Do we think that we are so removed from everything down here and it’s been long enough that we think these ‘toys’ are just cute now without any further discussion needed?

Friends on the ‘cute toy’ side choose to ignore the connotations, instead either focus on the ironic humour or the ‘traditional’ nature of making these items.

In addition, we have our own kitsch and somewhat racist ‘Aboriginalia’ http://www.abc.net.au/tv/collectors/segments/s2656593.htm, so it occurs to me that we really do (erroneously) believe that these golliwog toys are simply cute kitschy curios. I mean, we didn’t have our own African slave trade so these golliwogs have been imported wholesale from another culture.

When I saw them my jaw dropped, because I’d never actually seen one, especially being sold so nonchalantly. I went and asked the sales woman why that store sold racist toys, but she looked at me blankly and said that “golly dollys” were very popular in Britain. I was so shocked I just left the store.

Note the fact that the people making them and selling them know they’re racist – they’ve dropped the ‘wog’ and they’re only called ‘gollys’ now. I think this is classic capitalism, “we know we’re in the wrong, but you can’t prove it and we should make money before we get rumbled”.

What a load of bollocks. Golliwogs are as racist here in the UK as they are anywhere else.

This summer I was surprised to see a lot of these dolls for sale in a market in Blackpool (a northern English seaside resort), and when I did some googling online later, found this disturbing report in a popular British Sunday paper, the News of the World (a downmarket paper not usually associated with coverage of serious social/political issues!):

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/465772/Angel-faced-racist-aged-12-Girl-burns-golly-at-BNP-fun-day.html

This was exactly the same doll I saw for sale in Blackpool, and leaves no doubt as to how they are perceived, especially by extreme right-wing racists.

As for the British treatment of black soldiers in history, a previous commenter is perhaps unaware of the 1919 race riots and lynch mobs in Liverpool and Cardiff, after the First World War. Demobbed black soldiers and sailors (who had fought for this country) were attacked and killed by racist mobs, and their homes and lodgings destroyed. Read Peter Fryer’s ‘Staying Power: the history of black people in Britain’ if you’d like to learn more about this shameful episode.

It undermines your statements when you preface them with “well, you’re all a bunch of idiots, but here’s what I think”. You might want to check out this site if you’d like to remedy this: http://derailingfordummies.com/

We had the conguitos (which are the Spanish version of peanut M&Ms without the candy coating) for that. Lacasa, the company making them, redesigned the mascot in 2003 due to a professor’s protest (and that, by that time, Black African immigrants had been coming to Spain for some ten years, so the offensive stereotypes were getting more glaring every day).

For instance, there’s a court case over the Tintin books right now: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2009/09/publishers_of_tintin_comic_bei.html

There is a very popular, local brand of drinking chocolate with a jingle from the fifties that went “Yo soy aquel negrito/ del África tropical, /que cultivando cantaba / la canción del Cola Cao.” (I’m the “darkie” /from tropical Africa / who sang, as he worked on the fields / the Colacao song). The use of “negrito” is now racist (it’s just a diminutive and as such, it sounds condescending, as if treating all black people as children). I just made a search, assuming that at some point in its history, Colacao had a golliwog as its logo. To my surprise, they went from a cute (white) toddler, to a woman serving colacao to a girl and a boy, to a quite stylish, slightly abstract representation of a black man and woman sorting out cocoa beans. I think it’s very surprising that there has never been a goliwog in the advertising of a company with the word “negrito” in a jingle that has been in use for at least 50 years!

it’s times like this that start really depressing me about how much racism is built-in to the culture. If I’d seen that toy on vacation, I would totally have snapped it up, assuming it was a cute little character like any other doll, and I’d love playing with it or displaying it. Because I honestly would have had no idea (For the second picture; the other doll is a more obvious stereotype, to my eyes).

The whole thing has been blown out of proportion by the ‘politically-correct police’ later. A bunch of misguided idiots unable to address real problems of racism, with nothing better to do, who used such ridiculous but visible campaigns to promote their own careers.

I am old enough to have lived through it all, and with generations in the UK going back to 1920s.

It is not in the words, or the dollies folks, but the intention behind the words. A lot of those ‘PC’ experts are, quite frankly, quite nasty, humorless, pernicious, busybody cunts behind the facade they enforce on others. You would not want to live in a world ruled by them.

Terms like ‘darkie’ were used innocently, even as terms of endearment. Kids would love their ‘gollie’ and, to be honest, they were a great thing for race relationships. Little white girls loving little black babies. Even nigger, in the UK, did not have the hard connotations it might have done in America. It was just ‘what they were called’ like ‘Jocks’ for the Scots.

I do not know from where the re-invention of them as such hard terms came from. Politics of another time and place … the race hate, and race hustlers, in America I would guess. You have to remember that before the 1950s, the vast majority of Brits had had no interaction with blacks at all, what interaction they had had was positive and, from the 50s on, what blacks there were in the UK were there because they wanted to be. not forced to be.

It is impossible to “hate” something you have never met. If you doubt me, try asking or reading up on the positive experiences of Black GIs in the UK in comparison to the racism they encountered from the White US Army who treated them like animals, “mules”. The White US Army who even had to have special whores just for Blacks to use … right up until Vietnam.

Your average working Brit has no guilt, no shame, no responsibility for black suffering during the period of slavery onwards. Only a handful of toff families, who were equally shafting native Brits, do.

Don’t adopt what the Yanks say … and don’t believe what you read on the Wikipedia folks.

I think there IS a point to be made about cultural differences, and how one thing that is offensive in one country might not be elsewhere. I don’t think golliwogs are that thing. It’s not a doll of a black person. It’s a doll of a racist stereotype.

If you are suggesting Cardiff locals don’t see them as racist because of a different socio-historical context, then that is definitely not the case.

Are you from Cardiff or Wales, or have you been there? There are plenty of black people living in Cardiff, who are probably aware of these and it is unacceptable that these items, purposefully mocking black people are being sold in the present day.

I would say that the anaolgy with mexico is very poor, you are dismissing the sale of golliwogs as cultural differences, which is ludicrous, and suggests a lack of knowledge of race in the UK.I don’t know if this is the case?

The Somali community in Cardiff is one of the oldest black communities in the UK, so while the city is arguably less diverse than others, it is not completely white. Not that the sale of golliwogs is acceptable in white communities anyway.