Chappie Sympathizes with Playmobile's Good Intentions...

I sympathize with everyone in this little story I happened upon while wasting time on-line this morning. Well, I don't have much sympathy for ME...

How could I resist "Dark-skinned doll wearing 'slave collar' ignites outrage"?  After reading this account of a Sacramento mom who was horrified to discover her little boy playing with a toy which required attaching a "slave collar" to a dark skinned toy pirate figure, went ballistic and called the company, Playmobile, to account on Facebook, I had a think about it. Something didn't seem right. It occurred to me that it's just possible that Mom was concerned that her little boy had come upon the leather slave collar in the nightstand of her bedroom? Holy Shmoley!  Bad joke--I apologize. But, in fact, Mom is African-American and is experiencing for the umpteenth time the history of her people seen from the perspective of corporate America. Corporate America, by the way, is white. As much as I sympathize with her, I see no easy way around this problem. Appearances can be deceiving.

Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) in Alex Haley's Roots, 1977 (David Wolper Productions)

Doesn't Playmobile get credit for making the slave collar accessory optional?  The outraged mother, who is clearly very bright, recognizes this fact but not its significance when she writes, "I suppose it's optional as to whether a kid chooses to then place said character into chains or into a prison cell at the bottom of the ship."

EXACTLY!  "Optional" means free to choose what to do. A five-year old will probably not fail this moral test. He or she might do as the mother suggests and place the dark figure in chains in the hold, but then...he will feel something about that, he will create a counter-narrative freeing the confined figure? Why not? Five years old is when we begin to recognize others who are as powerless and vulnerable as ourselves.  It's all a crap-shoot and we have to let them learn from the earliest possible moment.

No, I'm not being funny.  I know exactly what the designer intended. The applicable/removable collar permitted the child (or adult) player to MANUMIT the captive...to REMOVE the collar as would have happened when some runaways or captives were selected to join pirate crews, perhaps as slaves at first but with the chance of freedom after proving themselves.  You didn't know this? I've got news for everyone: this is exactly what happened repeatedly. Pirates of the Caribbean doesn't quite get it right...there were many African descended men in pirate crews (and working as crew on other ships) and they didn't get there the easy way. And only a few were slaves.  There is strong evidence of at least one former slave who became a pirate captain--Black Caesar. Though the account of his career on Wikipedia is unsourced and sounds very Hollywood, the fact is that at the end of the day an African pirate leader was hanged at Williamsburg Virginia in 1718. This proves something...

Removable slave collar detail (Playmobile)

No, I'm not reading too much into this. I'm reading it as I would have when I was a child and as the game's designer no doubt DID when designing it. Good guys and bad guys doing what they do. Children don't have pure minds and don't need to be protected from everything, especially not from realities which involve limitations placed on human freedom. Children all know about limitations on human freedom. This smacks of the sadly officious parents who won't let their children have toy guns or play "violent" games. No, I don't mean Ms. Lockett whose shock I understand. I mean all the "well-meaning" trolls who will jump on Playmobile for being responsible to history and human nature. Grow up, people. In her classic 1993 memoir, Love's Work, Philosopher Gilliam Rose referred to this propensity of avoidance,

"...the decision to stop small children, girls and boys, from playing with guns, pugnacious video games, or any violent toys. This brutally sincere, enlightened probity, which thinks it will stop war and aggression, in effect aggravates their propensity. This decision evinces loss of trust in the way that play (fairy stories, terrifying films) teaches the difference between fantasy and actuality. The child who is able to explore that border will feel safe in experiencing violent, inner, emotional conflict, and will acquire compassion for other people. The child who is locked away from aggressive experiment and play will be left paralyzed and terrified by its emotions, unable to face or release them..." (page 126)

Yes, perhaps it's a bit too much historical reality for a parent who is understandably ignorant of certain facts of history and wants her child to remain ignorant of certain unpleasant facts about the Past. That's the parent's choice even if its mistaken, in my view. Surely the manufacturer should advertise that the toy is "historically accurate and may upset some sensibilities."  But the mother in Sacramento should breathe a sigh of relief. At least Playmobile doesn't seem to have included certain other edgy realities in the game, realities suggested by the titles of books such as: Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity by Hans Turley or B. R. Burg's 1983 classic  Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with rum, sodomy(a meaningless legal term now) or the lash if properly applied--but not for children. I sound as if I'm channeling a Seinfeld episode...not that there's anything wrong with that. As for rum, stay away from that horrid spiced stuff...

Is that EYE MAKE-UP on Jack Sparrow? (Disney)

To conclude, this episode indicates that today's parents are severely burdened by expectations of inculcating political correctness (if that's really a thing) or of just preventing their children being desensitized by our hyper-sexualized and humanly indifferent environment. I sympathize. But Playmobile did nothing wrong--quite the contrary.

I hope they'll send me a complimentary copy of the game for my sandbox...