Whatever Ballerina Tesesa's lagging sales may say about society, retail analyst Lori Wachs said Walmart may ultimately regret their pricing choice.
#Walmart black baby dolls skin
"I wanted to make sure that the makeup and face and skin tone was true to girls in my community," doll designer Stacey McBride-Irby said in a video on the So In Style Web site.Ī Mattel spokeswoman said that the So In Style dolls have met with a "great response" and are part of the toymaker's 2010 catalogue.
Last year, Barbie manufacturer Mattel debuted a new line of African American dolls, "So In Style," designed to better resemble black women's facial features with wider cheeks, broader noses and fuller lips. "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. Barbie has weathered critcism in the past for producing dolls that bear little resemblance to the ethnicities they represent. Wade said that Walmart could have chosen to keep the dolls at equal prices in an effort not to "reproduce whatever ugly inequalities are out there."īut 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.īlack parents, she said, may simply choose black dolls whose physical features hew more closely to those of themselves and their children. There's still the problem, the overcoming years, decades of racial and economic subordination," Harvard University professor William Julius Wilson told "Good Morning America." "Black children develop perceptions about their race very early. But when asked which doll was prettier, nearly half of the girls in the group chose the white doll. This time, at least some of the results were markedly different: of the 19 black children surveyed, 42 percent said they'd rather play with a black doll compared with 32 percent for the white doll. Last year, following the inauguration of the country's first black president, "Good Morning America" revisited the experiment. Run by the Clarks, Northside's founders, the study asked a group of black children to choose between playing with white dolls and black dolls 63 percent chose the white dolls. One landmark study revealing color hierarchies among black children took place in the 1940s. Overcoming 'Decades of Racial and Economic Subordination'ĭecades after segregation and the civil rights movement, studies show Americans - both black and white - continue to internalize the heirarchical notion that lighter skin tone is considered "better than" darker, Wade said. "Most white parents wouldn't think to buy a black doll for their child, even if they believe in equality and all those things," she said.
Wade said that when white dolls outsell black dolls, it's usually because black parents are more likely than white parents to buy their children dolls of a different race. Last year, Wade posted a blog entry on another case where a black doll was apparently priced less than its white counterpart at an unidentified store. The red price sticker indicates that this particular doll was on clearance when the photo was taken, and though both dolls were priced the same to start, one was marked down due to its lower sales to hopefully increase purchase from customers." "To prepare for (s)pring inventory, a number of items are marked for clearance, " spokeswoman Melissa O'Brien said in an e-mail. The person did not return e-mails from .Ī Walmart spokeswoman, who could not verify the exact store shown in the photo, said that the price change on the Teresa doll was part of the chain's efforts to clear shelf space for its new spring inventory. The dolls look identical aside from their color.Įditors at said the person responsible for the photo told the Web site that it was taken at a Louisiana Walmart store. The Barbies to the right of the Teresa dolls, meanwhile, retain their original price of $5.93. The Teresa dolls, which feature brown skin and dark hair, are marked as being on sale at $3.00. Ma— - Walmart is raising eyebrows after cutting the price of a black Barbie doll to nearly half of that of the doll's white counterpart at one store and possibly others.Ī photo first posted to the humor Web site and later to the Latino Web site shows packages of Mattel's Ballerina Barbie and Ballerina Teresa dolls hanging side by side at an unidentified store.
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