one of the biggest Koori schools and trades-oriented TAFE certificate providers for young people in Melbourne’s working class North. Yet children living in this area will rarely see a toy that depicts females or non-whites in trade-related occupations.
There was no shortage of Black male images involved in violent sports or clad in fearsome black alien armoury, but none of the traditional “good guys” were depicted as Black.
Apart from the negative effects of teaching children to glorify militarism, it is a very negative form of social conditioning for our children when toy manufacturers and stockists portray the “Special Force” and “World Peacekeepers” who “defend” us as being exclusively male and white.
Add to this the prevalence of Black male figures in tough bad boy personas and the absence of soft, vulnerable Black babies and we’ve got a real racist problem in the way our children are being conditioned to view the Black male.
A large number of the non-white images fed to our children by the toy industry come either from other galaxies far off into the future, or from the palaces of long ago and far away forgotten lands, living in the realm of fiction and exotica.
I had originally gone to Northlands to see whether they had started stocking a racist “golliwog” doll that has recently appeared in my local shopping centre, Epping Plaza. I found an absence of golliwogs, but I found instead that there was no absence of racism in the selection of toys at this major store.
Comments
Anonymous replied on Permalink