In the thread about the Durrant twins, a commenter scoffed that the racism found in America was distinct from that in Britain:
The BBC children’s show “In the Night Garden” and toy company Hasbro are in hot water over lightening the skin color of a toy doll.
Seems the doll for sale at toy stores was much lighter-skinned than the television character. Read more…
Huh…
Meanwhile, over at Black and Married with Kids, a blogger wonders if the much-discussed “mommy wars” exist within the black community.
But historically, haven’t black women always worked outside the home? Isn’t this a cultural thing? Isn’t this just what we (black women) do? Give our all in all areas of our lives?
Truthfully, I didn’t even know being a stay-at-home mom was an option. When I found out I was pregnant with my son, I told my boss and she asked if I was planning to come back to work after he was born. I looked at her with a confused look on my face. “Why wouldn’t I come back?” I thought to myself. Read more…
I’ve been noodling on a post about this myself. A lot of media outlets cover ad nauseum the (I think trumped up) idea of a bloody battle between stay-at-home moms and moms who work outside the home. (Salon, I’m looking at you.) But most discussions seem very narrow in terms of race, class and even sexuality. I’m glad to see someone examining this issue outside of the context of upper- and upper-middle class white mothers. (An important group, just not the only group.)
The article I read about The Night Garden show mentioned there have been a few incarnations of the characters and that the doll was based on an earlier animated version and not the current puppet version. Going from ink to cloth, the character got darker. The toy matched the ink. The next run of the toy would match the puppet version.
The creator of the show was quoted as pointing out that the characters in the show are all toys and that everyone’s taking this too seriously. The character doesn’t have skin and therefore no skin tone. The article continued to take it too seriously.
If I may toot my own horn for a minute, I wrote an article “Ain’t I a Mommy?” about mommy wars/mommy memoirs and black women’s mostly-non-participation for Bitch magazine last year.
http://bitchmagazine.org/article/aint-i-a-mommy
Of course you can toot your horn, Deesha! I’m embarrassed that I didn’t toot it for you. I loved that article you wrote and it should have popped to mind in relation to this topic.
It’s all love, Tami.
Thanks for the heads up on the BMWK site. I saw a funny video of theirs on a friend’s blog a little while ago, and I’ve been meaning to check them out again ever since.
Jeff – I have to assume that you haven’t been personally affected by racism when you say that it’s not a matter to be taken seriously? I find that comment interesting, being that all over the world, it seems that the darker your skin is, the worse you are treated. To me, it’s highly important that there are models of very dark skinned main characters in books, movies and made into toys – that show normalcy and beauty in those characters and I view it as a very SERIOUS thing.
I too, was curious about the comment about racism in Britian. We had a homophobic/racist incident that occurred at my school earlier this year, and when some of us approached our president because we didn’t think he was doing enough – his take was that he was Canadian, and so he didn’t know how to deal with it. What?