Mel Chen’s chapter “Lead’s Racial Matters” in Animacity looks at race and narratives of globalization and contagion in the context of the 2007 recall of Chinese-made toys, the paint on which contained high levels of lead.  One aspect of this exploration that I find  particularly interesting is the ways in which this ‘crisis’ with its international implications actually impacted racial discourses within the United States.

Chen mentions two layers or two types of racialization that this panic inspired. The first is the framing of lead as “Chinese” through continued association of the potentially dangerous toys with China as a population and geographic space. The second is the instance where focus shifted within the US from the black American child as victim to the white American child as victim.

In the decades leading up to the events of 2007 , lead paint appeared in the context of health concerns with old buildings, where class and race intersected in such a way that resulted in lead poisoning disproportionately affecting African American children.

However, with the lead toy crisis, the physical appearance of the victim shifts. The Child at risk of harm from Chinese-made toys is white, middle class, and often male. (This child is even seen as heterosexual, Chen argues.)

If this child meant to represent all children, this is problematic in that the chosen image reinforces belief in a white male default, framing him as the “everychild”. On the other hand, if the chosen image reflects that the structures and companies behind such ads and campaigns seek primarily to protect these privileged children (and their privileged parents), this plays into discourses of disposability, wherein certain bodies are devalued.

The black child represents a type of “otherness” within the American racial context, but the introduction of another nation/ethnic group as occurred during the toy crisis takes away the need to grapple with ideas of other within and people can instead focus their energies on the other without. Degrees of “otherness” can be disregarded in favour of a very clear “here”/”there” binary.

Chen talks about this mentality of “here” and “there”. Lead is of “elsewhere” and it should not be “here” in America. The introduction of the “lead toys from China” threat shifted attention away from this internal problem “here” to an issue whose origins are “there”, a process that to a large extent erases the existence of lead within the US.

This paradigm of fundamental separation results in monolithic representation of “here” and “there” that applies also to race within these two conceptual spaces. Thus, despite documented health concerns of previous decades and despite great racial diversity in the United States, the child of the American “here”, the child in need of protection, is White.