Amazon, what is going on here? Monkey dolls found during search of African American dolls

BY SIMONE J. SMITH

“Hi! I am a Mom here looking to find a doll my kids can relate too. I went to Amazon.ca and I keyed in African American dolls and this is what came up.  MONKEYS under Black baby dolls …”

You can imagine my shock when I received this email. I was encouraged that this mother saw that something wasn’t right and spoke out, but I was dismayed that after years of fighting to be seen as more than a primitive people, Africans are still facing slights, even ones that seem harmless.

“They said it would be taken down but if you go on Amazon.ca and key in, African American baby doll, it’s still there!”

So, I did just that. I went and checked it out for myself. No shock, it was still up, and as I scrolled through the page, I began to understand what that mother must have felt when she first pulled this up.

One of the dolls is called, “Wamdoll, 20 inches, 51 Cm.” It was classified as a reborn monkey doll. They also had a “ZIYIUI Reborn Monkey Doll, 21 inches, 51 cm.” Finally, they had a “ZIYIUI Reborn Monkey Doll, 21 inches, 51 cm,” a little boy monkey doll. These dolls were sprinkled between the other African dolls that were on the site.

They have been taken down, but not until after numerous emails from this mother to Amazon’s head office. She did receive an email back from a Linda, who was part of the Amazon management team that read,

“This is Linda, the supervisor from Amazon that you spoke to today. I am so sorry that those monkeys came up when you were searching for African American dolls for your child. I have escalated this to the proper department here at Amazon, rest assured. I don’t know how these things are linked, but if I find out anything from the escalation going forward, I will personally reach out to you. I also on a side note have issued you a $50.00 gift certificate. Have a blessed holiday season, and God bless you and your little girl.”

Sigh!

There is so much to say here, but what I will do, if our Amazon Leader Linda gets a chance to read this, and for all other corporations who don’t know, this shit is offensive, and it needs to stop.

Maybe it is time for a refresher course on the racist nature of what has occurred at Amazon.

In 1570, there was a story about a Portuguese woman who was exiled to Africa where she was raped by an ape and had babies.

The general acceptance of the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin was easily twisted into a means of identifying further “evidence” of the primitive status of Blacks. Africa has for years been labelled as a contagious continent incubating pestilences of all sorts in hot muggy jungles, spread by reckless and sexually unrestrained people. AIDS in particular is said to have its origin in the careless dealings of Africans with simians, which they eat or whose blood they use as an aphrodisiac. There was no proof of this, and in this day and time, this would have been coined as misinformation.

Then there is the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers accused of having raped two young white women. In 1935 a picture story by the Japanese artist Lin Shi Khan and the lithographer Toni Perez was published. ‘Scottsboro Alabama’ carried a foreword by Michael Gold, editor of the communist journal New Masses. In one of the fifty-six images it shows the group of the accused young men beside a newspaper with the headline “Guilty Rape.” The rest of the picture was filled with a monstrous Black simian figure baring its teeth and dragging off a helpless White girl.

A hateful association between Blacks and monkeys or apes is another way that the antebellum south justified slavery. Blacks were considered by some Whites to be more simian than human, and therefore had no self-evident rights, including freedom.

Blacks were depicted in such a way as to blur the line between audience identification of them as humans and as monkeys. It got to the point that direct associations were more often made in the overtly racist pop culture. In the 1960s, a recording artist named Johnny Rebel produced a series of 45 rpm records on a Louisiana label, with lyrics like, “America for White; Africa for Black. Send those apes back to the trees. Ship those ni*#@s back.”

Unfortunately, that was not the end of it. There are other examples of anti-Black monkey association that continue to pop up. In 2009 a “Cuddle With Me” Black doll was released, packaged with a monkey and wearing a hat that read, “Lil Monkey”. These dolls were sold at Costco stores and were pulled from the shelves after the chain-received complaints from consumers.

All too often, the White perpetrators of these incidents claim to be ignorant of history, so let me make it clear again. This is unacceptable, and a $50.00 gift certificate is not going to make up for it, Leader Linda. Whoever is responsible for this must be held accountable.

I will be following up on this story, but for now, spread this far and wide. We need to stop giving our money to organizations that ignore the systemic racism that is so blatant, that it cannot be ignored.