When the same company responsible for the beanie baby craze in the early ’90s released the “Marvelous Malia” and “Sweet Sasha” dolls earlier this year, it created a firestorm. The beanies hit toy shelves in January. Shortly thereafter, the White House issued a statement denouncing the concept of the dolls, which were promptly renamed.
The two dolls—part of the Ty Girlz collection, which includes an assortment of pleasing pop tarts, including “Bubbly Britney” and “Precious Paris”—were notable for another reason. The $10 beanies happened to be the first non-white girlies in the line.
No one really bought Ty’s excuses (the company claimed the dolls weren’t exact replicas of the real-life Sasha and Malia), but many people did express interest in buying the beanies.
“I ordered them because customers called in and asked for them, before they even saw the dolls on the news,” said the owner of Emily’s Hallmark in Danville, CA. “I have daughters and don’t think it’s fair, but hey, what sells, sells.”
She ordered a batch of the dolls and expected to get them on the shelves in February, but those plans were cut short when she received a letter from Ty, saying that—in deference to the Obama family—the dolls had been renamed “Marvelous Mariah” and “Sweet Sydney.”
All names aside, some argue the dolls would have done more good than harm.
“For me personally, the issue is much bigger than exploitation,” Denise Gary-Robertson, the president of Dolls Like Me, an online toy retailer specializing in multicultural dolls, said. “Here we have a manufacturer that has not formerly produced black dolls and now they have two black dolls named after two gorgeous black girls. What does that say to black girls around the world? That says, ‘I now matter. I’m more important.’”
“This is an issue of self-esteem and one of reflection,” she continued. “Around 30 to 40 percent of all children in America are children of color. There should be no manufacturer producing a line of dolls that doesn’t include dolls of color.”
Robertson, who describes her business as “a toy retailer with a conscience,” said she was not exploiting the Obama girls by selling the Ty dolls.
“We were celebrating the fact that Ty is now producing black dolls,” Robertson stressed. “It was secondary that those dolls were named Sasha and Malia.”
The fervor to own the Sasha and Malia dolls is arguably a reflection of the Obama Effect. Blackness is now more desirable than ever, and the rise of the Obamas has unveiled a market that has always been around, but was previously ignored.
Jezebel recently reported a six percent increase from last year in the use of black models on the runways of this year’s fall fashion shows in New York. In an industry previously criticized for its gross lack of diversity, 18 percent of all models this year were women of color, and according to Jezebel, black models were the second-largest ethnic group on the runways.
In the case of the Sasha and Malia doll controversy, Dolls Like Me has been in business for three years and has never carried a Ty beanie in its inventory of 300-plus dolls—because the Ty dolls were always white. Robertson argued that the lack of multicultural inventory on the U.S. market is damaging to the self-esteem of children of color, which is why she’s in business—and business is good.
Robertson said the well-known Clark doll experiments of the 1940s—when most black children tested preferred to play with “pretty,” white dolls because they considered black dolls “ugly” and “bad”—were recently repeated and yielded the same disturbing results.
“I feel that, as a mother, Michelle Obama was well within her rights to do what she did,” Robertson said. “But her role and my role are are very different. She only had to look out for two black girls. I’m looking out for all black girls—that’s where I am.”
Synolve Craft, a freelance writer with a degree in African studies and a contributor to the Deep South Moms Blog, couldn’t disagree more.
“As a parent of two children, I think this is crazy,” Craft said. “You can’t say you’re going to do something for all black children and exploit two black children in the process.”
Craft argued that positive community role models, not dolls, nurture self-esteem in young people, and folks making a profit at the expense of two high-profile children do not embody the values she’d want to instill in her children.
The Obamas, who are indeed the impetus for the rising profile of blackness in America, represent a success—but also a problem. The fact that little Sasha and Malia were so swiftly singled out to be role models for the young black community, simply because they are a first in this country’s long history, hints at the gaping need for black representation in popular culture.
Robertson and Craft take different routes, but ultimately arrive at the same point: There should be more Sashas and Malias to choose from—we shouldn’t have to single those children out to be positive black role models—-and there are, we just haven’t taken the blindfold off to notice. Until now.
“As for Michelle Obama, I think her anger is misplaced,” Robertson argued. “She should be calling out all the manufacturers who aren’t making dolls that reflect children of color. Up until this point, I’ve been the only voice going to manufacturers saying, ‘Wait a minute. When are you going to make some dolls of color? When are we going to recognize that not all of the children in America are white? When are we going to get that?’”