Welcome. A minor accident last Friday left me with painfully bruised ribs and constipation. (Perhaps you didn’t need to know that). So I have been in no fit state to write the blog I intended. Instead I have drawn out of my lap top something I wrote some time ago. Duplo have since altered the toy, I think. Hopefully, by next Tuesday everything will be flowing freely and I can produce a longer blog.
And You thought Duplo was child’s play? (Or the Complexity of Multi-culturalism).
Sadly, our box of Duplo toys is now buried deep within our garden shed. Amongst the brightly coloured building blocks, the chubby postmen and the benign tigers is a 12-piece ‘International Families’ set. It consists of mother, father, daughter and son of respectively African, European and Far-Eastern appearance.
I have heard the set commended, rightly, as a helpful educational toy for pre-school children: either enabling them either to recognise that they live in a society of different ethnic groups, or that their minority group belongs here just as much as anyone else.
Nonetheless in ‘race’ things are never that simple. The Duplo pieces also raise questions. Firstly all 12 figures are dressed in what might be called ‘smart-casual clothing’ That may encourage the children to believe that they have a prosperous future in mainstream society. But what if your family dresses in saris or kente cloth? If the children and their parents dress quite differently does it suggests that they don’t belong? (As an aside, I am always surprised that the Sinocenrtic, supposedly Marxist members of the Chinese Communist Party nonetheless dress to a man as though they were western bankers).
More controversially, all the families consist of two parents and two children. What if your family consists of three generations, one parent or nine siblings? The toy strongly suggests a normative family pattern which is not that of a growing number of children in our society. I believe it is a highly commendable pattern, but for many children it will be an alien or even excluding one.
To summarise:
Good – children in their play are both enabled to recognise people who look like them as players in the world community, and to recognise that those who look differently have an equal right to belong.
Bad – the figures normativise in ways that are also excluding: all wear western ‘smart casual’ clothing, as opposed to the dress of any other ethnicity; more seriously one form of nuclear family is given prominence.
There is of course no simple way around the issue. All presentations of people that are seen to be ‘racially significant’ unavoidably set norms, which never give a full, complex or true picture. Even if Duplo introduced an ‘International Families’ set with 200 figures there would still be some ways of dressing or patterns of family life that are excluded. Perhaps the 12-piece set does the best job it can, but its limitations and distortions need bearing in mind. But it would have been nice to have a granny.
In other words, multi-cultural societies are complex. Invariably, initiatives have both positive and negative consequences, and it requires wisdom and experience to balance out the pros and cons of each initiative. And it is easy to get things wrong. That is why the controversial and combative tones in which race and culture are often discussed (I plead guilty as charged) is so deeply unhelpful. It is rarely possible to do some good without doing some harm; and we need to be open, honest, tolerant and forgiving towards each other
To take but one more example, the London Borough of Brent ran after-school classes in English and Maths for Somali pupils:
Good – children from a quite encapsulated and also low achieving ethnic group were being drawn into the educational (and, one hopes, ultimately social mainstream) by special provision.
Bad –such special provision reinforced the separation of Somali children from others in their leisure time, whilst unjustly other educationally low-achieving groups (not least white English boys) were unprovided for.
The same complex issues arise for ethnic specific provision in churches – a recurring issue in this blog.
Meanwhile, from out of the toys of children and infants comes wisdom
" DUPLO " is commonly produced in North East Asia in the south of the Korean Peninsula as " COKO ". In case you are interested.