When my daughter Serena was a toddler she developed a fixation on some dolls in the kindergarten at her big brother's school. If I had been paying attention I would have noticed that the dolls she loved had one feature in common, but in my naivete I endeavored to make her a doll of her own. In skin and hair tones that matched hers.
She hated the doll and let it drop, unwanted, to the floor after she unwrapped it. The Waldorfy doll that had taken me hours to make and that I was so proud to present to her, knowing how much she loved dolls.
The problem? It didn't have the brown skin and black hair of the dolls she loved. (The next year I bought her one with brown skin and black hair, having learned my lesson, and she still loves it.)
Her older brother made a doll last year in school, and he was the only kid in his class to choose the brown skin color, though his own skin is whiter than the baby avatar that shows up when you make a comment here at Strollerderby.
So while the apparent acceptance of multiculturalism in my kids is certainly laudable, many kids want dolls that look like they do, especially if they're more multicultural themselves. Why wouldn't they? Being brown or tan in a sea of pinkish-white has got to be somewhat alienating. You can afford to make choices when you're in the dominant group, but being in the minority changes things entirely, in my opinion. When that happens, I think you cling to whatever familiarity you can find.
The problem is, most kids in the U.S. don't have many choices when it comes to finding dolls that look like them unless they too resemble that avatar-baby. I haven't braved the toy aisles of a major retailer in quite a while (that's what the internet is FOR, in my opinion: shopping), but last time I did there was pretty much a sea of white faces with maybe a token brown and certainly nothing in any shade of tan.
So maybe Kmart is cashing in on this dearth of choice, but even if it's purely profit-motivated, the fact that they are rolling out tons of new dolls in all shades, the first major retailer to do so, is in my opinion a pretty big deal. Yeah, I know...Kmart? But think about this: those multicultural Waldorf dolls, while lovely, are hardly accessible to many people either in terms of cost or familiarity. I'm just happy that more choices period are being made available, whatever the reason and wherever the source.
