One of the most popular lines of dolls in recent years is the American Girl line. The hook for these dolls is that there is a look-a-like for every little girl, sort of a “a doll that looks just like me!”
No matter if I am white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, there was a doll for me. American Girl even went as far as creating dolls with hearing aids or in wheel chairs.
Apparently that model of a line of dolls to suit every demographic wasn’t profitable, so American Girl announced last week that it would be “archiving” four dolls from the “historical character” line. Among these are two Caucasian dolls, an African-American doll, and the line’s only Asian doll. As expected, it took no time for the race police to take to social media to voice their “outrage” over the move. The usual accusations that American Girl does not care enough about minority girls to carry more dolls of color were of course front and center.
“Guess Asians are no longer an important demographic to the American Girl Company”, snarked one unsatisfied customer.
“It would suck if you retired Addy, she is the only African-American doll left”, said one more American Girl devotee.
Here’s how race-baiting works. You can and should create every politically correct doll possible. Even if those dolls don’t sell, it is your obligation to keep losing money on them. Because the profit on racism is not about your product, it’s about intimidation of your company, once you have been tricked into staying at racism’s Hotel California! American Girl works a lot like Beanie Babies did in the 90’s. Every so often, new Beanies would come out, and some of the old would be retired. Part of the fun of being a collector was the thrill of hunting down discontinued Beanies to add to one’s collection. In other words, discontinuing is part of the strategy to get dolls more popularity, ergo more future value. What the race-baiters fail to mention is that American Girl has retired nine dolls since 2008. Seven of them have been Caucasian dolls. The retirement of the black and Asian dolls leaves a total of seven dolls remaining in the collection: four Caucasian and three dolls of varying ethnicity. It seems like a fairly even split, certainly more diverse than Google. One other fact that the racist doll contingent conveniently leaves out is the fact that American Girl will be introducing new dolls in the fall, though there have been no leaks as to the ethnic makeup of the new collection. There is something very disturbing about the fact that adults can take something as simple as the manufacturing of a doll into a symbol of racism. The children certainly would not care. Yet these inanimate symbols of people must now match the ethnic makeup of the population in order to suit some nonsensical Liberal sensibility. I’d say the lesson here is that neither the dolls nor the kids care what the dolls are. I suggest Liberals, aka race-baiters learn this is the true America.
