Playing with diversity: racial and ethnic difference in playmobil toys

Abstract

How should toymakers represent a diverse society? Surprisingly, given the force of recent debates over race and nation and over migration, multiculturalism, and the postcolonial condition of Europe and North America, there is relatively little scholarship on how the toy industry engages with these particular themes. This article seeks to remedy this by taking a single toy company, Playmobil, as a case study for exploring the politics of racial and ethnic difference in its toys and marketing materials. It argues that the company, in an effort to diversify its products without alienating wary customers, has incorporated difference through specific strategies that elide and thereby reinforce an implicitly white, majoritarian norm, following a pattern of “banal multiculturalism” (Thomas 2011). By exploring these strategies in detail and by tying them to longstanding historical patterns, this study will suggest how companies can more critically challenge their own exclusionary practices of representation.