BrianGarst.com

ABC smells racism behind Walmart’s price cutting of black barbie dolls.

Walmart is raising eyebrows after cutting the price of a black Barbie doll to nearly half of that of the doll’s white counterpart at one store and possibly others.

…”To prepare for (s)pring inventory, a number of items are marked for clearance, ” spokeswoman Melissa O’Brien said in an e-mail. “… Both are great dolls. The red price sticker indicates that this particular doll was on clearance when the photo was taken, and though both dolls were priced the same to start, one was marked down due to its lower sales to hopefully increase purchase from customers.”

“Pricing like items differently is a part of inventory management in retailing,” O’Brien said.

But critics say Walmart should have been more sensitive in its pricing choice.

“The implication of the lowering of the price is that’s devaluing the black doll,” said Thelma Dye, the executive director of the Northside Center for Child Development, a Harlem, N.Y. organization founded by pioneering psychologists and segregation researchers Kenneth B. Clark and Marnie Phipps Clark.

This is so dumb. Goods are priced based on sales. The price of the doll with the lower number of sales was cut so that sales would pick up.

ABC is scraping the bottom of the barrel here.  It isn’t necessarily surprising that they were able to find so many race-obsessed “critics” to spout such nonsense.  The race mongering industry is thriving, after all.

But this is a clear case of starting from a conclusion (raaaaaacism), and finding a story to fit it.  Just imagine, for instance, if the price differential had been reversed.  What if black barbie cost more? Why, that would be racist against black barbie, too. Rather than being “devauled,” ABC would find “critics” to argue that Walmart was trying to hurt sales of black barbie and keep it out of the hands of poorer black customers.

This is agenda journalism, plain and simple.

Hat-tip: Right Wing News

race issues