Tribune writer: Obama dolls a sign of racial progress

Swamp writer Frank James says the controversial new Sasha and Malia dolls introduced last week could be a sign of progress:

A little over five decades ago when civil rights lawyers were trying to graphically show racism's psychically destructive power, they used famous, heartbreaking research by psychologist Kenneth Clark.

In experiments, he demonstrated that given the choice, young black children would almost invariably choose white dolls over black ones. When asked which dolls were good and beautiful, the black children, nearly without fail, pointed to the white dolls. The black dolls were perceived as bad or ugly. That research was used by the lawyers who argued Brown vs. Board of Education and helped sway the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down school segregation in 1954.

Fast forward 55 years. How remarkable it is that in 2009 we should have a company believing it can profit by marketing brown-colored dolls named Malia and Sasha. Maybe the dolls aren't so much a sign of exploitation. Maybe they actually signal progress.