I like best the mice squabbling in the London underground.
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I. Barkcloth.
An unusual and cool donation came in this week:
three large pieces of never-used, vintage barkcloth. Mid-century modern (MCM) design is still in, and barkcloth sells for a lot online.
As a test, I priced the smallest (3 yards) piece, below, at $32. It sold in three days.
Isn't it funny how our personal tastes change over our lifetime?
This ferny piece is splendid! I might have bought it for myself when I was in my twenties. But these days I'm preferring the geometric patterns of old wool blankets.
I still might buy barkcloth with space-age atomic designs, though. These were all botanicals.
Barkcloth is a densely woven cloth with a rough texture similar to an older fabric made of the inner bark of trees, beaten into sheets.
By the late 1930's, it was especially popular in Hawaii (taken over by the US in the 1890s), replacing traditional Hawaiian kapa (bark cloth) made from wauke, the paper mulberry plant, in a time-consuming, labor-intensive method.
US military personnel stationed in Hawaii during World War II often sent barkcloth home. [per Handmade Jane, who has a round-up of prints].
BELOW From the British Museum, "A Tahitian Mourning Costume": A watercolor of the dress of the chief mourner, with striped barkcloth dress and cape, painted by Herman Diedrich Sporing, who accompanied Capt. James Cook on his first voyage to Tahiti in 1773.
II. DOLLS & Bears
This week we also got a gaylord (huge industrial box) of new toys from Costco. I was excited––new toys!––until I saw they were all RETURNS, mostly electric toys with return stickers on them saying Does Not Work.
Great. More plastic crap.
You don't know why they don't work--it could easily be the buyers didn't know how to set it up, or it could be something unfixable.
A coworker took home a set of Mario Bros. racing cars and said that they just needed batteries...
I priced all the boxed toys cheap--2, 3, 4 dollars--and wrote "As Is" on the stickers.
It should go without saying that everything in a thrift store is "as is"--and we do have a 7-day, return-for-store-credit policy. Some people are fierce about insisting on cash back, but this is the only hard and fast rule at the store: No cash is ever given out.
I got pretty well caught up with incoming TOYS, so yesterday I pulled out the box where I throw modern, plastic dolls donated without clothes. I set aside incoming doll clothes too. Naked dolls don't sell, so every once in a while I dress them. They're everything from baby dolls to fashion dolls (Barbies & Bratz) to big American Girls type (usually the cheaper "Our Generation" dolls).
Matching dolls to fashions and sizes can take some time.
I'd also set aside some vintage Dolls of the World type dolls. (I'm reflected in the cabinet mirror, below.)
III. The Whiteness of Bears
Are Dolls of the World racially stereotyped?
Sometimes.
People aren't being touchy and 'over-woke' by pointing out that this can be hurtful or cause harm.
I can see that that's true--handling donated dolls & toys for a few years now, I can see how their message is "this is what normal looks like". And while this is changing, the repeated-over-and-over vision of normal remains Cute 'n' White.
So I'm okay with Dolls of the World.
Also, you know, sometimes we just love things, even if they have a difficult backstory. This includes loving people. So, fine!
Reality is complicated.
But even stuffed toy bears way, way more often come in white, pastel, or caramel colors than the dark browns or blacks of most real bears.
(In the wild, more North American black bears exist––one million!–– than all other bears on earth combined. There are 200,000 Brown Bears, which includes grizzlies.
White polar bears? 20,000.)
I hear people say this is incidental. "It's just a toy."
I tell you, from where I stand, no, it's not. There's a thing going on here, oh yeah. It's relentless.
But I mostly hear it talked about (and experience it) from a white perspective...
In the store's neighborhood, where white is the minority, it looks different. I love to put out dolls and toys that look like the customers, even if in some political contexts these might be deemed racist.
I see Native people buying Native dolls like the one 2 photos up, for instance, that might make a white academic-type such as myself nervous.
Some coworkers ask me to save them Black dolls for the kids in their lives. There aren't that many.
Side note: EVERYBODY LOVES BABY YODA.
When racist toys and images clearly intended to be harmful come in (not that often), I save them for my art historian friend Allan, who gives it to a teacher who works in cultural representation.
I have to go to work so haven't read the article in the Paris Review: "Addy Walker, American Girl: The role of black dolls in American culture," 2015, by Brit Bennett, the Black woman author also of a 2014 essay, "I Don't Know What to Do With Good White People".
In that essay, Bennett writes this, below, which reminds me of how some people dismiss my question, "Why are toy bears disproportionally white?":
"I often hear good white people ask why people of color must make everything about race, as if we enjoy considering racism as a motivation. I wish I never had to cycle through these small interactions and wonder:
Am I overthinking? Am I just being paranoid?
It's exhausting."
And,
Bennett addresses a phrase that drives me crazy (besides the above "you're overthinking"; and also, "they're doing their best"):
"They mean well."
Like,
hurt that is not intentional doesn't count? Like, we aren't responsible
for our actions if we DON'T THINK (or, god forbid, "overthink") about what they mean?
But isn't it a
mark of the intelligence and humane-ness upon which a good society is built to think about what we do, and why we do it (and how we could do it differently)?
So doesn't that make
"meaning well" an insult?
Bennett thinks so:
" 'You know what? He means well,' we say.
We lean on this, and the phrase is so condescending, so cloyingly sweet, so hollow, that I'd almost rather anyone say anything else about me...."
Btw, where are all these people who are "overthinking"?
I mostly meet the other kind.
__________________________
More things to look at and read:
Looking for discussions of race and dolls, I stumbled into the world of Black Dolls--here, an exhibit by the New York Historical Society. We get some of these donated sometimes, like the topsy-turvy dolls. Not usually antiques, but there have been a couple.
I'm excited to look more at the work of Leo Moss, a doll artist in Macon, Georgia, working in the late 1800s––early 1900s. Moss transformed mass-produced white dolls into Black dolls--not just painting them but remolding their features. An article about X-raying Moss's dolls: aperturephotoarts.com/leo-moss.
And here, the National Black Doll Museum.
But now I must go to work!
Oh, darn--it just started to very lightly snow...
I don't care (I do)––I'm biking anyway.
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