Podcasts: the cusp of communicatory evolution. At least, they are in my world.
Today I downloaded my first podcast. The action served as homework for my Capstone AgJ class here at Mizzou, and I was given free rein: any podcast that caught my eye. Being the sentimental type, I chose a piece from Chicago Public Radio’s series, “This American Life,” entitled “Matchmakers,” which I assumed would be a fluffy, tender story. Wrong.
The podcast consisted of a prologue and three acts, each set to a different background song and each successively more depressing. The first was a story of a failed romance in Afganistan; the second one was of a Jewish woman who tried (unsuccessfully) to set up a kidney matchmaking service and motivate people to donate a kidney to a complete stranger. The third story was the most disturbing, according to the narrator and also to me. An actress, Elna Baker, tells of her job as a doll saleswoman at the giant toystore, FAO Schwartz. She worked as a “nurse” in a doll “nursery,” selling lifelike dolls to little girls in a pseudo-adoption-agency. What at first was a somewhat boring job, spiced up by slightly malicious “accidents” the “nurses” would feign involving a deformed factory reject doll, turned solemn due to the encroaching push of racism. Thanks to media attention, the dolls became absurdly popular, and all the white babies sold out, except the factory reject dubbed Baby Nubbins. Urged to tell unhappy customers they could always shop online “for a wider selection,” Baker realized the more appropriate comment was that you could shop online “for a WHITER selection.”
The ethnic dolls went slowly, until only black babies remained. Then, to Baker’s shock, deformed Baby Nubbins went next, bought by an impatient white mother and her sullen young daughter. The story ends with the unhappy trio leaving the toystore, and it left me feeling discouraged in this world of seeminly endless racism. What are we teaching our children?
Tags: matchmaking, racism
