White Dolls Research Articles

Self-identification and Racial Preference in Urban and Rural Primary School Children from Southern Peru

Objective: This study aimed to understand the dynamics of self-identification and racial preference in urban and rural primary school children in southern Peru, and to discern the underlying causes of discrimination and racism in these contexts. Materials and Methods: The research adopted a naturalistic paradigm with a qualitative approach and a case study design. Participants included 24 students from urban and rural educational institutions in the southern highlands of Peru. Data was collected using the "Doll Test" questionnaire, based on the original "Doll Test" designed in the 1940s in the USA. Re-sults: The study revealed a concerning trend in students' perceptions of beauty related to the skin color of dolls. Stereotypes were evident in students' perceptions, associating the black doll with "bad" and the white doll with "good". A marked preference was identified for the blonde doll, but a majority identified with the black doll in terms of similarity. Most students anticipated an economically disadvantaged future for the black doll and a privileged one for the blonde doll. Discussion: The findings unveil the palpa-ble presence of racial stereotypes and prejudices in students' perceptions and preferences regarding skin color. This underscores the urgent need to promote a culture of inclusion and respect from childhood and the importance of implementing educational and cultur-al interventions to eradicate these stereotypes.

Cabelos e significados do pertencimento étnico-racial em conversas de meninas

Abstract Objective Structural racism is a systemic phenomenon in Brazilian society that distributes conditions of subordination and privilege among racial groups, reinforcing the dominance of the White group. Its individual expression can be seen throughout daily interactions. Children, through immersion in the social fabric, construct their cultural identity and gradually develop a sense of belonging to an ethno-racial group. The aim of this study is to identify racialized social stereotypes about hair in conversations among girls aged 9 to 11 years old. Method Two groups were organized in a public school, each consisting of two Black and two White girls. They participated in seven video-recorded play sessions, averaging 30 minutes each. Among the toys were a Black, blonde, Oriental, and a brown-haired White doll. Results Microgenetic analysis was performed, focusing on conversation segments about ethnic-racial belonging. Conclusion It revealed racist beliefs and values underlying the meanings attributed to hair.

Forecast & Vigil

57 KYLE MARBUT Forecast & Vigil  Forecast My superpower is feeling sad about things before they happen: my first kiss, winter sunsets, sunrise in general, telling you I’m scared of who I’ve been, running out of laundry detergent, birthdays, a summer spent in bed, two degrees Celsius, the day my cat dies and I bury him without flowers, the sea returning to its bed—the valley where I live, primordial ocean floor. The creek meets its banks, ponds bloom in the sandlot—speechless birds crowd black cherry trees, ruffling 58 feathers between strokes of lightning and the answering crash. I count four silent miles on my fingers. Somewhere a patch of grass smolders—somewhere a sycamore splits and flames, fountaining blackbirds. A puddle swallows my ankles, the storm drains can’t keep up with all this sky—passing cars arc gutter water into my eyes waves lap my thighs rainwater rises slow as cooling glass islands disappear I hold the sky -blue umbrella like a bowl overflowing raised to my brimming lips I cannot contain everything I am myself alone a child floats by on an oak door translating Hamlet into water into Ophelia words pour off clean pages my dress 59 a raft water-laden and drifting my dress a mermaid tail emerald-scaled inlaid with pearls a willow grows aslant the new seafloor branches sprawling underwater my brothers crowd the crown dueling for their castaway birthright ramshackle driftwood barge fistfight over gyres of jetsam and uprooted picnic tables white-water storm surge claims the coastline the eastern seaboard becomes open water landlocked corn country becomes beachfront property becomes open water I always wanted to live in a beach house my father is the ocean my mother is the sea I am tide-borne I am sinking Hurricane-force, black sky—when will the weather learn to behave itself? I’m not calling this an apocalypse, an ending, though the flood drowns two of each species and then some, and the richest bastards cry out to breaking skies for an island timeshare in high-and-dry Colorado, and the clouds 60 do not answer. In my dreams, the new world -ocean is not barren. All the arks are empty or unbuilt—the water teems with golden mer-cheetahs and jewel-toned hermit crab-rabbits with neon shells and moray ferrets tucked into crags—and the birds are mostly the same, except they wing saltwater and sing like little whales, crowing with humpbacks at dawn, when godbeams slice the epipelagic over our submerged street, our town below sea level, block after block of houseboat shipwrecks—open doors and windows, waterlogged, all our glasses are always full of the world, no room for pessimistic air, and we never have to wash our hair again. The body is governed by water. Can you swim? The water is governed by water. Come again? I can’t hear over all this storm, this icemelt—Antarctica cracking into continents, the planet jingling like a glass of coke. The icebergs are just icebergs. The water is just the world, now. I hope you said yes about the swimming— remember, I carried you to the deep end once by your armpits, and let go, and you flailed, gasped, learned: 61 You don’t have to hold yourself. Don’t worry—the water will catch you. Don’t worry—the water won’t come here anyway. 62 Vigil Meet me in the garden so I can weave us crowns from grass and clover, a stem twisted over a blade around tiny blossoms till the ends disappear . This is how I claim my kingdom, in the sunroom at moonrise, rain painting half-shadows on the thin glass walls. No one does what I ask, so I tell my subjects to pile pale white doll shoes and the black paper wings of ladybugs at the foot of this slow-rocking swing-bench, my throne. They come to me from far reaches, bearing slivers of dusty lace from an old maid’s wedding dress, panes of glass from rose windows in churches at the bottoms of lakes, boats of broken porcelain glazed with desert rain. All this they bring in through...

Forecast & Vigil

57 KYLE MARBUT Forecast & Vigil  Forecast My superpower is feeling sad about things before they happen: my first kiss, winter sunsets, sunrise in general, telling you I’m scared of who I’ve been, running out of laundry detergent, birthdays, a summer spent in bed, two degrees Celsius, the day my cat dies and I bury him without flowers, the sea returning to its bed—the valley where I live, primordial ocean floor. The creek meets its banks, ponds bloom in the sandlot—speechless birds crowd black cherry trees, ruffling 58 feathers between strokes of lightning and the answering crash. I count four silent miles on my fingers. Somewhere a patch of grass smolders—somewhere a sycamore splits and flames, fountaining blackbirds. A puddle swallows my ankles, the storm drains can’t keep up with all this sky—passing cars arc gutter water into my eyes waves lap my thighs rainwater rises slow as cooling glass islands disappear I hold the sky -blue umbrella like a bowl overflowing raised to my brimming lips I cannot contain everything I am myself alone a child floats by on an oak door translating Hamlet into water into Ophelia words pour off clean pages my dress 59 a raft water-laden and drifting my dress a mermaid tail emerald-scaled inlaid with pearls a willow grows aslant the new seafloor branches sprawling underwater my brothers crowd the crown dueling for their castaway birthright ramshackle driftwood barge fistfight over gyres of jetsam and uprooted picnic tables white-water storm surge claims the coastline the eastern seaboard becomes open water landlocked corn country becomes beachfront property becomes open water I always wanted to live in a beach house my father is the ocean my mother is the sea I am tide-borne I am sinking Hurricane-force, black sky—when will the weather learn to behave itself? I’m not calling this an apocalypse, an ending, though the flood drowns two of each species and then some, and the richest bastards cry out to breaking skies for an island timeshare in high-and-dry Colorado, and the clouds 60 do not answer. In my dreams, the new world -ocean is not barren. All the arks are empty or unbuilt—the water teems with golden mer-cheetahs and jewel-toned hermit crab-rabbits with neon shells and moray ferrets tucked into crags—and the birds are mostly the same, except they wing saltwater and sing like little whales, crowing with humpbacks at dawn, when godbeams slice the epipelagic over our submerged street, our town below sea level, block after block of houseboat shipwrecks—open doors and windows, waterlogged, all our glasses are always full of the world, no room for pessimistic air, and we never have to wash our hair again. The body is governed by water. Can you swim? The water is governed by water. Come again? I can’t hear over all this storm, this icemelt—Antarctica cracking into continents, the planet jingling like a glass of coke. The icebergs are just icebergs. The water is just the world, now. I hope you said yes about the swimming— remember, I carried you to the deep end once by your armpits, and let go, and you flailed, gasped, learned: 61 You don’t have to hold yourself. Don’t worry—the water will catch you. Don’t worry—the water won’t come here anyway. 62 Vigil Meet me in the garden so I can weave us crowns from grass and clover, a stem twisted over a blade around tiny blossoms till the ends disappear . This is how I claim my kingdom, in the sunroom at moonrise, rain painting half-shadows on the thin glass walls. No one does what I ask, so I tell my subjects to pile pale white doll shoes and the black paper wings of ladybugs at the foot of this slow-rocking swing-bench, my throne. They come to me from far reaches, bearing slivers of dusty lace from an old maid’s wedding dress, panes of glass from rose windows in churches at the bottoms of lakes, boats of broken porcelain glazed with desert rain. All this they bring in through...

Brown Beauty: Color, Sex and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II by Laila Haidarali

Reviewed by: Brown Beauty: Color, Sex and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II by Laila Haidarali Kenya Davis-Hayes BROWN BEAUTY: Color, Sex and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II. By Laila Haidarali. New York: New York University Press. 2018. In an age in which cosmetic lines such as Fenty and Lancôme are seeking out an expansion of shades catering to black women, modern society seems to be making strides towards the embrace of brown skin. Brown-ness in all its glory has recently crept its way into mainstream America as a viable aspect of the national beauty terrain. This growing acceptance of the broad spectrum of beauty within the black community, specifically of black women, has been a fraught journey throughout American history. From the creation of American slavery to today, black women's appearance has been derided and legislated against; lampooned and constructed as the hideous antipole to white feminine beauty. Historically, all things black reflected the worst of humanity and the human experience. It is this historical reality that makes Laila Haidarali's text—Brown Beauty: Color, Sex and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II very compelling. Nestled between America's post-Reconstruction racial nadir and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, Haidarali outlines the efforts and complexities of the black community's quest towards aesthetic legitimacy and value. Not yet having entered into the mainstream rhetoric of "Black is Beautiful," academics, authors and advertisers espoused the concept of "Brownness." In Haidarali's words, the text explores "brown beauty as a consumerist discourse that held powerful sway over the public imagining of African American women" (18). Between the 1920s and the end of World War II, the rising black middle class both utilized and was wooed by the more acceptable coding of dark skin through the use of the word "brown" to sell products, find interest in products and to promote themselves as respectable members of society. Haidarali interestingly maps the full scope of the utilization of "brownness" for the furtherance of the black community. Advocates for the betterment of the black community like Elise Johnson McDougald capitalized upon their own fair-skinned brown complexion to promote the skills and employability of black New Yorkers. She also became the first black principal in the New York Public School District thus leading to extensive coverage of her achievement in the New York City press. Stories regarding the rise of McDougald commented as much upon her complexion as her achievement thus leading her to reflect a changing expectation of "New Negro Womanhood." In Haidarali's words, images like McDougald's "appeared to embody the very qualities that were routinely denied to African American women: beauty, educated accomplishment and middle-class status" (53). As individuals worked to shift popular images of black womanhood, black entrepreneurs also invested the notion of brown for both social uplift and economic gain. Companies like the National Negro Doll Company sold attractive "brown skin" dolls for black girls. Contrasting more commonly found white dolls or unattractive black rag dolls, the NNDC imbued a sense of respectability into its young patronesses through the utilization of the word "brown." The text goes on to explore the "reliance on the verbal language of brown as a racial marker in advertising text"(80). In tandem, black women artists and poets worked to appropriate the word "brown" thus granting it a fuller, more human, meaning complete with self-acceptance and positive sexual undertones. Haidarali canvasses the works of Anita Scott Coleman, Helene Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimke [End Page 85] and others who assert the brownness of black women in truly celebratory tones. During the Harlem Renaissance, Grimke penned, "Brown girl/ You smile/And in your great eyes. . .I see little bells." In the hands of black women poets, the word "brown" superseded advocacy and advertisements and became a term for black feminine acceptance and joy. By the end of WWII, the black middle class had fully established the concept of "brownness," as found in printed texts, advertisements and popular literature, as a representation of decades-long efforts towards propriety and respectability. Those able to fully embrace the term and...

Skin Bleaching and the Self-Hate Polemic

The popular explanation for skin bleaching among Black Jamaicans is self-hate. The concept of complex personhood debunks the psychopathology explanation of skin bleaching. Complex personhood is an autonomous, multidimensional, nuanced and optimal self that displays strength, weakness, resilience, ambiguities and contradictions. Some of the skin bleaching literature frames the skin bleachers as self-hating, restricts identity to a binary, argues erroneously that there is only one way to be black and silences the skin bleachers in public discourse. The self-hate explanation for skin bleaching in Jamaica is informed by the doll study in America which confounds the minority of Black children’s choice of a white doll with self-hate. The self-esteem studies in Jamaica and America refutes the self-hate thesis. The use of complex personhood to understand the behavior of the Jamaican skin bleachers liberates them from the self-hate explanation for their behavior and provides the alternative explanations of miseducation and colorism.

Algumas notas sobre bonecas para mulheres "negras" em Maputo

Resumo: Este artigo busca pensar o lugar que as bonecas ocupam na formação da subjetividade de mulheres "negras" moçambicanas. Tendo em vista que a indústria de brinquedos opta pela superprodução de bonecas "brancas" e loiras para crianças de vários pertencimentos "étnicos", paramos para refletir sobre as seguintes questões: que lugares as bonecas ocupam na vida de uma criança? De que forma elas operam na maneira como as meninas se relacionam com os próprios corpos e com seus cabelos? Quais as implicações para uma menina negra que tem somente bonecas loiras disponíveis para brincar? Seria esse brinquedo também um objeto de criação de distinção racial? Farei uma reflexão da infância a partir das experiências rememoradas de mulheres adultas. Trata-se, portanto, de um olhar em retrospectiva feito por meio de relatos e reminiscências de mulheres que já brincaram com bonecas.

White Bias in 3–7-Year-Old Children across Cultures

In three studies we report data confirming and extending the finding of a tendency toward a White preference bias by young children of various ethnic backgrounds. European American preschoolers who identify with a White doll also prefer it to a Black doll. In contrast, same age African American children who identify with a Black doll do not show a significant preference for it over a White doll. These results are comparable in African American children attending either a racially mixed (heterogeneous), or an Afro-centric, all African American (homogenous) preschool. These results show the persistence of an observation that contributed to school de-segregation in the United States. Results also reveal a lack of congruence between skin color identity and preference is not limited to African Americans. There is a comparable, if not stronger White preference bias in five to seven-year-old Polynesian and Melanesian children tested in their native island nations. Using a modified procedure controlling for binary forced choice biases, we confirm these findings with second generation American children of Indian descent showing clear signs of a White (lighter skin preference) bias. These results are consistent with the idea that during the preschool years children are sensitive and attracted to signs of higher social status that, for historical reasons and across cultures, tends to be associated with lighter skin color.

The Ambiguous Role of Agency in Childhood Studies

Robin Bernstein's Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York University Press, 2011.Courtney Weikle-Milis's Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640-1868. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.C. Dallett Hemphill's Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.Childhood studies frequently exhibits dueling interests regarding child agency: while some scholars critique the ways in which childrens rights are limited, others champion the means by which children still exercise control. Recent books by Robin Bernstein, Courtney Weikle-Mills, and C. Dallett Hemphill demonstrate just how much assessments of childrens agency can vary. While Bernstein focuses on how childrens culture can be appropriated for political agendas, Weikle-Mills looks at how literature for and about children often affirms changes in their status as citizens. Finally, via an archival analysis of family culture, Hemphill reconstructs the experience of actual historical children to demonstrate the significance of sibling relationships to one's ability to adapt to a rapidly changing cultural landscape.In a world filled with DVD collections and streaming media, many of us find ourselves returning to the television shows and films that delighted us as children, only to discover how thickly they are layered with the prejudices of the period in which they were created. Believing we are escaping to a world free of a political agenda, we instead find ourselves bumping up against the same problematic ideologies we ask students to identify and resenting the education we received without realizing it. Bernstein's Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights focuses on this tendency of children's culture to give the appearance of existing outside a political context.Bernstein's concept of racial innocence refers to the ways that the child can be used to make political projects appear innocuous, natural, and therefore justified (33). Bernstein illustrates this process in her first chapter, in which she compares the cover image of the book-a Cottolene advertisement from the 1890s featuring a young, smiling black girl hugging a soft cloud of cotton-with a photograph of a young white child in a cotton field. While the photograph of the white child is clearly meant to protest child labor, the Cottolene advertisement nefariously presents the black child as happily embracing the product she helps to produce and, by extension, the labor she had to perform to produce it. Such images, Bernstein argues, were responsible for perpetuating the idea that black children were insensate, immune to pain, a belief that culminated in the figure of the invulnerable pickaninny.Bernsteins second chapter then demonstrates her methodology for examining material culture, explaining that the primary question to ask about a material object is what practices it both invites and discourages. Bernstein shows that a wide variety of material objects historically affirmations and approval of black insensateness: from black rubber dolls whose very composition encouraged rough treatment, to E. W. Kemble's 1898 A Coon Alphabet, a collection of rhymes about black children that frequently end in violence and that invite the reader to participate in that violence by turning the page to reveal it. In subsequent chapters, Bernstein examines how illustrations and theatrical adaptions altered the ideologies of Uncle Tom's Cabin-, analyzes the forms of play scripted by the popular cuddly doll Raggedy Ann and the books sold with it; and questions whether Kenneth and Mamie Clark were correct to assume, as they did in the 1940s, that black childrens preference for white dolls bespoke their internalized racism rather than attitudes about play.Weikle-Mills s Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640-1868 also presents a concept with far-ranging applications for childhood studies: that of imaginary citizens, individuals who could not exercise civic rights but who were, in Bernsteins terms, to see themselves as citizens. …

Racialized Things

Racialized Things Sarah E. Chinn (bio) Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. By Robin Bernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 318 pages. $75 (cloth). $24 (paper). Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. By Nicole R. Fleetwood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 296pages. $75(cloth). $25(paper). Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century. By Kyla Wazana Tompkins. New York: New York University Press, 2012. 288pages. $75(cloth) $24(paper). Consider the topsy-turvy doll. An invention of enslaved women in the nineteenth century, the doll is a potent image of the inextricability of American whiteness from its black counterpart, and vice versa. If you have never seen one, it is a fascinating object: the doll is a fusion of two half-dolls, one black and one white. What would normally be the legs and feet of one doll is the torso and head of the other. As one turns the doll upside down, the skirt attached to its waist flips over, revealing the face and body of the other doll. It is a short commute from playing with a white doll to playing with a black doll: a quick flip, and the doll’s racial other emerges. The topsy-turvy doll can never fully show both its black and white ends: for one to be visible, the other must be hidden beneath the doll’s skirts. The black and white dolls are joined at their nonexistent crotches, which instead become the beginning of the other doll. Each doll, then, is in a way giving birth to even as it smothers the other; each doll emerges from the nonexistent genitals of the other.1 As Robin Bernstein shows in her eye-opening book Racial Innocence, the topsy-turvy doll is one of the most illuminating and poignant enactments of segregation we have. Black and white figures are joined literally at the hip but never genuinely interact. While each becomes visible through the same mechanisms, the terms in which that visibility occurs are very different: the [End Page 873] white doll is more often than not identified as “Eva,” the innocent martyred child hero of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while the black doll, as its name suggests, is named after Topsy, the enslaved child whose soul Eva sets out to save. On occasion, the black doll is a mammy figure, the caring subordinate to the white girl to whom she is set in anatomical opposition. As in the segregated United States, black and white girls and women occupy the same space but under terms of profound inequality. To say that the topsy-turvy doll naturalizes racial difference is not quite accurate. No one would argue that dolls are products of nature, after all. Rather, the doll filters understandings of how race operates through an everyday object, and, most importantly for Bernstein’s purposes, a product designed for and played with by children. All three books under consideration here are fascinated by what we might call racialized things: things that bear, communicate, and reproduce regimes of racialization even as that is not their sole or even primary purpose.2 They all ask, in different (and differently overlapping ways) the question posed by Nicole R. Fleetwood in Troubling Vision: how does a certain kind of racial identity—which in Fleetwood’s work is blackness, in Bernstein’s is blackness and/or whiteness, and in Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s is blackness, whiteness, and Chineseness, among other identities— “get attached to bodies, goods, ideas, and aesthetic practices,” and how do those practices get disseminated on various registers in popular culture (20)? Fleetwood, Bernstein, and Tompkins are all part of a new generation of scholars in American and African American studies. Heirs to the anti-essentialism of the 1990s and the efflorescence of affect theory in the twenty-first century, they see blackness as both fungible and deeply rooted in lived experience. They are as indebted to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s formulation of racial formation as they are to queer theories of performativity and the emotionally resonant while theoretically sophisticated work of current scholars such as Robert Reid-Pharr, Sara Ahmed, and Heather Love.3 This olio...

Serious Play

Serious Play Katharine Capshaw Smith Cultural historian Robin Bernstein recently gave a talk at my university on the Kenneth and Mamie Clark doll experiments of the 1940s. These experiments, now famous, asked African American children to select between black and white dolls. The record of children's preference for white dolls, as well as the young people's despair at being presented with such a choice, became potent evidence for efforts at school integration, particularly during the Brown v. Board of Education hearings. Bernstein's fascinating presentation focused not on the uses of the experiments within the civil rights campaign, however, but on the way in which children's facility with cultural expectations for doll play helped influence the choice between a black and a white doll. In short, black dolls had historically been used in play associated with violence, and children's reluctance to select the black doll revealed their resistance to the American cultural practice of defiling black bodies. One of Bernstein's observations allowed me to reflect on unspoken assumptions about children's culture within the field of literary criticism: "In my research on doll-play, I constantly found the phrase 'supposed to': children reported that they knew how they were 'supposed to' play with different dolls. Sometimes they did what they were 'supposed to' do, other times they refused, but they consistently understood the play scenarios that dolls prompted, the traditions of performance that dolls referred to." Stepping back from the particular example of the Clarks' experiments, I wondered then about the expectations for critical play with children's books within the field of literary studies. How are we able to challenge cultural "givens" about the place and purposes of children's texts? What are we "supposed to do" with children's literature, and how do we engage and often resist such expectations? The essays in this issue of the Quarterly all reveal an awareness of cultural expectations for children's texts and then spotlight moments of resistance to such expectations; our essays analyze re-imaginings of texts and of authorial identity or themselves demonstrate resistant critical practices. In other words, they do not play the way they are "supposed to" play, and for [End Page 1] that I am grateful. Adrienne Kertzer's essay, "Fidelity, Felicity, and Playing Around in Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox," discusses expectations for film adaptations of children's books, arguing that Anderson cannily understands the cultural demand for fidelity to the source text, but he instead offers "a tribute" to Dahl influenced largely by Anderson's own childhood experiences rather than by textual accuracy. In one section of the essay, Kertzer looks at the figure of a more critical and ironic Mrs. Fox in the adaptation, finding that "The film thereby functions as both a tribute and a critique, differing significantly from previous filmic adaptations that never consider challenging Dahl's depiction of adult women." Adaptations play with children's texts, even as they pledge to be faithful to the original, and Kertzer's essay asks us to reconsider attraction to the idea of a stable text. Joseph T. Thomas Jr. studies a persona of one of the most popular children's poets of the twentieth century, Shel Silverstein. To say that this persona has been overlooked or ignored is an understatement; the "Uncle Shelby" version of Silverstein is bawdy, earthy, irreverent, and iconoclastic, qualities not typically embraced by the children's book–buying public. Thomas discusses the larger purposes of re-imagining our popular authors: "Shel Silverstein and his persona, Uncle Shelby, provide us with a more robust way to think about children's literature, reminding us that the line between texts for adults and those for children is far more blurry than we generally like to believe, as is the line between child culture and adult culture, even though we like to police that line with ever-growing determination." According to Thomas, ignoring Silverstein's publications within the pages of Playboy magazine has restricted our awareness of the scope of his attention, as well as limited our appreciation of the ambition of his authorial presentations. If Thomas bucks our expectations for reading Shel Silverstein, Lydia Kokkola takes...

Children's Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children's Literature

In about 1855, three decades before frances hodgson burnett wrote her first best-selling children's book,little lord fauntleroy, she was a child—Frances Eliza Hodgson—and she read Harriet Beecher Stowe'sUncle Tom's Cabin.She found Stowe's novel, like all the stories she encountered, to be “unsatisfactory, filling her with vague, restless craving for greater completeness of form” (Burnett 44). The form the girl craved—that is, the material she believed she needed to complete the narrative—was a black doll. When Burnett obtained the doll, she named it Topsy and used it to “act” out the parts of the novel she found most “thrilling” (53). Casting a white doll she already owned as Little Eva, she played out ever-repeating scenes of Eva laying hands on Topsy, awakening the hardened slave girl to Christian love. Burnett also kept the Eva doll “actively employed slowly fading away and dying,” and in these scenes she took on the role of Uncle Tom (57). At other times, Burnett performed the scene of Eva's death, casting the white doll as Eva and herself as “all the weeping slaves at once” (58). And at least once she designated the doll Uncle Tom and cast herself as Simon Legree. For this scenario, the girl bound the doll to a candelabra stand. “[F]urious with insensate rage,” she whipped her doll (fig. 1). Throughout the whipping, the doll maintained a “cheerfully hideous” grin, which suggested to the girl that Uncle Tom was “enjoying the situation” of being “brutally lashed” (56, 55).

On Dolls, Presidents, and Little Black Girls

The essay is a reflection on the inauguration of Barack Obama and on teaching Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye the next day. Reading the story of Pecola Breedlove put in sharp relief the fact that on January 20, 2009, the Obama daughters were the most adored children in the world. The juxtaposition occasioned thoughts on historical change and on the role of feminist critique in analyzing and producing it. Pecola is despised and defeated; she clings desperately to the images of white dolls and little white girls who represent beauty and love in her world. While racism destroys Pecola, her friend Claudia MacTeer becomes a figure for the black feminist critic, who resists racism and sexism using the tools of deconstructive analysis and a wicked sense of humor.

<i>The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy Christine Harold The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy edited by Karen Tracy, James P. McDaniel, and Bruce E. Gronbeck. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. 314 pp. $60.00, cloth; $38.00, paper. The essays collected by Karen Tracy, James P. McDaniel, and Bruce E. Gronbeck in The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy explore the rhetorical details and patterns of grassroots democracy as they emerged in one particular controversy in a Boulder, Colorado, school district in 2001. Attending to the specificities of the case is crucial to the editors' larger mission: to offer a radically localized alternative to the field's penchant for "grand theory," which, they suggest, too often neglects or ignores "the tenacious intrusions of the nonsovereign subject speaking to neighbors and the institutions of the village, town, and city" (37). The essays all explore what, for a while, became known in the media as "Barbiegate." In 2001, in a predominantly white suburb of Boulder, a third-grade girl conducted a social experiment for her school science fair. She presented two Barbie dolls, one black and one white, each wearing a different colored dress, to thirty fifth graders and thirty adults. The subjects were asked to choose which was the prettier doll. Then she switched the dresses and asked the question again. Of the adults, all chose the doll wearing [End Page 296] the purple dress, regardless of skin color. Of the fifth-graders, nearly all picked the white doll, regardless of what color dress it wore. On seeing the student's poster presenting her findings, school administers banned the project, arguing that it violated the district's nondiscrimination policy. The girl's father vehemently denounced the decision, claiming that his daughter's civil liberties were at stake. Controversy erupted in school board meetings, the local paper, and later the national media. Barbiegate served as a microcosm of some of the country's most hot button issues: free speech, racism, education, and the uneasy mix of politics and science. However, rather than approaching Barbiegate as simply an example by which to illustrate larger theoretical concepts about democracy and citizenship in general, the authors in this collection make careful effort to keep their theorizing "on the ground," to explore the character of one particular instantiation of grassroots politics at work, what the editors call "ordinary democracy." McDaniel and Gronbeck provide the interpretive frame for the collection in their thoughtful essay "Through the Looking Glass and Back: Democratic Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate." In considering ordinary democracy, they explain, one must attempt to avoid, on the one hand, "'descent' into the infinite variety of details" and, on the other, "abstraction or elevation above the minutia." They continue: "To take seriously the means by which ordinary citizens engage in civic dispute presupposes that details matter, but moreover it suggests that democratic theorizing requires grounding in the 'mundane'" (33). With an eye toward analyzing Barbiegate as a demonstration of the "vernacular intelligence" of ordinary political actors, McDaniel and Gronbeck postulate four imperatives that characterize ordinary democracy: 1) "the imperative of place": "localness should be understood both conceptually and materially as a marked or circumscribed place for political activity"; 2) "the imperative of time," as "ordinary democracy is what rhetoricians these days call kairotic—marked by not only the hereness but also the nowness of a particular time-in-place"; 3) "the imperative of performativity," meaning that "to perform politically is to be engaged in a face-to-face encounter with an other, each proposing and/or attacking visions of a better (morally, pragmatically) tomorrow"; 4) "the imperative of the doxatic," meaning those "species of communal thought and values that must fill up the abstracted self of the citizen if he or she is going to have rhetorical efficacy in localist political environments" (35–36). With these imperatives framing the collection, McDaniel and Gronbeck make the case for slowing our tendency to default to more privileged norms of political practice and instead turn to the particulars of [End Page 297] texts and their performances, as only then "can we begin to develop strong interpretations of what is actually present, what...

BODY IMAGE ANAK USIA 5-6 TAHUN DALAM STIMULASI BONEKA MANUSIA

The objective of this research is to describe about body image of 5-6 years old children in Human Doll Stimulation that include human doll stimulation process, doll choosen by children to be played with, wanted physical character when children grow up, child's opinion about self physical condition, inspiring figure for children about physical beauty (beautiful or handsome), how parents and teachers grow a positive body image to children. This research was held in Early Childhood Education (PAUD) Cikita, Bogor. This research was foccused on Matahari class (class of 4-6 years old chilren) and implemented qualitative method. Data collecting was done with triangulation, which consists of interview, observation, and documentation. Data analyzing was done by transcripting, data organizing, recognition, and coding. Result of this research found that: (1) human doll stimulation process started with children choose dolls they wanted, enrobe clothing and accessories, role play. (2) the selected dolls of children for a puppet play is a representation of the human adult than baby dolls. Physical doll that children preferred are well-lean and white doll, (3) the desired physical characteristics by female children when they grow-up are well-lean and white, the desired physical characteristics of male children when they grow-up are are well-lean / muscular and white, (4) children's opinion about their own physical and well-colored fat (5) figures that inspired children about physical beauty (beautiful / handsome) is a fictional character from television as Cinderella, Barbie, the army, siblings and a cousin that phisically attractive(6) how teachers and parents instill a positive body image in children's materials in the body, body functions, religious approach, masculinitiy learning. Implications of this research is the emergence of cooperation between parents, schools, teachers, directorates of the Early Childhood Education in implementing a positive body image in children, can also be used as a discourse for the readers, especially for next researchers.

Black Children, White Preference: Brown v. Board , the Doll Tests, and the Politics of Self-Esteem

In Brown v. Board of Education the Supreme Court cited psychologist Kenneth B. Clark for evidence that segregation damaged black children’s self-esteem and hampered their ability to learn. Clark and his wife Mamie had tested black children’s “racial preference” by asking them to choose between black dolls and white dolls, interpreting the choice of white dolls as evidence of damaged self-esteem. After Brown , the Clarks’ studies set the parameters for research on racial identity, self-esteem, and child development—even though they were discredited on methodological and statistical grounds in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Subsequent research showed that the doll tests do not measure self-esteem and, further, that African American children do not have low self-esteem. Nonetheless, social science remains invested in the conception of proper racial identification. The doll tests’ contested history suggests that we need to replace this conception with a model of adaptive, negotiated, and hybrid racial identification.

Reexamination of Young Children's Racial Attitudes and Skin Tone Preferences

This study continues the line of research on children's racial preferences that dates to Kenneth and Mamie Clark's classic research that revealed that Black children preferred White dolls and attributed more positive characteristics to White dolls than to Black dolls. In the current research, the authors examined Black and White preschool children's preferences for cartoon characters of different skin tones and whether their preferences shifted after listening to a moral story depicting a Black child as a hero. Findings are discussed in the context of how method of presentation may affect young children's responses and children's preferences in relation to race awareness and self-identification.

White Body

Stop-motion animation of a small white doll: the figure grows from a ball of modelling clay, is cut and sewn shut, and then buried and ‘reborn’, among a nest of white granulated sugar and the dark stain of slut’s wool - the fluffy dust that collects under furniture and along skirting boards.

The Brown Decision: Its Long Anticipation and Lasting Influence

THOUGH IT WAS LONG IN COMING AND SURPRISINGLY FAR-REACHING IN ITS influence, the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision was not unanticipated. In the decades following the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), African Americans and their white allies slowly pushed toward the day when that ruling would be overturned. Most African American people understood that the Plessy case, which legalized separate but facilities and cleared the way for other Jim Crow restrictions, would eventually be ruled unconstitutional. They believed in and understood this hopeful outlook just as so many African Americans in the antebellum era had believed and understood that America would in time have to dismantle its system of racially based chattel slavery. In 1896, only about thirty years following slavery's demise, African Americans were still very much in a struggle to be indeed--free in establishing economic independence, free in political participation, and free in setting and choosing their social circumstances. The Plessy decision further limited their lives and served to remind them that their actions could be circumscribed by the will and whims of white Americans. Despite the daunting limitations, African Americans held on to the hope that Plessy, like slavery, would be removed sometime in America's future. Within the boundaries of segregation, black Americans created strong institutions that would one day help them in their battle against unjust oppression. During the early twentieth century, they built organizations, staged campaigns, and protested in individual circumstances. Blacks also cultivated alliances with those white Americans who believed that segregation was wrong and that the laws operated unjustly toward a group of people who deserved equality and who had belatedly been protected by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (the so-called Reconstruction Amendments). Looking to the day when the effects of Plessy would be dismantled, African Americans established the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 and 1910. Its leaders included descendants of white abolitionists and, in the person of W. E. B. Du Bois, a key proponent of an equal and just society. In 1911 activists set up the National Urban League, whose founders also included both black and white Americans seeking economic equality for blacks who had relocated to urban areas. In this dark time of their history, African Americans continued to build on to educational institutions that today we refer to as historically black colleges and universities. Black leaders understood that educated people were a must in the struggle to create a more equal situation for African Americans. Moreover, they recognized that if life circumstances improved for black people, the entire nation would benefit. Thus, blacks reminded all Americans of their interdependence. With a reputable list of organizations--including some specifically led by women like Mary McLeod Bethune of the National Council of Negro Women (which still operates in the twenty-first century)--African Americans continued to mount a tremendous force against Plessy, its legalization of Jim Crow laws, and all the practices and traditions surrounding segregation. Academic work by black scholars contributed to the growing movement in crucial ways. A telling moment that helped black people to appreciate the long-lasting impact of the Plessy decision came with the publication of studies showing that black children would choose white dolls over black ones, an indication that segregation was causing black children to dislike their own image. Some argued that black children, through segregation and discrimination, had even come to hate themselves by internalizing the hatred that many whites felt toward black people in general. The studies about dolls by Kenneth B. and Mamie P. Clark played a significant role in convincing the members of the Supreme Court that segregation no longer had a place in American society, not even in the American South. …

From Control to Adaptation: America's Toy Story

The child's toys and the old man's reasons are the fruits of the two seasons. -William Blake Introduction Nothing defines us more than our toys. From infancy, when we clutch brightly-colored blocks and cuddly teddy bears, to adulthood, when our toys of choice are fast cars, electronic games, and cute or expensive collectibles, toys say a great deal about who we are and what we value. Some toys, such as kites, jacks, and hoops, are inherently recreational, enabling us to have fun. More often than not, though, toys also serve a larger purpose as they exemplify our cultural truths: what skills we hope to develop, what attitudes we want to cultivate, and what possessions we wish to flaunt. Toys reflect the interplay between our society's view of play and its opposite, work. All societies have had toys, affirming a basic human need to connect with an object-perhaps a doll or a ball-in some form of play. However, it was not until the late sixteenth century that the word toy-which was associated with triviality, delusion, and lust-began to refer to children's playthings (Kuznets 10). In America by end of the nineteenth century, the notion of toy took on new meaning. Prior to this time, toys-which were almost always homemade, usually of wood-were few, as children endured endless hours of chores, leaving little time for play. The toys and games that they did have frequently embodied moralistic messages. By the Industrial Age, this began to change as mass-produced, affordable toys became available, and workers had the income to buy them. At the same time, children, who previously were regarded as little adults and treated accordingly, entered a new sphere. Deemed different from adults by virtue of their innocence, children warranted special care, protection, nurturing, and instruction as they moved through a distinct stage of development known as childhood, characterized by their own books, clothing, and playthings. In essence, they won the right to be children and to play, and toys became part of the formula. This attitude became even more entrenched by the 1950s when, during the the post-World War II baby boom, television invaded American homes attracting children with shows and advertising geared to them and espousing a child-centered, family-oriented agenda. In such a culture, where children are highly valued, the role of toys takes on greater importance, and several questions emerge, some practical, others ideological. What functions do, and should, toys provide? What messages do toys and the narratives that accompany them impart to children? How do toys reflect and affect attitudes and values in a dynamic, increasingly technological, careerist, and consumerist mass culture? Do we ever outgrow our toys? As artifacts of popular culture, toys embody the controversies of their time. Sites of philosophical struggle, they form a text that invites a discussion of contemporary issues regarding empowerment, control, social roles, and consumption. Then and Now One way to address these issues is to consider how toys have changed. In the summer of 2000, the Francis Land House in Virginia Beach, Virginia, which dates back to colonial times, presented an exhibit of American toys from the first half of the twentieth century. Titled Memories of Childhood, it was made possible through the contributions of various friends and members of the Francis Land House Historic Society, who scoured their attics for treasured childhood play-- things. In one corner of the exhibition hall stood a large white doll house with painted green shutters that Henry Nichols Horton built in 1925 for his daughter Doris. An exact replica of the Horton Family home in Providence, Rhode Island, the doll house contained furniture and accessories that Horton hand crafted. Other toys in the exhibit included a Shirley Temple doll in a blue dress, a porcelain tea set painted with red flowers, a pair of rusty roller skates with a key, a clay marble game, two tattered brown teddy bears, a cowboy shirt and spurs, a 'Lil Orphan Annie stove previously used to bake mud pies, and several tin toys, such as a bus, train, and plane. …