Ah, ages 4-10.
Yeah, I think that’s when a lot of black kids start learning about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, too.
Um. At least then someone would have actual ‘fun’?
I gotta admit, as a pinko hippie white knight social justice warrior cosmonaut fan of Obammunism (it’s on my business cards!), who is also in favor of mothers having to have awkward conversations about topics they’d rather avoid with their children, I do not understand the connection. 
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I don’t think it’s garbage. The racial issues in the USA are crazy and deep and complex for outsiders to grasp, let alone navigate with expertise. Even many people raised in American culture from birth still struggle with it. For those of us who don’t have a lifetime of education in American racism and culture, the unknown unknowns are vast. (I was stunned when I first heard of a person losing their job for violating an American racial taboo regarding fruit. I had not the faintest idea that even fruit has racial overtones in the USA. My American cultural blindspots like that are everywhere).
I think you underestimate how much North American culture and racism you have been able to assimilate and intuitively navigate from having lived there. It is not a simple or trivial subject to understand.
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They really do seem to have everything.
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it’s certainly clear that the “cop busting a shoe-less homeless man” may be in fact asking about an odd new headwear trend sprouting in China
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Fun Playmobile story, I got about a dozen set with mostly intact boxes, mostly intact pieces, and a Lego pirate ship with a damaged but whole box for $50 at a garage sale. I flipped those for like $500, IIRC. Most were cowboy and Indian and pirate sets from the late 80s, early 90s. Lego ship was missing about a dozen pieces, but there is a site where you can literally find and order any part ever made and I made it complete to get a higher price.
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I love garage sale finds like that.
A while back I bought a $150 keypad door lock from a guy for $4 because his wife didn’t like the way it looked.
Works fine for me.
Actually, I think it’s pretty good that this kind of thing exists. Cleaning and other manual jobs are necessary and have dignity, so I can’t see why having cleaners is insulting. I find it more offensive where children are taught that these jobs, and therefore the people doing them, are beneath them. I guess it would be different if this was the only place you saw female minifigs, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. We had this growing up:
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having cleaners is NOT insulting, except when you label the box “SUMMER FUN”
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I guess it’s important to see the context then - the Summer Fun theme is all about things you could do while on summer vacation - camping, going to a theme park, staying at a hotel, playing sports etc. You can populate your destinations with different characters, and the hotel has a porter, housekeeping service, a shop and a luxury suite with furniture. The cleaner does have black hair and could be seen as Latina by US customers, but a number of other minifigs in that series also have black hair and different skin colours:
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I have no trouble imagining that 4-year-old-me would have totally unbiased fun making the hobo into my hero and having Charlie-Chaplin-esque hijinks with the fine fellow.
The guy that gets to sleep under a tree, make inventions from trash (eg items outside the playmobil universe) or steal comically-sized legs of ham from the barbie-supermarket, while being pursued by the uniformed guy and the office worker… Heaps of fun!
Plenty of kids books and tales - Grimm, Arabian Nights, Hans Anderson, Roald Dahl,* have a tramp or underprivileged protagonist playing a positive role. Depicting a scene that has value in the context of literature or role-playing or story-making is just what toys are for!
( Enid Blyton, not so much )
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If you can call videoing yourself tugging miserably at your flaccid todger in the hope that you can scandalise some poor minimum wage woman for a brief sense of superiority over someone - fun, then sure, I guess.
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Ah, so you’re familiar with Waldorf toys then?
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Gif bank, please!!!
If you speak of watermelons, I have to admit I was in college before I ever heard of that one. Everyone in my lily-white trailer-park family loved watermelon during the summertime. Had no idea that fruit had baggage for an embarrassingly long time. Still think that baggage is even dumber than most dumb baggages of that sort.
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Kind of in the same boat. Living in rural Pennsylvania, was vaguely aware that racism was an ongoing thing out there. But until college my exposure to African American norms and portrayals was primarily through prime-time television, which tended to portray such folks being as much like my family as anyone else around.
I remember the mention of watermelon in the Arrested Development song “Tennessee” seemed really random to me when it came out, and had the impression there might be some significance to it, but had no idea if that was the case or what it meant.
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