Walmart caused a bit of a controversy when it was discovered that they are selling black Barbie Dolls for nearly half the price of white Barbie dolls at one of their stores and quite possibly others.
The black and white dolls are identical in appearance except for their skin tones. Mattel’s Ballerina Theresa dolls, which feature brown skin and dark hair, are stocked side by side with the white Ballerina Barbie dolls. Yet the black Barbies are marked on sale for $3.00 while the white Barbies have retained their $5.93 price tag.
The photo of the dolls, sitting next to each other on the shelves with different prices, first appeared on the humor Web site FunnyJunk.com and also on a Latino Web site Guanabee.com. The photo was taken at a Louisiana Walmart store. A Walmart spokesperson claims the store reduced the price of the Theresa dolls as part of the chain’s efforts to clear the shelves for the upcoming spring inventory.
“The implication of the lowering of the price is that [it’s] devaluing the black doll,” said Thelma Dye, the executive director of the Northside Center for Child Development, a Harlem, N.Y., organization founded by pioneering psychologists and segregation researchers Kenneth B. Clark and Marnie Phipps Clark. “While it’s clear that’s not what was intended, sometimes these things have collateral damage,” Dye told ABC News.
Other experts concur with Dye. Walmart should have made the decision “that it’s really important that we as a company don’t send a message that we value blackness less than whiteness,” said Lisa Wade, an assistant sociology professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the founder of the blog Sociological Images. –terry shropshire
