Strictly hip hop news

Just a month ago, Walmart was publicly chastised for placing gangsta rappers in Black History Month displays at a number of stores across the nation, now the cheapie retailer is in trouble again — this time for the way its prices Barbie Dolls.

At least one of its stores slashed the price of a brown-skinned Barbie doll to nearly half of that of the doll’s White counterpart, according to ABC News.

A photo posted to Latino-interest site Guanabee.com earlier this month shows packages of Mattel’s Ballerina Barbie and Ballerina Teresa dolls hanging side by side in a Louisiana Walmart. The Theresa dolls are marked as being on sale at $3.00. The Barbies to the right of the Theresa dolls, meanwhile, retain their original price of $5.93. The dolls are identical aside from their color — a fact which has some cynics questioning Walmart’s suspicious price slash.

“The implication of the lowering of the price is that’s devaluing the Black doll,” says Thelma Dye, executive director of the Northside Center for Child Development, a Harlem organization founded by pioneering Black psychologists and segregation researchers Kenneth B. Clark and Marnie Phipps Clark. “While it’s clear that’s not what was intended, sometimes these things have collateral damage.”