ANTH 010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Social Inequality, Jesse Owens, Aryan Race

• School: College of The Sequoias
• Department: Anthropology (ANTH)
• Course: ANTH 010
• Professor: gaddis

Document Summary

Ethnically correct dolls: toying with the race industry. Wonder why these dolls represent social and cultural worlds so foreign to children who play with them. In 1991 the makers of barbie introduced the first ethnically corrected dolls to address the problem of minority representation. Designed and marketed specifically to reshape a territory dominated by an assumption of whiteness; paradoxically they have fixed racial boundaries more firmly. Hair type, facial features and skin tone. These barbie"s do not address questions about abused, fat, pregnant or dope dolls more than the white counterparts. Idea that kids of colour play better with dolls that look like them. Kids live lives contained by the contingencies of social inequality. The social, economic, historical, and political factors that have engineered the absence ethnically correct toys are the same forces that have helped to form poor, racially segregated and embattled communities in urban areas.