This blog post is one that I will continue to update as I learn more. Below is an alphabetical list of characters who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (and a few white people) that I know have at least one action figure out there for sale. I am also including a few words…
Blog Posts
The Buccaneers
This is the first of a few pirate crews I’m putting together. I gifted this one to my godson; I will likely do the same with another; but I’ll be keeping two for my little one. With all of the pirate crews, the overall idea is the same, but the crew members are unique. Pirates…
Summer 2021 (Part 2)
This post is a continuation from Summer 2021 Part 1. I really wanted to have an Anansi toy like this custom one that I saw online (created by Double Thwip Customs). It is based on a Marvel comic where they reimagine a bunch of classic Marvel characters in different cultural settings than the one in…
Summer 2021 (Part 1)
In the summer of 2020, I had my nephew living with us for a few months, and one of the things that he loved to do was play with my old action figures. He didn’t like to play alone. He always wanted me to play with him. The things that I learned about him and…
America’s Team
What’s more American than Cowboys? What’s more American than celebrating diversity? … Maybe football and capitalism and mind-numbing entertainment… I’m joking, of course. I put this group of cowboys together because they did not fit in any of the other western crews I assembled. Then I decided to have fun with it and add a…
Westside Outlaws
The name is a tribute to Tupac, but the crew is based on real outlaws from the days of the wild west. The Westside Outlaws believe in getting money over everything, and they don’t respect any of the laws (or enforcers of laws) meant to stop them. I think it’s pretty common for kids to…
The Enforcers
I’m not doing the “good guy vs. bad guy” thing for my kids, but it should be obvious that this crew is going to be at odds with most of the other crews. Their job is to enforce the laws. They enforce laws to protect people’s possessions and to capture and punish people who have…
Birds of a Feather
Three members of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation partner with outsiders who have courage and desire to join their way of life. They protect their homes and go on raids against White settlers to get what they need to survive. Each of the members of this crew is based on a real person from history. With…
Los Bandoleros
Really, they’re not bandits or robbers–at least not if someone is thinking of that term as purely motivated by selfishness. This band of custom Playmobil toys are one of many attempts to help my kid think about the harm of greed and the honor of redistributing wealth in order to benefit the masses. From the…
The Rufus Buck Gang
I was inspired by watching The Harder They Fall (2021). It was really cool to see all these Black people as the central characters in a Western movie and to know that they are all based on real people. I thought, “that’s kind of what I’m doing with these all these Playmobil sets for my…
Golden State Warriors
Did you know that California is named after a fictional Black woman? Montalvo, a Spanish writer from the early sixteenth century, wrote a famous epic tale about Christians fighting against Muslims who were assisted by a warrior Queen named Calafia, her Black women warriors, and her fierce griffins. In Montalvo’s fictional world, Queen Calafia is…
Baby Jesus
My little one is still too young to play with these toys but I decided to make this Nativity scene for him to look at. I hope that we can set it up together next year and that we can talk about the significance of this religious story in fresh and relevant ways every year.
Wifey with the Win
One of the toys that I bought my nephew for this fifth birthday (in addition to the toys that I already mentioned) was another Green Lantern whose real name is Simon Baz. I had hoped to use this toy to teach him a little about Islam and Islamophobia. Unable to contain my excitement about this…
Ghost Dance Resistance
The Ghost Dance has a much more complicated history than I will share here. In short, the dance was part of a spiritual movement in the 19th century that brought together many Native American peoples hoping to bring back spirits of the dead who would make peace on earth and remove the White colonizers. Many…
Revolutionary Toys for Revolutionary Boys
A friend of mine is a real leader when it comes to radical change. She writes articles and books about the ways that we need to focus on addressing the root causes of harm in our communities so that we can build a society where policing and prisons become obsolete. She critiques the dangers of…
My Baby’s First Action Figures
The first two action figures that I bought my baby were Valkyrie and Falcon. He was about eight months old, and I thought that I could use these two toys (just about as well as any random doll or other toy) to teach him basic human body parts and movements. So, that is what I…
How to Get Black Action Figures
Back in the 1980s, Yla Eason saw the problem with the absence of Black toys and she did the work of creating Olmec Toys so that our kids could at least have some toy that looked like them. A few decades later, you can get the impression that toy companies have taken great strides and…
Blackened Playmobil
Playmobil got a lot of flack a few years ago for a certain pirate ship set that they were selling in which one of the pirates has brown skin and a slave collar around his neck. According to complaints, the toy was racist because “It told my son to put a slave cuff around the…
“Heart Grew 3 Sizes that Day”
Some family members have referred to me as a “Grinch” before. I’m not much of a fan of Christmas. But I will say that giving gifts has been pretty fulfilling, especially when I feel like I might have helped a child in their development as a caring person. One such instance came in June of…
A Few Toys for My Nephew’s 5th Bday
As my nephew approached his fifth birthday, I ordered a handful of toys for him from eBay. Since we live a couple thousand miles away from each other, I asked his mom to gift him the toys one-by-one on different days (because I figured he might disregard some immediately if he gets them all at…
Can Black Toys Really Help?
A few years ago, Black-ish had an episode called “ToysRn’tUs” where Diane and Bow protested after they found that the toy company they wanted to buy from had a ton of options but only two Black dolls–a slave and a civil rights activist, who both carry the moniker “Sassie.” At the protest, Diane holds up…
First Experiment with Black Toys Matter
I bought my nephew a John Stewart (Green Lantern) toy as my first experiment with this whole #BlackToysMatter idea. After learning what I could about Green Lantern on Wikipedia, I decided that he could work well to teach my nephew about mental health and depression. I wanted to make sure that he know that heroes…
How Black Toys Matter Got Started
In the summer of 2020, my nephew was staying with me for a couple months, and he wanted us to play with my old action figures that my brothers and I had kept from our childhood. I was able to get him to take a liking toward a couple of my favorite toys (Nightcrawler and…
Why I Made Black Toys Matter
I love being Black. That’s just part of how I was raised. From the time we were little, my brothers and I were taught by our parents to love our blackness and to support Black people in all our strivings. But as I grew older I realized that my stalwart Black pride was not enough…