Whenever I go to WalMart with the family, we inevitably end up in the Aisle of Red Stickers, aka the Clearance Aisle. This is an aisle of the store where everything is priced not to sell, but to get it out of the store. Everything has a red sticker, calling to the consumer as if to say, “BUY ME! I COST LESS!”
It is so drastically different you can’t help but know it’s not the usual price.
Which brings me to this “scandal.” Someone took this picture of a black Barbie next to a white Barbie. The black Barbie cost half as much as the white one.
”The implication of the lowering of the price is that’s devaluing the black doll,” said Thelma Dye, the executive director of the Northside Center for Child Development, a Harlem, N.Y. organization founded by pioneering psychologists and segregation researchers Kenneth B. Clark and Marnie Phipps Clark.
Other experts agree. Walmart could have decided “that it’s really important that we as a company don’t send a message that we value blackness less than whiteness,” said Lisa Wade, an assistant sociology professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the founder of the blog Sociological Images.
Are race relations so positive in America that the only place they can find a scandal is in WalMart’s clearance pricing strategies? No, but this is a double whammy for liberals. They get to stir up racial tension and they get to blame it on WalMart.
They spent three pages on this. Really.
Sociological Images co-author Gwen Sharp, a sociology professor at Nevada State College, said that inequality might not necessarily be what’s behind Ballerina Theresa’s lagging sales.
Black parents, she said, may simply choose black dolls whose physical features hew more closely to those of themselves and their children. Barbie has weathered critcism in the past for producing dolls that bear little resemblance to the ethnicities they represent.
“Maybe for both parents and kids, it seems more real and less symbolic of a change to have a doll that actually presents a range of attractive features rather than ‘Oh we’ve changed the skin tone slightly,’” Sharp said.
Let me get this straight. The racism industry kicks into high dudgeon over clearance pricing, but Mattel is supposed to now make the black Barbies’ “physical features hew more closely to those of themselves and their children.”
Can you hear that protest?
Come on! It’s not like Jesse Jackson has anything better to do than protest Mattel headquarters. He’s protesting Bingo rights. You know he’d jump all over this.
What would he say if Mattel made the doll’s lips bigger? Made her too dark? Too light? What about her hair?
Can you imagine how many focus groups this doll would be in, only to be attacked once released?
You know I’m right.
If you can turn a clearance priced Barbie into a racist event, imagine what race baiters could do with one that was meant to represent the appearance of black America.
I fully expect to be labeled a racist for bringing up the physical appearances I did above. That’s the kind of ridiculous racial environment America has created.
