by M. G. Lord
The 1924 "Chicken Snatcher" is another stunningly awful plaything. This wind-up toy, which, according its advertisement, "will delight the kiddies," featured a "scared Negro" who "shuffles along with a chicken dangling in his hand and a dog hanging on the seat of his pants." But even when toys weren't poking malicious fun at unassimilated foreigners or African Americans, they were erasing them through omission. Until the civil rights movement of the 1960s, dolls were predominantly white; black children couldn't play with little effigies of themselves. The effect of this invisibility was quantified in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when two African-American social scientists, Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, did a study using dolls to investigate black children's self-esteem. Given a choice between a white doll or a black doll, 67 percent of the black children they surveyed preferred the white doll. They dismissed the black dolls as ugly and bad.
The Clarks' troubling findings were not without impact. In 1954, Thurgood Marshall, arguing for the plaintiff in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, used the Clarks' testimony to document the psychological damage that had been suffered by blacks because of segregation. Marshall won the case, which resulted in the Supreme Court decision to integrate public schools.
To set the scene for Shindana's launch, we must return to the 1965 Watts riots, which broke out in midsummer after a Los Angeles coroner's jury excused as "justifiable homicide" the police killing of an unarmed black teenager carrying a baby—a verdict eerily similar to the one in the 1992 trial of the officers accused of beating Rodney King. In August, when the embers were far from metaphorically cool, Lou Smith and Robert Hall formed Operation Bootstrap. They wanted to take the community's anger and channel it constructively. In reaction to "Burn, baby, burn," their motto was "Learn, baby, learn."
Elliot Handler hooked up with Bootstrap in March 1968. "I thought it would be a good idea to get something started in the black neighborhood to see if we could train some people and turn them into entrepreneurs," he told me. But he had no connections—until he met the late Paul Jacobs, a left-wing writer, former union organizer, and brother of Cliff Jacobs, Mattel vice president in charge of market planning.
A staff member at the Santa Barbara-based Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Paul Jacobs had become friendly with Lou Smith while researching his 1967 book, Prelude to Riot: A View of Urban America from the Bottom. Prelude is a bitter book; the cover of its paperback edition shows an American flag and some crumbling buildings sticking out of a battered garbage can. To understand what Michael Harrington had termed "The Other America," Jacobs immersed himself in it. He didn't just debrief a handful of black leaders, he interviewed dozens of families in their homes— often having to overcome their skittishness and distrust. He also probed abuses of authority in the Los Angeles Police Department, producing a document so damning that L.A. Mayor Sam Yorty said Jacobs "ought to be investigated" for having written it.
Jacobs concluded that the violence in Watts wasn't just a response to police mistreatment. It expressed the community's frustration at being excluded by poverty from the consumer culture. He writes: "To buy a house in the Valley, spend a weekend at Lake Arrowhead, have babies who grow up to become teenagers attending the senior prom, visit Hawaii . . . shop downtown before going to the PTA fashion show, learn to ski at Sun Valley, take scuba diving lessons . . . these, the life patterns of middle-class Los Angeles . . . are unknown to these generations of unemployed, underemployed and low-paid workers." He might as well have said "these, the life patterns of Barbie"—so close were his examples to the situations for which she had outfits. He also blamed television advertising—of the sort Mattel had pioneered—for heightening black frustration. The ads, he said, ensured that the economically disenfranchised were intimately familiar with all the products they could never afford. Jacobs's undisguised distaste for Barbie's "America" made him an unlikely mediator between Bootstrap and Mattel; yet he not only introduced them, he helped keep their marriage together.
By 1967, Bootstrap had opened a student-staffed car repair shop and a factory where apprentice seamstresses made clothes. It held classes in typing, keypunch, English, and business math. And it ran "Kiwanda," a pricey boutique in Pacific Palisades that sold student-made dashikis to upper-middle-class white people.
If Smith and Hall were intrigued by the idea of going into the toy business, they didn't initially show it. "We went down into some little ramshackle place that was being used as a training center," Handler told me. "And we sat down and I explained to these people—Lou and the guys around him—what I wanted to do. And they didn't believe me. They said, 'Are you serious?' Ts this some kind of a deal?' 'What's going on?' So we had to talk for quite a while and through Paul's help we finally convinced them we wanted to do something."
"I think what Lou and Robert were feeling was not so much skepticism as: Are they really going to live up to what they are telling us?" said Marva Smith, the widow of Lou Smith, who died in 1976. (Hall is also no longer alive.) "We need their assistance in every area. This is all new to us. Will they be there in the long run?"
A Philadelphia-born civil rights activist who came to L.A. to be the West Coast director for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Smith's dream for Shindana was to make dolls that looked black, dressed black, and talked black—"Brother and Sister dolls made by brothers and sisters," as a 1971 Shindana promotional flyer put it. He wanted games that taught history from an African-American perspective. And he wanted to make enough money from the toys to support other Bootstrap projects, like its day-care arm, the Honeycomb Child Development Center.
Yet even with Mattel's help, this wasn't easy. Articulate, charismatic, and fiercely Afrocentric, Smith didn't change his style to court white investors. "He'd meet with presidents of banks, universities, or large corporations in his dashiki and his jeans," Marva Smith told me. And he was so distrustful of government agencies that he refused to apply for a Small Business Administration loan. Rather than change Smith's mind, Mattel donated $150,000 to set up a toy factory on Central Avenue.
The plant's opening ceremonies in October 1968 attracted national attention. Ironically, Mayor Sam Yorty, Paul Jacobs's avowed enemy, presided at the festivities, which Jacobs also attended. Hatchets were seemingly buried—or at least shelved. "I know you don't agree with a great many of the positions in which I believe and sometimes with the way in which I express them," Jacobs wrote to the Handlers in a letter dated shortly after the opening, "but in this case we seem to have a common understanding."
The optimism continued at Toy Fair, when buyers, introduced to Shindana by Mattel's sales force, responded positively to Baby Nancy, who, with her molasses complexion and kinky Afro, was very unlike the cafe-au-lait, Caucasian-featured "black" dolls that had been put forth by mainstream toy-makers. Her appearance was so radical, in fact, that creating it posed a technical challenge. To make her Saran hair look "natural," James Edwards, Shindana's head designer, told me, "You'd sew it into the doll's head, then stick it into the oven and it would crinkle up."
Nor did Shindana produce only dolls. It licensed images of the Jackson Five for a card game, and issued "The Black Experience American History Game," in which players, to quote the catalogue, "begin their existence as slaves and work their way . . . to the present." Today, the Jackson Five cards are avidly sought by collectors because they feature a Michael who still looks black.
African-American celebrities seemed eager to hop on the Shindana bandwagon. Besides its Flip Wilson doll, Shindana made talking, stuffed versions of Redd Foxx and J. J. Evans, the lanky son from TV's Good Times. It issued a Maria Gibbs fashion doll and a football action figure based on O. J. Simpson, who, as he was married to Shindana designer James Edwards's cousin, found the offer hard to refuse. When supercool detective Shaft appeared in the movies, Shindana introduced Slade, a black crime-fighter with a nubby Vandyke, a canary leather pants suit, and a briefcase full of "ransom money." Intended as a role model, Slade
had street smarts and a sheepskin. "He grew up in the ghetto where he learned to survive," the catalogue says. "He went to war and was taught to fight. Now, after college, he puts it all together as a tough secret agent."
Mattel had agreed to support Shindana for its first two years, after which, ideally, it would be self-sufficient. In an internal memo dated eleven months after the plant's opening, Mattel marketing director Cliff Jacobs expressed optimism, as well as concern that the trust, which had been hard to establish, not break down. "Black people were suspicious and did not want to be 'put down' by the 'con,' " he wrote. So it fell to Mattel to provide the "best trainers" possible—"not second-rate people who can be spared from their regular jobs," but people who " 'talk the language' and are in complete sympathy with the project."
The "best trainers" meant Jacobs himself, who led a weekly marketing seminar at Shindana. It also meant senior engineer Adolph "Dolph" Lee and Art Spear, vice president for manufacturing, who would later head Mattel. Spear never allowed Mattel's burgeoning financial problems to interfere with his commitment to Shindana. "Art was the kind of person who was at my disposal twenty-four hours a day," said Robert Bobo, who joined Shindana in 1974 as its president. "If I needed him for anything, he was a phone call away." And on one occasion, Spear did, in fact, save the day. Shindana had unexpectedly run out of the plastic it needed to make a certain doll, and Spear immediately found a source at Mattel. If a company the size of Mattel had been undersupplied, Spear reasoned, it would endure. But the shortage could have wiped out Shindana.
"I always thought about doing a sitcom on Shindana—called Making It to the Top in the Dark," Edwards told me. "Playing on the idea of dark skin and also 'in the dark'—as in not knowing what you're doing." Listening to Edwards, whose comic timing is a cross between Eddie Murphy's and Jay Leno's, the idea sounded plausible. It might, however, have been too volatile for seventies television. Take the time Shindana had to come up with a name for its "Little Friends"—a rainbow of Hispanic, Asian-American, Native-American, African-American, and European-American toddlers. "A white person may buy a black doll for their kid, but they didn't want to buy a black baby doll," Edwards said. "Because a baby doll would give the kid the idea that they could have a black baby. And white parents did not want their kids with the idea of having a black baby. So we started playing with the idea of 'Little Friends'—like your kids would play with other ethnic groups in preschool. And tried to get that 'baby' thing out of their brains."
Then there was Shindana's outrageous cast of characters. Smith and Hall were militant, civil-rights types, Edwards said. "Other blacks were at the other end of the spectrum—where if you talked to them, you thought they were white. Then you'd have another guy with a 'street' kind of personality." And if this olla podrida weren't spicy enough, there were Shindana's assorted investors—not just Mattel, its initial backer, but "the president of Chase Manhattan bank, here in South Central, talking to all these personalities."
Ironically, the largest purchasers of Shindana products weren't African-American. December is the key sales month for toys, but because black parents tended to do their Christmas shopping later than white parents, Shindana's merchandise was often sold out by the time they went into the stores. Nor did toy buyers—almost entirely white and male at the time— take Shindana seriously enough to reorder. Because of its relationship to Mattel, Bobo said, "There was a lot of token buying." But no real commitment to the toys: "Nobody took them on as a real product that they could make money on," Edwards told me. "You'd go in there and they'd say, 'What do you jungle bunnies want? We gave last year.' "
By the mid-seventies, domestic production had become so expensive that Shindana was forced to move most of its manufacturing to the Orient. "We had little places called Shindanatown in Hong Kong and Taiwan," Edwards told me. But the move was not uncontested. "I can't even begin to tell you how much arguing there was against that," Shindana plant manager Ralph Riggins said. "One of the things Bootstrap wanted to do—and did—was put the unemployable to work," Bobo told me. But financial realities left Shindana no choice: either build overseas or go broke.
The deemphasis on Shindana's local factory depressed company morale, as did the death in 1976 of Smith and his school-age daughter in a car accident while they were on vacation. Shindana's optimism and hope began to be poisoned by cynicism and distrust, reflected in a board game that it brought out in 1980: "Manipulation: The Mammoth Corporation Game." A sort of "Monopoly" for minority businessmen, it details not only "the mechanics of borrowing money from a bank for business purposes," but also how to stay out of jail if you can't pay it back.
"Well, you know, they didn't have much use for the white man's 'manipulation,' " Cliff Jacobs told me. " 'Anybody can run a business; you guys are trying to keep it a big secret'—I can just hear them telling us. Of course when it came to planning for themselves, this was not one of their great strengths."
And so, in the early eighties, Shindana sputtered out. By 1979, Edwards, Bobo, and Riggins had left. Only Herman Thompson, who headed its sales force, and Earl Coss, who replaced Bobo, remained. Like Moses, who expired before entering the Promised Land, Shindana blazed the trail to the modern multicultural marketplace, only to perish on its outskirts. Over its dead form, the next generation of companies—Olmec Corporation, Golden Ribbon Merchants, Cultural Exchange Corporation—strode through the gates.
ROGER WILKINS, A CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST AND ASSISTANT Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson, is probably not the first person one thinks to contact when one is doing a book about Barbie. But I ran into him in the greenroom at Cable News Network in December 1993, and, because I tend to be single-minded about my research, our conversation turned to Barbie. Wilkins told me that his sister, who is in her early forties, had been opposed to Barbie dolls because they coded European standards of beauty. Moreover, to encourage her daughter to take pride in her heritage, she had given the girl a Swahili name. But when Mattel came out with its Shani line, his sister did an about-face. Shani, which means "marvelous" in Swahili, was, in fact, her daughter's name. And the child now has several of the dolls.
"We are living in a moment where 'the other' has a certain kind of commercial value," Ann duCille dryly observes. One reason is, of course, that racial and ethnic minorities have significant disposable income. But other forces had an influence, too.
In 1985, Dr. Darlene Powell Hopson and Dr. Derek S. Hopson, two married psychologists, duplicated Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark's experiments using dolls to explore black children's self-esteem. Their results were shocking: they suggested that in the forty years since the Clarks did their research—despite landmark legal decisions, acts of Congress, and the civil rights movement—little had changed. Sixty-five percent of the black children they interviewed preferred white dolls, and 76 percent said the black dolls "looked bad" to them. "It was so disheartening," Darlene Powell Hopson told me. "I remember sitting at McDonald's—of all places—in Harlem, crying, saying, T don't want to do this. I can change my topic. I can do something different.' " She had begun collecting the data for her dissertation in psychology at Hofstra University. But her husband, who had already earned his Ph.D., urged her to forge on, which she did.
When Powell Hopson and her husband presented their study at the American Psychological Association's annual meeting, it was greeted with "despair around the world." The New York Times published their findings on the front page of its science section, and they were picked up by periodicals ranging from Essence to USA Today. This led in 1990 to the publication of their book, Different and Wonderful: Raising Black Children in a Race-Conscious Society, which not only details their research, but suggests ways that parents of color can help their children develop a healthy sense of self.
Different and Wonderful caught the eye of Mattel, when it was beginning plans for a new line of African-American fashion dolls to be introduced in the fall of 1991. The key in-house players on the project were African-American: Mattel p
roduct manager Deborah Mitchell, who has since left the company, and designer Kitty Black Perkins, who clothed the original Black Barbie. Mattel also brought in an African-American publicist, Alberta Morgan Rhodes from Morgan Orchid Rhodes, a firm that specialized in target marketing. Intrigued by the people and the project, Darlene Powell Hopson accepted Mattel's invitation to be a consultant.
Not all of Powell Hopson's suggestions were implemented, but many were—the most significant of which was making not one but three dolls with varying pigmentation. The series includes Shani, the lead doll, who has a medium-brown complexion; Asha, who is very light; and Nichelle, who is very dark. In The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans, authors Midge Wilson, Kathy Russell, and Ronald Hall argue that skin color plays a part in the formation of social hierarchies within the African-American community. One of the many studies that the authors cite—mounted, in this case, by Wilson and two of her students at Chicago's DePaul University—shows how the self-image of black women is sometimes negatively affected by the darkness of their skin. In this study, eighty participants— black and white, male and female—were asked to examine photographs of twelve African-American women and describe them. "Regardless of the individual woman's attractiveness," Wilson, Russell, and Hall write, "the study participants nearly always rated the dark-skinned women as less successful, less happy in love, less popular, less physically attractive, less physically and emotionally healthy, and less intelligent than their light-skinned counterparts." They were, however, believed to have a good sense of humor—attributable to what the authors called "the Whoopi Goldberg effect."