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Playing with diversity: racial and ethnic difference
in playmobil toys
Jeff Bowersox
To cite this article: Jeff Bowersox (2022) Playing with diversity: racial and ethnic
difference in playmobil toys, Consumption Markets & Culture, 25:2, 139-158, DOI:
10.1080/10253866.2022.2046563
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2022.2046563
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa
UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
Published online: 28 Feb 2022.
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Playing with diversity: racial and ethnic difference in playmobil
toys
JeffBowersox
School of European Languages, Culture and Society, University College London, London UK
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.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 11 June 2021
Accepted 21 February 2022
KEYWORDS
Toys; children; race;
ethnicity; diversity;
multiculturalism
Introduction
Toys are heavily invested with semiotic, psychological, political, and economic significance, and
scholars in a variety of fields have explored these investments from various angles. Inspired not
least by Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s iconic, if also flawed, doll preference study (Clark and
Clark 1947; Bergner 2009), social scientists have explored how toys can shape a child’s understand-
ings of gender (Weigram and Dinella 2018), race and ethnicity (Srinivasan and Cruz 2015),
migration status (Jones and Rutland 2018), and disability (O’Neill, McDonald, and Jones 2018;
Schalk 2017) and have experimented with using toys to uncover and challenge prejudice. Historians
and cultural theorists have focused on contextualizing toys, showing how they have been used to
both produce and challenge prevailing norms of race, gender, class, ability, and nation (Bernstein
2011; Martin 2014; Ellis and King 2015; Forman-Brunell and Whitney 2015; Simpson 2020).
These disparate strands of scholarship have been drawn together in recent years with a wave of
activist campaigns in Europe and North America calling for a “toy like me.”Campaigners have
drawn attention to social inequalities by highlighting histories of marginalization in the toy market
and by insisting on the importance of uplifting representations for children’s self-esteem. Small-
scale entrepreneurs, often frustrated parents, have responded with products like Lottie dolls (Ireland),
Zuree dolls (UK), and Lammily dolls (USA), and major toymakers like Lego and Mattel have also
updated their toy lines to reflect a broader range of appearances and social roles across lines of gender,
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
CONTACT JeffBowersox j.bowersox@ucl.ac.uk School of European Languages, Culture and Society, University College
London, London UK
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE
2022, VOL. 25, NO. 2, 139–158
https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2022.2046563
race and ethnicity, and disability (Lins de Almeida 2017). Many toymakers, like product designers and
marketers more generally, want to be identified with a diversity agenda associated with fairness and
equality. Their challenge, however, is not merely to avoid demeaning depictions and increase positive
depictions. As Burton suggests in her discussion of critical multiculturalism (2002; Chin 2017), effect-
ing fundamental marketplace change requires confronting the power structures and inequalities that
have structured society, and this must include a confrontation with long-established semiotic and dis-
cursive patterns that have diminished, erased, or otherwise oppressed marginalized groups (Davis
2018; Coleman and Yochim 2008). However, making such an effort also runs the risk of alienating
consumers wary of change or critical of the politics of inclusion. As Steven Vertovec (2012)and
Sara Ahmed (2012) suggest, institutions seeking to avoid controversy can turn to banal or tokenistic
definitions of diversity that reinforce marginalization.
In this article I assess how a single toymaker has managed these tensions in its representations of
racial and ethnic difference. My case study is Playmobil, a world-leading toy brand owned by the
Brandstätter Group (also knowns as “geobra Brandstätter”) that has been in production since
1974. I survey its product lines and marketing materials over this time, treating them as expressions
of a semiotic system that, in any given year, conveys a coherent worldview meant to be recognizable
to consumers in Europe and North America above all (Van Leeuwen 2009; Köpper 2014; von Hol-
zen 2017). In this I follow the company’s own claim (Playmobil 2022) that its toys allow children to
“recreate and experience the world in miniature”and also to imagine unlimited new worlds of their
own design. I test these corporate claims to accuracy and imaginative liberation with an approach
that is fundamentally historical. Drawing from semiotics and discourse analysis as well as postco-
lonial and whiteness studies, I will illustrate how, over time, Playmobil’s design choices have var-
iously excluded or marginalized social groups marked as outsiders by ethnicity and race. This
has been true even as, in recent years, the company’sofferings have become markedly more inclus-
ive. My central argument will be that this recent shift follows what Mary E. Thomas (2011) has
called “banal multiculturalism,”a superficial appreciation of difference that avoids controversy
but also frustrates calls for a more diverse manner of representation by leaving racialized structures
fundamentally unchallenged. Unlike competitors like Lego or Mattel, Playmobil has proven unwill-
ing to take the risks and court the controversy that would come from a more fundamental engage-
ment with the structures of an unequal society. In the end, Playmobil effectively tinkers while
maintaining the central pillars of a view of society that excludes and marginalizes.
The article’s analysis proceeds through two sections. The first examines a 2015 controversy that
played out in print and social media over a Playmobil pirate ship and slavery. This section shows the
competing racialized meanings that consumers invest in Playmobil’s products and, by exploring
Playmobil’s unwillingness to court controversy, helps to explain the company’s changing represen-
tations of racial and ethnic difference since 1974.
The second section begins by surveying this history of representation, based on a comprehensive
analysis of the company’s historical catalogues, and then engages in a detailed examination of its
2017 product line, which most effectively illustrates the brand’s recent turn toward limited inclu-
sivity. This section provides the key findings by outlining in specific terms the company’s strategies
and their historical roots. First, Playmobil has actively incorporated markers of racial and ethnic
difference in representations of contemporary urban society while at the same time limiting
them in ways that that prevent concentrations of such difference. Second, the company has relied
on strategic exclusions (Ger 2018; Veresiu and Giesler 2018) from symbolically resonant themes:
the pastoral, heritage, and fantasy settings that lie at the heart of national origin myths. These prac-
tices elide and thereby reinforce a white majoritarian norm, hiding it in plain sight even without
necessarily intending to do so (Davis 2018; Burton 2009a,2009b). According to this norm, a com-
monplace within debates on citizenship across Europe, populations racialized and ethnicized as
Others are only ever recent arrivals to and fundamental outsiders in a Europe never challenged
by its postcolonial condition (Gilroy 2005; Stoler 2011; Wekker 2016). These particular strategies
produce a banal appreciation of difference, one that allows the company and many consumers to
140 J. BOWERSOX
avoid confronting the abuses involved in and the transformations engendered by colonial histories
and more recent mass migrations.
Beyond outlining these specifictactics,mychiefscholarlycontribution lies in the historical
contextualization of Playmobil’s choices (Askegaard and Linnet 2011). I demonstrate how they
have been shaped by broad patterns of representation within Euro-American culture that date
back over two centuries and continue to shape the conditions of social belonging today. Decades
of scholarship in colonial and postcolonial studies and histories of race and racism have
thoroughly established the centrality of racializing tropes to the visual and material culture of
Europe and North America. Marketing has historically been implicated in the production and
circulation of these tropes (Davis 2018), and regular controversies show that such themes are
still symbolically resonant. This is especially true since Black Lives Matter effected an inter-
national reconsideration of previously uncontested advertising imagery (Thomas 2020;Morgan
and Pritchard 2018; Borgerson and Schroeder 2002; Kennedy 2000; Back and Quaade 1993;Pie-
terse 1992). Drawing attention to the particular representational practices that marginalize even
within a multicultural frame (Golpadas and Siebert 2018;Ger2018;Shabbir2014) will help com-
panies that seek to challenge their own historical practices (Davis 2018;LicsandruandCui2018).
It will also aid critics who want to pressure commercial actors to make substantial changes (Wei
and Benjun 2020;Murji2006; Müller 2008;Crockett2008). Finally, this analysis of represen-
tations will provide a foundation for further research on what happens when children play
with products imbued with implicit meanings (JonesandRutland2018; Acosta-Alzuru and Kre-
shel 2002), testing what Van Leeuwen (2009)callsthevariabledegreesofaffordance and con-
straint within a toy company’s semiotic system.
To summarize, this article argues that Playmobil’s representations of racial and ethnic difference
are inaccurate in ways that accord with longstanding patterns that marginalize those marked as
racial and ethnic minorities. Comparisons with competitors at the end of the article and attention
to the scholarly literature throughout will demonstrate that the company’s choices have not been
natural or inevitable, even if they have been made with little attention to historical structures of
inequality and with a wary eye on consumers who might be turned off. Drawing attention to
these design choices and placing them in their historical context is crucial for effectively confronting
marginalizing trends and taking seriously any claim to inclusivity. I hope that my analysis will con-
tribute to debates about how companies represent the world around us and will offer material for
reflection within companies about the processes that lead to their design choices.
Data collection and terminology
This article is based on a discursive, semiotic analysis and a historical survey and contextualization
of two bodies of material. The first collection of data comes from a survey of Playmobil’s product
catalogues from 1974 to the present, supplemented with the company’s own promotional materials
to explain their vision. When I began my research, the entire range of original German catalogues
and more recent country-specific catalogues could be found on Playmobil’s website. This allowed
easy access to both the full range of product offerings and idealized visions of how children might
play with them. Excepting the earliest catalogues, these are primarily visual sources with very little
text, and so the analysis requires a “reading”of the images and their relationship to each other.
Additionally, surveying the entire range of products through the catalogues, supplemented with
information available through fan encyclopedias like Klickypedia (https://www.klickypedia.com/),
allowed me to establish and record patterns of representation. I tracked figures’skin tones, social
roles, gender, age, fashion markers, accessories, and settings, identifying consistent trends and
changes from 1974 until the present. It is worth noting that there are some minor, market-specific
differences between the original German catalogues and catalogues for other markets, most notably
that historically products have been released for German consumers first and only in the next year
for foreign markets. There are also small differences in emphasis from one context to the next, but
CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE 141
the general trends outlined below are consistent across all markets. Regrettably, when Playmobil
updated the website to its current form, the collection of historical catalogues was not included.
Fan forums now provide the best means for locating digital copies of past catalogues, while the
most current print catalogues can be requested from the country-specific Playmobil sites.
If this material is useful for understanding Playmobil’s design choices over time, I have collected
a second body of data to understand the various meanings associated with the company’s products.
This material comes from surveys dating back to 2008 of German, American, and British media
commentary and fan responses available online. I have collected fan responses from social media
platforms like Facebook and Twitter as well as from more traditional forums and discussion
sites. Some of these forums, for example Klickywelt (https://klickywelt.de/) and Playmofriends
(https://www.playmofriends.com/), are dedicated specifically to the world of Playmobil, while rel-
evant discussions have also taken place in forums dedicated to a range of other cultural, social, or
political issues. While Playmobil fans engage quite actively in these various platforms to share their
memories and experiences, more traditional media only pay the company occasional attention. The
most revealing discussions for the purposes of this analysis have tended to concentrate around con-
troversies like that over the pirate slave discussed in detail just below or others that I mention in
passing. These discussions tend to bring out disparities that otherwise are papered over in the
shared online community-building encouraged by Playmobil and shaped by enthusiastic consu-
mers (MacInnes and Folkes 2017; Wei and Benjun 2020).
Finally, a note on terminology is in order. Playmobil uses commonly understood stereotypical
features to mark social groups racialized by their outward physical features and presumed site of
“original”ancestry (e.g. as white, Black, Latinx, or South or East Asian), but the design choices
also contain a host of ambiguities. Historically, Playmobil’s human figures have come in only
three skin colors. The original, foundational color is a light peach, and that is still the color of
the vast majority of figures today. A dark brown was introduced in 1978, and this color has been
used to mark Black and South Asian characters. In 1989 orange was first used to denote Native
Americans, and since then Playmobil has used this color to mark lighter-skinned people of African
or South Asian descent as well as Latinx and Arab characters. However, orange is also used to mark
white people stereotypically presumed to have a darker complexion, for example an Italian Pizza
Baker (product #6392), a Spanish Football/Soccer Player (#4721), or tanned white characters in
summer holiday sets. Further, in 1990 Playmobil introduced its first explicitly (East) “Asian”
figures (#3794). These figures have peach skin and semicircular eyes, rather than the circular
eyes of other figures. Playmobil uses this feature to indicate the epicanthic fold stereotypically
associated with East Asia, but this eye shape is also used to indicate an especially large smile on
otherwise unidentified characters. Because of these ambiguities, I will always describe the toys
with reference to these features rather than presuming an easy equivalence between colors and
eye shapes and the unstable, racialized categories in which we often discuss the social order. A
further note: because many sets have similar names and change regularly, whenever referring to
a particular set I include product numbers in parentheses (#XXXX). Images can be found at the
fan site Klickypedia (https://www.klickypedia.com/).
The “pirate slave”and race talk
In 2015 a complaint from a concerned mother created a controversy over a Playmobil pirate shipthat
played out in print and social media. The surrounding debate illustrates the competing racialized
meanings consumers associate with Playmobil figures and how they reflect what Derald Wing Sue
(2015) has called “a clash of racial realities.”Critics of the controversial toy suggested that it reflected
a broader system of structural inequality that was obvious to those disadvantaged by it, while Playmo-
bil’s defenders engaged in what Wetherell and Potter (1992) have called “race talk,”discursive strat-
egies deployed by members of the majority to deflect from and delegitimize such critiques. Debates
such as this relatively small one over a particular toy do not merely reveal static and underlying
142 J. BOWERSOX
tensions over the operations of race. They are the discursive sites where tensions are re-enacted on an
everyday basis and under unequal relations of power, as consumers forge their sense of self and
coalesce temporarily into groups according to their positioning within the charged politics of race
(Veresiu and Giesler 2018; Arnould and Thompson 2005). The detailed analysis of social media
debates that follows will illustrate how Playmobil products are never entirely separate from discourses
that limit the manner of inclusion for those racialized as minorities. The emotional attachments that
conditioned competing consumers’critiques (Park and MacInnes 2018; MacInnes and Folkes 2017;
Arvidsson and Caliandro 2016; Wei and Benjun 2020) also conditioned Playmobil’s awkwardness and
hesitancy when criticized for its banal incorporation of difference. Unlike competitors Lego and Mat-
tel, Playmobil has proved unwilling to be drawn into controversial debates, which allows for the easy
perpetuation of subtly exclusionary representations, as discussed in the next section.
In October 2015 Ida Lockett, an African-American mother in California, raised concerns on
Facebook over racism in Playmobil toys. Her son, for his fifth birthday, had received the elaborate
“Large Pirate Ship”(#5135) from his aunt, Aimee Norman, who had chosen the set because three of
the four crew members were orange, a color that she associated with darker skin tones. As Lockett
assembled the set, she received a shock. The last page of the instructions directed her to place a gray
collar around the neck of one of the smiling orange pirates, even providing a helpful illustration to
show how it clips around the throat of the smiling man. This pirate wears tattered and torn clothes
that reveal a hairy chest and bare feet and is a figure who, despite his smile, seems to have known
some suffering. (Figure 1) Confronted with these features, Lockett was horrified at the thought that
her son had received a “pirate slave”for his birthday.
Lockett took to social media to express her displeasure, seek support, and demand a response.
She took pictures of the figure and the instructions and posted them on her own and Playmobil’s
Facebook pages (Lockett 2015). She annotated them with brief comments of shock and dismay
while Norman posted a much longer statement. With references to the television series
Roots and the film Twelve Years a Slave, Norman protested that the inclusion of a slave in a toy
set was
Figure 1. Image used by Aimee Norman to illustrate her post on Facebook, 6 October 2015.
CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE 143
obscene, even moreso [sic] given the marked absence of diversity in your entire toy line.
#Slavery.is.not.a.game. Playmobil
What is wrong with you???? (Norman 2015)
Beyond her central point that inviting children to play at slavery was inappropriate, she decried the
general reduction of Black figures to slaves, asking why Playmobil could not “just create a regular
old black pirate.”The story was quickly picked up by local media, and the local chapter of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People offered support by demanding that
the toy be removed from shelves immediately (CBS 2015).
A few days later Playmobil offered a brief statement on Twitter (Playmobil 2015) defending the
product (Figures 2–3).
Highlighting the figure’s equal status on the ship, the anonymous spokesperson pointed to the
illustrations on the packaging and other promotional materials, which show the figure not barred in
the hold but rather navigating from the crow’s nest (while wearing his collar) and manning a can-
non (without the collar). By claiming historical accuracy, the spokesperson attempted to relieve the
company of responsibility for any offense taken, and the insistence on the figure’s equality in a
seventeenth-century context even awkwardly suggested the toy represented a celebration of diver-
sity. The American and international press also reported on the story, and the attention produced a
Figure 2. Playmobil’sofficial response on Twitter, 8 October 2015.
Figure 3. Playmobil’sofficial response on Twitter, 8 October 2015.
144 J. BOWERSOX
brief swell of online commentary before the controversy blew over.
1
The only lasting consequence
was the quiet cancellation of the pirate ship in question and its replacement by a new model (#6678)
the following year. The new ship featured an orange pirate captain and two crewmen, one peach
and one brown, and no shackles of any sort.
In the broadest sense, this controversy illustrates how a charge of racism in a product with such
devoted customers provoked a form of “race talk”in which many defenders of Playmobil absolved
the company and themselves of prejudice by marginalizing minorities’experiences of inequality.
Agoustinos and Every (2007), catalogue patterns of such racial discourse that are evident in the
responses to Lockett and Norman’s critique, including 1) denial of prejudice, 2) assigning negative
characteristics to the original complainants, 3) rejection of the relevance of race to the issue, and 4)
claiming their views were grounded in a presumed external reality (“historical accuracy”) rather
than in their own particular experiences. These techniques represented various ways of evading
the central complaint: to invite children to play at slavery was to ask them to imagine themselves
within an abusive and violent system whose legacies continue to shape the lives of Black and
white people in manifold and unequal ways. By frustrating an uncomfortable engagement with sys-
tems of American racism, as Agoustinos and Every suggest, such strategies rationalized and perpe-
tuated the systems of inequality under critique.
A number of respondents who identified themselves as devoted fans denied that Playmobil could
even produce an offensive product, pointing to the apparent diversity of their offerings. In the
words of one defender of the brand, “Poorly Diversed? [sic] If you actually look at their toys
they have several skin tones including African, Asian and Hispanic figures.”These commentators
followed a pattern described by Ahmed (2012), focusing not on the harm done to the accuser but
rather on the supposed harm done to the accused company. Given how closely they identified with
the brand itself, what Park and MacInnes (2018) refer to as self-relevance, these commentators also
treated the accusations as harm done against themselves. Many responses were correspondingly
filled with abusive personal attacks, using obscene insults or insisting that “People who take
offense at such things as this need to move to another country.”Many suggested that Lockett
and Norman were ignorant or lazy or accused them of cynically and selfishly “playing the race
card”to get attention, “hoping that some scumbag lawyer will try to get you some money for all
your ‘pain and suffering”this has caused.’Others associated them with an agenda of “political cor-
rectness”or a culture of self-victimization among African Americans generally. One commentator
with a self-proclaimed Irish heritage drew an unflattering comparison to suggest what happens
when groups live in the past: “I am Irish and the Irish were spurned and rejected when they first
came to America. I don’t let that stop me from living and trying to succeed today.”
Many tried to deracialize the issue, echoing a point raised by one commentator that “y’all think
everything is racist and it is not.”Some used bizarre classification schemes to fix the orange char-
acter’s race as something other than Black, for example suggesting that “This slave appears to be a
native of Latin America, not Africa ….is somebody trying to get paid?”Others criticized the pre-
dominant association of enslaved people with Blackness, arguing along with another commenter
that “pirates took slaves & prisoners of all races”or cautioning, as one respondent did, “let’s not
forget the millions of white slaves.”Others sought more explicitly to diminish the role of whites
in propagating slavery by noting that African leaders (or “black native africkin’slave traders”in
the inflammatory words of one participant in these discussions) had been involved in the slave
trade as well. While some posts were calm and considered, most were sarcastic or insulting or excla-
matory. Perhaps the most emphatic response rejected the very premise that the toy had anything to
1
The quotations in the rest of this section come from two intertwined threads on Facebook, where most of the debate took place.
Aimee Norman’s Facebook page, 6 October 2015, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1351405728219971&set=o.
103744793656&type=3; Ed Fox’s Facebook page, 9 October 2015, https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=
749143588523947&id=119512978153681.
CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE 145
do with either slavery or race: “It’s a PIRATE ship!!!!!!!!!!. NOT a SLAVE TRADE ship. Pirates took
prisoners. Get it right.!!!!!!!!!!!”
Based on the idea that race was not relevant, many commentators complained that Lockett and
Norman took offense too easily over an insignificant matter. In one respondent’s dismissive view,
Who would’ve thought in the year 2015 people are still sensitive about slaves? Slavery happened. Whether you
wanna pretend it didn’t or not is up to you. But the fact you are “Mortified”is a joke. This whole world has
turned into a bunch of sensitive cry babies. Pirates were bad people. Your [sic] just stupid.
Despite such accusations of over-sensitivity, these commentators’own sensitivity was obvious in
their emotional responses. This was especially apparent in those that suggested that Lockett and
Norman’s personal “hangup”would unjustly impose a cost on those who did not see a problem.
One post made this explicit when it asked, “And if you can’t help yourself, why not just choose
to buy it/throw it out, instead of removing a fun toy for everyone else’s children?”
Efforts to diminish the relevance of race to the issue were bound up ironically with arguments
based on claims to historical accuracy. In many posts, some of which were quite abusive, respon-
dents followed Playmobil in insisting the toy was historically accurate but went further, arguing that
Lockett and Norman’s complaint amounted to an effort to deny or re-write history. Maritime his-
torian Ed Fox summarized the case in a polite post that nevertheless evaded the original criticism of
the “pirate slave.”Writing as a published expert on the history of pirates, he suggested that parents
who did not want their children playing with a slave figure were failing to place that toy in its proper
historical context. He noted that pirates “were nasty brutish criminals,”and yet parents encourage
their kids to imagine themselves as pirates. Given this, he asked why parents would be offended by a
toy representing a slave who had been freed and treated as an equal by those same pirates, which the
historical record showed was a common practice at the time. Implying a measure of hypocrisy in the
willingness to glorify murderous pirates but not the freedom of former slaves, Fox finished with a
grand injunction: “But what we should not do, ever, is pretend slavery didn’t happen. We should
not ignore it, sweep it under the carpet, or hide it from our children”(Fox 2015).
There is a certain degree of blindness apparent when commenters, most of whom presented as
white, lectured African-American caregivers not to hide the history of slavery and discrimination
from their children. This is especially evident given the reluctance of these commentators to engage
with Norman’s central points: that it was precisely this history that produced differential experi-
ences of race in the present and that these experiences would be engaged if Black and white children
were to play at slavery. Rather than drawing an analogy with playing at piracy, which has little pol-
itical valence in the present, Lockett, Norman, and their supporters drew other analogies to make
their point. One commentator considered the whole issue a minor matter but sympathized with the
initial complaint, reasoning that “If they made a toy portraying the holocaust, I wouldn’t want my
child playing and thinking ‘kill Jewish people’even if that’s historically correct.”Another commen-
ter noted that “9/11 is a historical fact as well but I’m sure merica [sic] would be in an uproar with
replicas of the twin towers and innocent victims.”Less sarcastically, Norman argued that “the teach-
able moment is that we don’t play slavery, just like we don’t play rape.”
Comparing playing at slavery, which many commentators considered acceptable or even necess-
ary, with these atrocities outraged many respondents, provoking one to “question your mental state
for having even said something so crazy.”The provocation was effective, though, because such com-
parisons undermined the insistence that slavery, discrimination, and racism were merely history
and should be treated at some remove from the present. It was the very contemporaneity of racism
that lay at the heart of Lockett’s and Norman’s critiques of the “pirate slave.”As Norman put it in
response to Fox’s post,
In the US, slavery is not a distant historical happening. It was the breath and blood of only a few generations
gone (not to mention its more recent lingering vestiges of segregation and Jim Crow laws). I am aware that
many people whose personal history is not entwined in this reality do not understand the deeper feelings and
reactions this play set may evoke for others.
146 J. BOWERSOX
In response, one disgusted commenter rejected the notion of any such entwined personal history.
Aimee Norman Could you share the instructions where the company said, “Aimee Norman, you need to place
the slave collar on your neck.”If these instructions exist with your name or your loved ones name’s[sic] then
I’ll agree there is a racist context within the game. Until you can provide this information, please stop spewing
garbage.
The often aggressive rejection of connections between the past and present and between the per-
sonal and political, manifested in the “race talk”tactics outlined by Agoustinos and Every
(2007), served to confirm the contemporaneity of racism as well as the challenge of addressing it
through debates on social media.
This brief controversy over a “pirate slave”posed risks for Playmobil’s carefully crafted brand
identity, which is based around the imagery of innocent children engaged in free, imaginative
play, supported by loving adults. Like other major toy companies, Playmobil cultivates a sense of
a brand community joined by these sorts of childhood memories and experiences. This arguably
produces a particularly powerful affect for toy consumers, who may have established brand-self
connections at a young age and, as adults, wish to connect with their own children or their younger
selves (MacInnes and Folkes 2017). This sense of common experience was directly challenged by the
racialized meanings that consumers attach to Playmobil figures, meanings based in their clashing
personal experiences of race, history, and belonging (Sue 2015). It is important to note that such
meanings are not inherent to the toy itself, but, as this case shows, the producer’s response influ-
ences the range of meanings associated with it (Wei and Benjun 2020). This becomes especially evi-
dent given that the “pirate slave”was not originally intended to be a slave. As a digital storybook on
Playmobil’s US and UK websites at the time made clear (2015), the collared orange prisoner was not
escaping slavery at all but rather a military jail. A similar prisoner had featured in earlier naval
prison sets (#3859, #3112), and designers moved it into the pirate ship in question in 2011,
where it stayed without drawing attention until this controversy.
Given the toy’s apparent connection to naval imprisonment, why did the Playmobil spokesper-
son confirm the presumption that the collar must indicate a slave past? Perhaps the spokesperson
was simply unaware, or perhaps a more accurate response would have been embarrassing. After all,
how did developers miss the possibility that a colonial-era, non-white character wearing tattered
clothes and a collar could be associated with slavery? Lack of access to company archives or person-
nel means that internal deliberations on the pirate ship and public relations response remain opa-
que. The Playmobil spokesperson may have intended the company’s response to be neutral, a way of
acknowledging the issue while also diminishing the threat it posed to a harmonious brand commu-
nity. However, the insistence on historical accuracy and a banal celebration of diversity revealed a
certain clumsiness and hesitancy when dealing with questions of inequality and difference. In part
this can be explained by the company’s unwillingness to alienate loyal customers, some of whom
took the company’s response as an endorsement of their frustrations and even an inducement to
attack Norman, Lockett, and other critics. But the response also reflects the company’s ambivalent
efforts to change how it represents race and ethnicity. As the next section will show, Playmobil has
quietly incorporated markers of difference as part of an inclusive vision of Euro-American society,
but designers’and marketers’efforts are marked by persistent blind spots and patterns that perpe-
tuate historical trends, diminishing or even erasing the presence of those marked as outsiders by
race or ethnicity. As Norman and Lockett understood, these practices affect the worlds that children
can imagine through Playmobil toys.
No limits on the imagination? Playmobil and marginalizing myths
Playmobil’s founding philosophy is to create unlimited possibilities for imaginative play by provid-
ing children with accurate representations of “western”society, its histories, and its fantasies. After
surveying its guiding principles, I will briefly summarize how the company has introduced racial
CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE 147
and ethnic difference into its products over its history. I will suggest that we can best understand
these choices in the context of the changing demographics of the Federal Republic of Germany
and western Europe more generally since the 1960s. The arrival of large numbers of foreign workers
and their families and refugees challenged prevailing myths of social homogeneity and provoked
essentialist discursive reactions that marginalized or even erased these new arrivals. These myths
have been reflected in Playmobil’s toy lines, putting very real limits on the imaginative worlds
that children can create. This brief historical survey will lay the foundation for a focused analysis
of Playmobil’s2017 catalogue, which offers a particularly clear illustration of the operations of
the “banal multiculturalism”(Thomas 2011) that has characterized the company’s incorporation
of racial and ethnic difference. While moving toward an active incorporation of markers of racial
and ethnic difference, this incorporation has been marked by a flattening of contemporary demo-
graphic patterns as well as exclusions from the pastoral, fantasy, and heritage settings at the heart of
European and American founding myths. Exploring how Playmobil enacts these strategies lays the
foundation for comparing its choices with those of competing toymakers and other firms purport-
ing to represent society fairly and accurately.
From its beginnings in 1974, Playmobil has marketed its products as both entertaining and edu-
cational, with the educational value bound up in the “true-to-life role play”(Playmobil 1977, 1) the
toys were meant to encourage. The strategy, a common one that runs through the history of the
modern toy industry, emphasizes the development of autonomy through the free play of a child’s
imagination (Cross 2012; Stearns 2017). Playmobil’s founding designer, Hans Beck, wanted to pro-
duce figures that accurately, if also playfully, reflected the realities and fantasies of their society.
With familiar figures in hand, children could mix and match as they pleased, and the endless ima-
ginative worlds they created would help them safely explore their world (Bachmann 2006; Köpper
2014; Haug 2004).
At the core of this company philosophy is a commitment to accuracy that Playmobil continues to
draw upon, as the response to the “pirate slave”controversy suggests. However, as von Holzen
(2017) suggests, Playmobil toys have become increasingly fantastical and are not accurate in any
literal sense. Rather, Playmobil’s ever-evolving and expanding contemporary, historical, and fantasy
settings are filled out with reductive caricatures that evoke fanciful but recognizable stereotypes.
Doctors and nurses wear red crosses and carry stethoscopes, and burglars wear woolen caps and
striped shirts. Knights are burdened with unreasonably decorative armor, Vikings are adorned
with horned helmets, and contemporary Alpine residents are dressed in something akin to Dirndls
and Lederhosen. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Native Americans cobble together a mélange of features
drawn from across North America in the nineteenth century: canoes from the eastern forests, tee-
pees and feathered headdresses from the Plains, graphic designs from the American Southwest, and
totem poles from the Pacific coast (Deloria 2004;Hirschfelder, Fairbanks, and Wakim 1999).
Playmobil (1975,2–3) has claimed that its toys “set no limits on the imagination”because chil-
dren can take their play in any direction they choose. However, the nature of representation does
impose limits insofar as it relies on assumptions and stereotypes that work to marginalize or exclude
(Van Leeuwen 2009), as Szabo (2014) and von Holzen (2017) have shown to be true in terms of
gender roles, for example. There is a similar limiting process at work in Playmobil’s depictions
of racial and ethnic difference, which have channeled trends in western European discourses on
race, nation, and migration. From the 1940s, western European states recruited workers from
abroad to recover from wartime devastation and fill necessary services, but the economic crash
of the early 1970s, the very moment when Playmobil was established, led governments to try to
halt and reverse these migration patterns. As these efforts failed, discussions around migrants
and migration became characterized by what Bade (2003, 231) calls a “xenophobic, culturalist dis-
course”and a corresponding emphasis on coercive integration policies. As Chin (2017) demon-
strates, these were part of a new, racialized politics of national belonging. Political leaders across
western Europe defined migrants from Turkey, Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia as “the bearers
of alien cultures that now rendered them ‘inassimilable’to the nation”(Chin 2017, 6). Their
148 J. BOWERSOX
presence and any burgeoning efforts to build multiethnic societies were presented as challenges to
the myths of national homogeneity and social cohesion that had helped reestablish political order
after 1945.
El-Tayeb (2011) has used the concept of “ethnicization”to explain this process and argues that it
was closely intertwined with discredited processes of explicitly racial differentiation. Popular dis-
courses on “visible minorities”associated supposedly innate cultural differences with non-Euro-
pean origins, similarly with outward features like darker skin tone or clothing associated with
Muslim practice. Such persistent associations meant these populations were imagined as permanent
aliens despite long-term residence, integration into the labor market, and even citizenship. El-Tayeb
argues that these constructions of “cultural”alienness have buttressed a European ethnicity based
on a normative whiteness while, at the same time, making it possible to imagine Europe as a con-
tinent utterly without race and racism. Imagining Europe as both colorblind and homogenous has
required, as Ann Laura Stoler (2011) puts it, “active dissociation”from histories of colonial encoun-
ters and violence, labor migration and exploitation, and religious pluralism and conflict. Such era-
sures have made it possible to see the era of postwar migration as an unprecedented injection of
difference, an interruption in otherwise continuous histories that reach back to mythical national
origins and a shared European heritage.
A thorough survey of all of Playmobil’s catalogues since 1974 illustrates this racialized process of
ethnicization and its links to myths of national homogeneity and continuity. This is most immedi-
ately evident in the fact that figures meant to represent non-white characters, marked by brown or
orange skin or semicircular eyes, generally have been assigned to times or places distant from con-
temporary Europe: in the American “Wild West,”among the pirates of the Caribbean, on safari in
Africa, researching in the Arctic, or in a futuristic space environment. Some of these sets have
trafficked in the crassest of colonialist stereotypes of primitive savagery; the most notorious in
this regard was the Jungle series that featured peach Indiana Jones-style explorers confronting
brown “Jungle Natives”(e.g. #30008140) dressed in animal pelts, feathers, grotesque masks, and
loincloths. Continuing another tradition dating back to the Age of Empire (Bowersox 2013),
brown and orange figures have also been concentrated in circus and zoo sets that associated
them with wild animals and allowed them to be dressed in exoticized fashions like a fez or turban.
When these figures were included in sets depicting contemporary European city life, they were
introduced as little more than very occasional tokenistic figures meant to show an interest in diver-
sity without challenging prevailing modes of representation organized around a white norm. At first
this was literally true: from 1985 until 1993 catalogues included brown figures in illustrations for
suggested play even when there were none for sale in those sets. But even as brown and orange
figures were haltingly introduced, they most often occupied subordinate or serving roles and in
very small numbers that belied the actual concentrations of people of color and migrants in
urban environments. They also often received ethnicized or racialized labels that positioned
them relative to an implicit white norm, for example the brown “England player black”(#4736)
meant to complement the peach but deracialized “Soccer player –England”(#4732). From 2009
there has been an apparent effort to move beyond tokenism and to introduce brown, orange,
and peach figures with semicircular eyes more broadly across sets. Even still, this incorporation
has been limited by practices that both ensure representation and prevent concentrations of
these figures. Their incorporation has also been characterized by significant absences in symboli-
cally resonant sets like the pastoral, historical, and fantasy themes that have been central to
myths of national identity since the dawn of the age of nationalism. As such, Playmobil’s most
recent strategy has relied upon markers of racial and ethnic difference to promote Thomas’s
(2011) positive but banal vision of multicultural diversity, one that remains wedded to the norma-
tive whiteness that El-Tayeb (2011) describes. It has limited the ability to encompass the range of
experiences of people of color in the present and to imagine people of color into the myths that
underpin the social order across Europe and North America.
CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE 149
These trends come into sharper focus if we look more closely at a single, recent case study, and I
have chosen the 2017 German catalogue because it best highlights the trends under discussion. A
statistical overview of the features Playmobil regularly uses to mark racial or ethnic difference
(Table 1) provides a foundation for assessing the particular patterns within the catalogue: these
numbers exclude non-human figures like monsters, ghosts and aliens, and they also exclude
movie tie-in sets promoting the Ghostbusters and Dragons film franchises, since they stand outside
my effort to understand how Playmobil represents the world more generically. In the catalogue, the
vast majority of figures, roughly 85 percent, feature the peach skin and circular eyes that are the
norm in the Playmobil world; these figures predominate in every theme, and their number was
actually lower in 2017 than in other years because of the Romans and Egyptians series, discussed
below. Just under 6 percent are brown, while roughly 2.5 percent of the figures have peach skin
with semicircular eyes. Just over 6 percent are orange, and this includes two figures with semicir-
cular eyes in an Arctic theme, seemingly to represent Inuit populations. As mentioned at the outset,
it is important to note that these percentages are only broadly indicative, as there is some indeter-
minacy about what these features can represent.
As broad indicators, though, categorizing by these features reveals a tokenistic diversity that
enables a multicultural visibility of difference while flattening out the real diversity of the present.
With significant exceptions to be outlined below, each theme representing contemporary society is
made up of roughly 10–20 percent of brown, orange, or peach figures with semicircular eyes. It is
important to note that in these sets the figures are otherwise indistinguishable in terms of fashion
and role from their peach counterparts with circular eyes. For example, both the police and the fire
department themes include one brown male and one orange male figure out of a total of seventeen
and thirteen respectively, and they are dressed and performing the same roles as their colleagues.
Similarly, a shopping theme with nineteen figures in all features two peach women with semicircu-
lar eyes, one orange woman, and one brown woman. These figures are all are depicted as consumers
and not mall employees: they wear fashionable, interchangeable clothing, and they are depicted
withdrawing cash from an ATM, carrying a purse while shopping for a skirt, and being sold
flowers by a peach attendant. Generally, across the themes representing contemporary Euro-Amer-
ican urban society, there is an evident effort to include a representative sample of markers to indi-
cate an awareness of diversity, and Playmobil appears sensitive to the risk of associating these
figures with subordinate or otherwise marginalizing roles associated with working-class employ-
ment. Outside rescue workers, police officers, and medical professionals, the only such figure rep-
resented “at work”is an orange security guard at the airport (#5338). In this way, Playmobil
presents a vision of a cosmopolitan, consumerist society based on the equal participation of ethni-
cized populations.
This manner of inclusion both makes ethnic difference visible and, by avoiding concentrations of
ethnic difference, reinforces a white norm. There are never more than a handful of non-normative
figures in any single theme, and they are almost always accompanied by a peach counterpart with
circular eyes, perhaps reflecting a concern that consumers would not buy them on their own: of the
forty-eight brown, orange, or peach figures with semicircular eyes in contemporary sets, only five
come unaccompanied (#9257, #6969, #9251, #6692, #5309). There are also only two sets that include
more than one such figure (#5567, #9272), and in both sets they are outnumbered by peach figures
with circular eyes. The effect is an apparent statistical limit that might seem a reasonable
Table 1. Distribution of figures within Playmobil’s 2017 German catalogue.
Type Total Total Adult Men Women Total Children Boy Girl Baby/ Unclear
Peach/circular eyes 467 366 232 134 101 40 49 12
Peach/semicircular eyes 14 10 5 5 4 4 0 0
Orange 35 29 22 7 6 3 2 1
Brown 31 22 14 8 9 3 4 2
Total 547 427 273 154 120 50 55 15
150 J. BOWERSOX
representation of the non-white population of an entire country or continent but that, in practice, is
far from Playmobil’s goal of accurate representation of contemporary urban society. It is difficult to
gather consistent data on race, ethnic difference, and migration status across Europe, but European
cities have large concentrations of people of color and ethnicized migrants (Arapoglou 2012; Berg
and Sigona 2013; Farkas 2017), in numbers often far higher than the limits found in Playmobil cat-
alogues. Put simply, a child would be hard-pressed to reproduce common scenes from neighbor-
hoods in London’s Brixton, Berlin-Kreuzberg, Seine-Saint-Denis outside of Paris, or the many
parts of cities and towns across Europe and North America where these blunt markers of ethnic
difference would be found in the majority rather than the minority.
Avoiding concentrations of difference limits not only how urban life is imagined but also
families. The apparent effort to avoid concentrations of non-normative figures means that, in
school and leisure sets that included children, designers have had to choose between having an
adult or a child as the token figure. As a result, in the 2017 catalogue brown, orange, or peach chil-
dren with semicircular eyes are generally not sold or advertised with parents or carers who look like
them. The result can be seen in a set like Aquarium Shop (#9061), which includes four peach figures
with circular eyes—a man, a woman, and two children—and one orange child. The box illustration
for this set suggests that the man is a cashier and the woman is responsible for the children, while
another illustration in the catalogue places the orange child in the company of a figure from a differ-
ent set, a peach man with circular eyes. However the figures are arranged, the set implies multiracial
families or social units connecting families of different ethnicities, and it is not unique. Similar sets
featuring adults and children with different appearances abound in the 2017 German catalogue
(#6927, #6661, #6662, #6686, #6657, #5572, #5567, #9230) and have featured regularly since
2010. There is only one exception, a brown man and baby included as part of a Housewarming
set (#9272), but even here they are accompanied by a peach woman and three peach children
with circular eyes.
The frequency of these implicitly multiracial families can be read as a rebuke to those who object
to mixing across these categories of difference. At the same time, the obvious absences in these
families suggests that their inclusion represents what Parker and Song (2001, 1) have described
as “a naïve celebration of ‘mixed-race’relationships and children as ‘living proof’of the transcen-
dence of racism and the ultimate expression of multicultural harmony.”In particular, the absence of
a presumed parent who resembles the child of color leaves these families incomplete, and this also
imposes real practical challenges on parents and children who want to build a family of color. In
2017, assembling such a family from the options available in catalogues and most stores would
have required purchasing multiple and possibly incongruous sets, making racial inclusion a con-
scious adult choice only available to those with the means to do so.
In an apparent recognition of this limitation, in more recent years Playmobil has introduced new
family sets featuring brown and orange parents with children, although still always with a peach
figure with circular eyes (e.g. #9422, #9424). They have also expanded the diversity of individual
“basic figures”(Grundfiguren), generic supplementary figures available online and at a slightly
higher price. However, these are not showcased in the catalogues but rather shunted into the
“add-ons and accessories”section and only on the German website. Whether a result of conscious
intention or the incidental product of a system of quotas, the presumption that a family unit should
include a figure that connotes whiteness reflects the limits of multicultural inclusion within the
world of Playmobil more generally.
These limits are also apparent in the deployment of brown, orange, and peach figures with semi-
circular eyes in the themes that are most central to racialized myths of national origin and a com-
mon European heritage: rural life, fantasy, and history. During the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries these themes were bound together into a complex that allowed for the imagining of a
new time—modernity—which moves in a linear fashion toward rational progress and nation-build-
ing. As Reinhart Koselleck (1985) argues, this new concept of modern time allowed for the hierarch-
ical assessment of different rates of development according to a Eurocentric standard, and
CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE 151
establishing this standard required defining temporal and geographic “Others”who existed in some
prior state of development. A more barbaric or simpler European Middle Ages provided one such
foil, as did a romanticized European countryside that sat outside of time and thus preserved traces
of particular folk roots. These Others were incorporated into narratives of progressive European
national development, while the wider world came to be defined as outside of modernity altogether.
To use Johannes Fabian’s(2014) term, the wider world was denied “coevalness,“a temporalizing
strategy that used various physiognomic or cultural factors to mark distant but contemporary
societies as primitive or stuck in the past. As Barnor Hesse (2007, 643) puts it, such oppositions
make it clear that “modernity is racial,”and yet this fact has been persistently elided by “white
mythologies”that interrogate modernity without attention to colonial and racial formations.
The racialized celebration of European heritage and tradition as found in Playmobil’s rural, fan-
tasy, and history themes reflects one such mythology on a more popular level, hiding normative
whiteness in plain sight. For example, depictions of racial and ethnic diversity in contemporary
rural settings diverge significantly from the depictions of contemporary urban society described
above. A Mountain theme includes a single brown figure among eighteen enjoying the outdoors,
and he was the first such figure ever included in the theme. The Farm theme does not have even
this level of diversity. It is the only theme in the 2017 catalogue that does not include a brown,
orange, or peach figure with semicircular eyes; indeed, only in 2019 did the Farm theme receive
its first brown (#70137) and orange (#70133) figures. In these rural themes, Playmobil reflects
what scholars like Michael Woods (2016) and Daniel Lichter (2012) identify as a common pattern
of under-stating the diversity of small towns and rural areas across Europe and North America. As
Charlotte Williams (2007) puts it, this pattern works to detach the countryside from prevailing nar-
ratives of race, preserving it as an idyllic repository of national traditions.
Fantasy and fairy tales are at the heart of these national traditions, “shadowing modernity”in
David Matthews’s words (2015, 1). As a range of scholars have shown (Utz 2017; Saler 2006),
romanticized depictions of the Middle Ages or of folk culture served as a static foil for imagining
a new modern era and also as a source of the enchantment that cultural pessimists feared had been
lost in the turn to modernity. Playmobil has embodied this enchantment through romantic castles
with princesses, sylvan glades with magical creatures, and medievalist fortresses with armored
knights battling trolls and dwarves. But the enchantment has been bound up with racialized pat-
terns of absence and marginalization that contrast with the depictions of contemporary urban
society described above.
The Princess theme, for example, reflects a very recent effort to introduce racial and ethnic
difference, receiving its first non-normative figures only in 2016. In the 2017 catalogue it features
a total of twenty-one figures with elaborate fashions, furniture, carriages, and horses appropriate
for the fairy tale castle that is its centerpiece. The theme almost meets the general quota found
in the urban themes with two figures: a finely dressed peach woman with semicircular eyes in
the Royal Stable (#6855) and an orange woman trying on clothes in the Dressing Room with
Salon (#6850). The detailed product descriptions found on their boxes identify them as princesses,
and the orange woman even wears a pink crown, but it is noteworthy that the title of each set is
generic. By contrast, ten other figures in this theme, all peach with circular eyes, are explicitly ident-
ified as royalty, for example the Royal Couple with Horse-Drawn Carriage (#6856) or the Prin-
cesses’Playroom (#6852). The Fairy forests are less diverse still than the Princesses’castle.
Among its sixteen figures there is only a token brown fairy who rides a Romantic Fairy Ship
(#9133) with two peach fairies with circular eyes. Similarly, the human figures in the Knights
theme are strikingly monochromatic. In the 2017 catalogue there are twenty-eight male figures,
almost all of whom wear fantastical armour and bear fearsome weapons. All are peach with circular
eyes with the exception of an orange peasant driving an oxcart (#6005), a representation that denies
even the possibility of a non-white warrior in a mythologized European space.
These fantastical depictions leave little room for historical and symbolic encounters with differ-
ence in the medieval and early modern periods, represented for example in the Saracen and
152 J. BOWERSOX
Moorish knights of Arthurian legends: Safir, Palamedes, Segwarides, Morien, and Feirefiz. As
Cohen and Steel suggest (2015), a wide range of encounters with difference took place on the
Welsh borders, in Islamic Spain, or on Viking journeys to North America and the Levant, and
they did not operate according to the racial and ethnic markers that conventionally are imposed
on the era from a contemporary perspective. As such, far from being accurate or natural depictions,
the norm defended in the “pirate slave”debate, Playmobil’s fantasy sets reproduce the racialized
narratives of purity and continuity at the heart of concepts of modernity, Europeanness, and
national identity in operation since the eighteenth century. As Helen Young notes (2016,10–11),
these are conventions that have long “formed habits of Whiteness”within the fantasy genre that
“simultaneously influence who can be present, and what is seen, thought, and done, by creating pat-
terns of bodies and spaces alike.”
The racialization of the European past relies on the containment of visible difference within and its
displacement beyond Europe’s imagined boundaries, and this pattern is strikingly apparent in Play-
mobil’s award-winning history series depicting the Romans and Egyptians. This theme is masterfully
designed with elaborate vehicles, a complex pyramid with a pharaoh waiting for entombment
(#5386), and beautifully detailed costumes. Caesar meets with Cleopatra (#5386), there are a wide var-
iety of Roman and Egyptian soldiers and bandits, and the website offers supplementary Roman and
Egyptian families for playing at more mundane social relations. For our purposes, the most note-
worthy feature of the theme is a binary opposition between peach Romans with circular eyes and
orange Egyptians, some of whom have heavily lined eyes drawn from ancient Egyptian art. The excep-
tion who proves the rule is Cleopatra, who, alone among the Egyptians, is peach. Her implicit white-
ness sits within a long tradition of depicting the queen as an icon of white beauty, but also, given the
orangeness around her, is a rebuke to those who have claimed her for Blackness. The point here is not
the color of the historical Cleopatra’s skin but rather, in Joyce Green MacDonald’s words (2002, 36), a
“flattened racial identification.”The only nods to the reality in which both Rome and Egypt governed
over vast and diverse territories are a brown Nubian warrior in the pick-and-mix Figures Series 10
(#6840) and a set of gladiators (#6868) that includes an orange fighter armed with trident and net.
The binary opposition of the Romans and Egyptians reflects the normative whiteness that runs
through the entire Playmobil world, which requires that ethnicized figures within modern Europe
be contained and any concentrations be displaced beyond its temporal and geographic boundaries.
In this way, Playmobil uncritically reproduces racialized concepts of Europe and the nation as they
were first popularized in the nineteenth century and then adapted over the twentieth. This vision, in
a playfully caricatured form, is then imposed on the past and the present. It erases the complexity of
contemporary Europe, and it marginalizes the experiences and perspectives of those ethnicized
populations who are marked as permanent outsiders.
Conclusion
Like all toy companies, Playmobil must make choices about how to depict a diverse society in
reductionist ways, and its fantasy vision of a harmonious society often hides its ideological oper-
ations. In part, this results from practical considerations about how much authenticity is acceptable
to consumers. For example, as per Hans Beck’s own initial concept for Playmobil, depictions of vio-
lence remain sanitized. It is either cordoned offin a romanticized past or represented by heavily
armed but smiling police officers chasing cartoonish villains who are always peach; there is no
echo of the disproportionate state violence exercised against racialized minorities, especially
Black citizens, that has animated the Black Lives Matter campaigns. Likewise, there are no depic-
tions of poverty, homelessness, or mental illness. Class inequalities and their intersections with
race and gender are largely hidden as well. Although many figures do represent service employees,
we do not see their lives outside of the workplace. There are no one-bedroom flats, only mansions,
and the leisure world presented is a consumerist one that does not encourage children to think
about disparities of income and access.
CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE 153
In a similar manner, Playmobil’s incorporation of racial and ethnic difference is anodyne, as per
Thomas’s(2011) notion of “banal multiculturalism”that appreciates difference but does not con-
front racialized structures. The company has quietly responded to public criticism with noteworthy
changes in recent years. Playmobil revised the “pirate slave”ship discussed above, and in 2014 it
stopped producing sets including the controversial Dutch figure Zwarte Piet (#4893, #5040,
#5206, #5217), but only after a court ruled that the character was offensive. Complaints about
the labelling of peach and brown England and France footballers in 2012 led to more neutral des-
ignations, although the company has yet to accede to requests for a wider range of German foot-
ballers. Playmobil has retired a number of series that only include peach figures with circular
eyes and no longer uses the crude colonial stereotypes that featured regularly in earlier years. Play-
mobil has also introduced brown, orange, and peach figures with semicircular eyes in areas where
they have been underrepresented within Euro-American popular culture more generally, include as
ice hockey players, astronauts, scientists, and action heroes. In this regard, the company stands
ahead of competitors like Schleich, which sells only a single person of color (Sarah) among all its
highly realistic human figurines, or Kinder Surprise, which has a history of hiding racist figurines
in its chocolate eggs.
However, avoiding controversy also has meant avoiding any overt association with critical self-
reflection. This contrasts with major competitors like Mattel or Lego, not to mention smaller com-
panies like those mentioned in the introduction. Despite its historically problematic depictions of
feminine gender roles and racial or ethnic Others, in the 2010s Mattel overhauled its Barbie line to
more publicly embrace inclusivity and empowerment (Piñon 2019). The company produced dolls
modelled on prominent women of color and actively broadened the range of hair styles, skin tone,
fashion accessories and body types to better reflect the range of girls playing with the toys. Just as
importantly, they accompanied these efforts with public relations campaigns that both trumpeted
their efforts and invited feedback of all sorts. Similarly, the world’s largest toymaker Lego has also
publicly made a commitment to overcoming historic under-representation a central part of its toy
design and marketing. This has been reflected in attention-grabbing toys like the “Women of
NASA”set modelled on the film Hidden Figures and, more notably, through changes in organiz-
ational priorities (Lego 2021). Neither Lego nor Mattel has been free of mis-steps over this time
(Weinstock 2015), and more research is needed on the particular strategies of representation and
the relationship to company structure and design practices. However, the salient point here is
that their confrontation with historical practices and contemporary representations has been public
and explicit, and thus open to investigation and critique. By contrast, as Playmobil’s press officer
Björn Seeger put it to me in a 21 June 2017 email, “diversity dips into our game worlds in many
facets but is not an explicit criterion for the development of products.”The company prefers to
remain publicly disengaged on this issue and, as the “pirate slave”controversy suggests, is unwilling
to alienate fans who resist considering unfamiliar “racial realities.”
Responding in piecemeal fashion to individual complaints and remaining otherwise disengaged
may avoid broader controversy, but it is not a neutral stance. Reflecting broader discourses that eth-
nicize people of color and recent migrants, Playmobil’s world makes racial and ethnic difference
visible but also contains it. By limiting its appearance in modern European settings and displacing
concentrations beyond Europe’s imagined borders, ethnicized populations are marked as unprece-
dented arrivals fundamentally disconnected from long-term traditions. Without further access to
staffor archives, unfortunately denied upon request by the author, it is impossible to say whether
this results from a simple lack of attention, a different interpretation of what society should look
like, a survey of what their most enthusiastic fans ask for, a cynical assessment of the buying
power of particular consumers, or some mixture of these and other factors.
What is clear is that these limiting representations are the product of what Ebony Elizabeth Tho-
mas (2019,4–12) calls an “imagination gap”that extends beyond Playmobil. Writing about fantastic
adventure literature, Thomas tracks the erasure or caricature of the experiences of people of color.
She argues these works are “racialized mirrors”that reflect back societal prejudices upon readers
154 J. BOWERSOX
and thus make it difficult for young people of color to see themselves as they understand themselves.
To challenge the false universalisms that elide the operations of whiteness, she calls for a practice of
“critical race counterstorytelling”that foregrounds the experiences and perspectives of the margin-
alized. More than the anodyne and limited diversity practices that Playmobil has pursued thus far,
such a call insists on the need for producers and consumers to actively engage with the longstanding
practices that have produced and sustained inequalities.
This call is particularly apt for toys because children use them to understand the world around
them. More and broader studies on representation and their links to historical practices will provide
afirm foundation for more studies on what children and other consumers actually do with these
products. Existing research shows that we must be careful not to assign toys too much power. Chil-
dren are creative creatures who undermine intended messages and often turn toys to unexpected
ends in the pursuit of their own enjoyment and personal development. As Van Leeuwen (2009)
has shown in his study of Playmobil, a child can transform a fireman into a baby, a wizard into
a biker. But toys do have power: they can confirm or challenge existing visions of the world
(Acosta-Alzuru and Kreshel 2002; Jones and Rutland 2018). The task for this future research, as
Van Leeuwen puts it, is to explore the varying degrees of affordance and constraint, how they
open up and how they close down what children can see and imagine. Playmobil’s founding
designer Hans Beck actually had this tension in mind when he envisioned a body of toys that pro-
vided the raw materials for children to engage with and reimagine the world around them. When
Playmobil more critically challenges the white mythologies running through its offerings, the com-
pany will be closer to achieving Beck’s idealistic vision of toys that “set no limits on the
imagination.’
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the journal editor for their thoughtful comments and
helpful suggestions, which markedly improved the earlier draft.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
JeffBowersox is an Associate Professor of German History, the author of Raising Germans in the Age of Empire
(Oxford University Press, 2013), and the managing editor of Black Central Europe (blackcentraleurope.com), a
web resource dedicated to presenting Black histories in the German lands over the past 1000 years.
ORCID
JeffBowersox http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1239-7944
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