American Girls: "Not Quite A Rainbow" With No Asian Character
Wednesday April 5, 2006
The American Girls line of dolls is one of the most inclusive lines of dolls widely sold today. In their main line of historical dolls, they have Caucasian dolls, plus an African American doll, a Native American Doll and a Hispanic doll. However, they don't have an Asian doll, and this is not sitting well with some commentators and consumers. Anita Cramer sets forth the case for an Asian American historical American Girl doll in
Not Quite A Rainbow in the Sacramento Bee.
Comments
Your link for the Not Quite a Rainbow article sent me to a registration page for the Bee. Since I didn’t want to sign up, I googled the article and got this link for it:
http://www.sacbee.com/content/lifestyle/columns/creamer/story/14234013p-15055708c.html
Which brought me the full article without requiring me to register.
Rene
Thank you, Rene! Its funny – my original URL works for me but not the one you’ve added (it may be regionally based) so I’ll leave both up for now. I hope others weigh in – if your URL works to read the article with no subscription for most of the country, I’ll change it. Thanks also for posting the very first comment on the doll collecting blogs!
Hi Denise – I cannot get into the article about AMerican Girls without registering. I tried both of your URL sites. Thanks, Pat
i had to dump the portion of the address with About.com on it to get past the Bee’s demand for a “cookie” when i attempted to register. then it opened the article on a separate window. anyway, here is what i sent them
read your column on a referral from About.com regarding doll collecting. Glad to see it. It’s been a bone of contention with me as well. I can see, though, how AG would have trouble picking “one” Asian American culture to represent, as there are so many, and none would be happy with the other as the sole choice. Whatever their origins, slavery/reconstruction was a commonality with African Americans, but what would the commonality be for Asian Americans experiences? Building the transcontinental railroad comes to mind, or Gold Mountain, but many of those stories were about men, as very few women were allowed to immigrate.
In any case, the so-called Asian face mold they use is pretty bad. I wouldn’t buy it, and i tried hard to find brown eyed brown/black haired fair dolls for my child. This is true of nearly all caucasian based doll companies, however, including the mighty Robert Tonner and his interpretation of Sayuri the Geisha. (Her face shape and bone structure and hairline are all wrong…and he is supposed to be an artiste) Despite all the examples of lovely dolls made by Asian people in Asian countries, none are used as models for doll lines here. My Twinn does better–at least you have a choice of approximate face molds and they are not all “slanty eyed” “pugnosed” faces with small eye orbits.
HOpe AG pays attention and gets a better artist.
Thank you Fran–great feedback!
Also, thanks to everyone regarding the URL issue. I am exploring options on how to do this better when referring readers to newspaper articles.
funy, My daughter selected as asian Bitty baby many years ago..and it is darling.
wow gold