I touched on this pre-Christmastime and never revisited: the issue of buying black toys for black girls and boys. As a 70s child runnin wild, I feel like I was of the first generation for who the option even existed. I’m sure the Black Is Beautiful era showed a spike in sales for black baby dolls; I remember a Halloween when the son of my babysitter dressed up as OJ Simpson, and it was a big deal that a costume of a black man even existed. My 3-year-old is growing up in the age (albeit not the country) of President Obama – he’s got his CHANGE toddler T-shirt from Union Square Park – but I still think it’s an issue, that children of color be somewhat surrounded by images (from pop culture or elsewhere) that reflect them.

Incidentally, I’d bought my boy a Green Lantern action figure without realizing he was in a messy métissage relationship with Hawkgirl. So I suppose he’s not the greatest superheroic race man role model. Oh well. Mattel releases Cyborg sometime this year…

My oldest’s third birthday is in a few weeks and (don’t tell him) I just ordered a Green Lantern action figure for him. GL isn’t his favorite; he only knows about seven superheroes anyway. But Mattel sells the John Stewart Green Lantern, the black one in other words, which is why I just bought it off Amazon.fr. At the start, most of Lucas’s toys were animals. But now there’s Superman and Batman laying around, and a Mr. Incredible to slip on late at night. Nobody’s black. That’s my responsibility, right? This is the topic of the next real post. For now, a little primer on where I (used to?) stand from my first book, Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don’t Have Bruises:

I chose to apply to the historically black Morehouse College in 1988, the same year their alum Spike Lee released School Daze (based at the fictional, historically black Mission College) and NBC began airing A Different World (a spinoff of The Cosby Show based at the fictional, historically black Hillman College). A Different World was cancelled during its sixth season in 1993, the year I graduated. Serendipity is an amazing thing. Comedienne T’keyah “Crystal” Keymáh of Fox Television’s In Living Color variety show invented a character named Crissy for a recurring skit about Black World, a place where everything was “good and black” with no sign of the dominant white culture anywhere around. Given the political sensibility I shared with hiphop peers, adopting the Black World aesthetic as a lifestyle seemed a viable, attractive option. After graduating from an African-American institution, the most significant jobs of my professional career included positions at the fanzine Black Beat, XXL, the urban-culture magazine Vibe, and the website of BET during the dotcom boom. Ironically, all those media outlets were white-owned: by Sterling/MacFadden Partnership, Harris Publications, Miller Publishing Group and Viacom, respectively.