Social/Cultural Context: Black Dolls

Assignment: How has your object or objects like it figured in popular culture? Has it appeared in political discourse, literature, film, television, or other visual arts? How does its role in popular culture vary with audience? What different meanings does it convey in different cultural contexts?

As I wrote yesterday, Iris's black dolls are homemade productions that have (presumably) not moved far beyond the context in which Iris (as the producer and owner) conceived them. This fact complicates my ability to complete the above assignment in its original form.

Even if I were to expand beyond Iris's dolls to a more generic examination of the social and cultural context of all black dolls, another problem crops up: black dolls have not been widely represented in most popular culture outlets. Such anonymity reflects the larger absence of black dolls in the consumer marketplace.

In attempting to move beyond these conceptual dilemmas, I have decided to focus this study on how popular cultural conceptions of blacks are reflected in (some of) the dolls of that era. After all, as the publicity blurb for SUNY Rockland's 2008 exhibit "Black Dolls: From Mammy to Barbie" suggests, the evolution of the portrayal of African Americans in popular culture can be seen quite clearly in mass-produced dolls.

Early dolls introduced or reinforced negative stereotypes about blacks. "Pickaninny" dolls emerged in the late decades of the 1800s, reflecting a stereotypical image of black children "as nameless, shiftless natural buffoons running from alligators toward fried chicken." The first famous pickaninny figure was Topsy, a character from Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); though meant in Stowe's narrative to show how slavery "indelibly corrupted" children, the character was later placed in comic contexts "to trivialize slavery's brutality." Thomas Edison's 1904 film Ten Picaninnies "referred to [black children] as inky kids, smoky kids, black lambs, snowballs, chubby ebonies, bad chillun, and coons."

Image of a Golliwog doll, a representation of blacks
made popular in the 1890s. (WikiCommons)

Golliwog, another early anti-black caricature, came into the cultural consciousness of pre- and post-Civil War America by means of minstrel shows. Golliwog dolls, byproducts of these shows, existed as late as 1870s. Florence Kate Upton, a British novelist inspired by a black minstrel doll she'd played with as a child, wrote an 1893 book that re-popularized these dolls. The fact that both black and white children played with early iterations of these dolls helps to explain why a debate about the Golliwog as "a lovable icon or a racist symbol" has existed in Europe and the U.S. for the last four decades.

Another stereotypical image -- the mammy -- became so ubiquitous as to merit its own representation in doll form. The mammy caricature stereotyped black women as "obese, course, maternal figure[s]," and persisted throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Evidence suggests that both white and black children owned "mammy" dolls; while whites are most often remembered as using the dolls as servants for their white dolls¹, little evidence remains as to the use and meaning of mammy toys for black girls.²

With the rise of popular radio in the early years of the twentieth century, and continuing with the rise of television in the 1950s and 1960s, black dolls came to resemble characters from media productions. Among these representations was Amosandra, a doll based on the child of Amos and Ruby Jones, characters on the popular radio/TV program Amos 'n Andy. Despite controversy surrounding the show, contemporary writers perceive that Amosandra was "[p]robably the most well received [black] doll of [the] postwar period" among both whites and blacks. A doll based on baseball legend Jackie Robinson also became popular with both black and white consumers.³

With the dawn of the black doll industry in the 1960s and 1970s U.S. alongside the increased visibility of black celebrities in American popular culture, a trend toward black character dolls emerged. Black G.I. Joe figurines for boys appeared as late as 1964⁵; representations of actresses like Diahann Carroll and musicians like Dianna Ross also emerged in this era.⁶ Into the 1980s and 1990s, popular TV characters -- from The A-Team's Mr. T to Family Matters' Steve Urkel to Moesha's Moesha Mitchell -- were also presented in doll form, highlighting the continued prominence of black actors and actresses in American mass media.

Notes:
1. See Plate 39 in Myla Perkins, Black Dolls 1820-1991: An Identification and Value Guide (Paducah, Ky.: Collector Books, 1993), p. 26, for evidence of this use.
2. Dawn E. Reno, The Encyclopedia of Black Collectibles: A Value and Identification Guide (Radnor, Pa.: Wallace-Homestead Book Co., 1996), p. 103, conjures that, for pre-Civil War black children, "[p]erhaps mammy herself made the doll" -- an indication (though perhaps an unreliable one) that black children played with toys modeled in this way.
3. Perkins, p. 80.
4. "Modern Designs for Negro Dolls," Ebony, January 1952, p. 46, quoted in Perkins, p. 80.
5. Perkins, p. 151.
6. Reno, p. 106.