“We're not safe just because we play with LEGO.”

June 19, 2020 2:09 PM

In the last few weeks, LEGO fan website The Brothers Brick has begun to engage with race and privilege, beginning by highlighting Dave Kaleta’s Black Lives Matter mosaic and asking readers “How has your privilege or heritage affected your participation in the LEGO hobby? And what are you doing to make our hobby a more open and inclusive space for people of all backgrounds?”

Related TBB posts include Pedro Sequeira’s George Floyd sculpture and an interview with Ekow Nimako (direct YouTube link, interview is 45:38). (Ekow Nimako, who probably deserves a separate FPP at some point, is a Ghanaian-Canadian artist who works primarily in black LEGO with an emphasis on Afrofuturist themes; notable pieces include Cavalier Noir and Flower Girl.) Not featured on TBB but worth mentioning is Dave Kaleta’s A Call To Action.

On June 2, the LEGO Group requested that marketers “pause” advertising of sets that include police, as well as the LEGO Architect set The White House, “in light of recent events.” The next day the company announced it “will donate $4 million to organizations dedicated to supporting black children and educating all children about racial equality.”

The discussions about race and privilege have not been universally welcomed by LEGO fans, though many acknowledge that diversity and inclusion remain areas where both the LEGO Group and the LEGO hobby community could do better. Comments on related posts at The Brothers Brick are definitely a mixed bag, though TBB founder and editor-in-chief Andrew Becraft has pushed back against “possessively toxic fandom.” The usual warning about what to do with the comment section often applies, but for those interested, here are the relevant TBB posts not already linked above: George Floyd Was Human, LEGO Stands Against Racism.

Post title taken from one of the closing comments in the interview with Ekow Nimako.

posted by nickmark (6 comments total)

As a white person of roughly the same age as Nimako, the comments on minifigs and color (beginning around 8 minutes into the video) really struck me. It made me think about how, as a kid of maybe ten or so, I remember thinking about how LEGO were really for everyone. That started with a reflection on how because the instructions didn’t use words, it didn’t matter what language kids spoke - even kids who couldn’t read could follow them! And then, thinking about the minifigs (or “LEGO people” as I called them in my head) - none of them were boys or girls: they were these oddly squat figures with just two eyes and a smile and no gender markers whatever - not even hair! Nearly all of my sets were Space, so maybe some other lines did have hair and/or gender markers, but from what I saw, they were clearly not boys or girls, just people. And all of them were bright yellow, which is obviously not a color that anyone actually is - so clearly they were all of us. And this was all a very conscious thought process for me, and I was so glad that there was this really universal toy (I was well aware even as a young white kid of the tokenism and lack of representation in toys/movies/comics) and even as I got older and didn’t play with LEGO so much, it still had a soft spot in my heart because of that inclusiveness.

Then, as they talk about in the interview, LEGO introduced “flesh toned” minifigs. Even though I was in my late 20s by then, I felt really betrayed when it happened. I had friends who thought the Lando mining was great - yay, a black minifig! - but I thought it was awful, because it meant exactly what Nimako is saying - that yellow was really just white all along. Which honestly had never occurred to me until that point (Simpsons notwithstanding; the Simpsons didn’t come along until well after I went through the thought process above). And it just really disappointed me. And when I came back to LEGO when I was older, a lot of the other things I had seen as inclusiveness as a kid were gone: Minifigs had clear gender markers, the aesthetic of them was clearly pretty white (the hairstyles include lost of ponytails neatly-parted hair but not a lot of afros or dreadlocks…). The modern minifigs have a lot of good things about them - the variety of facial expressions is great, and I like that some sets include folks with disabilities - but the inclusion of “flesh tones” remains a place where I really feel like LEGO let us down.

I generally still won’t buy sets that have flesh-toned minifigs, though I’ll make certain exceptions for sets honoring real people (like the Women of NASA set).
posted by nickmark at 2:10 PM on June 19, 2020 [12 favorites]

Ekow Nimako's work just blows me away. I suggest following him on Instagram. Art constructed using LEGO has to push hard to move past kitsch or gimmick. Before Nimako I can only think of two: Ai Weiwei's portraits of political dissidents and Olafur Eliasson's Collectivity Project. But Nimako is just doing piece after piece after piece that are both technically stunning and meaningful.
posted by feckless at 2:37 PM on June 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

If you haven't seen Lego police in a while, here's Evolution of the Brick: LEGO Police Headquarters Sets, and browse Brickipedia's list of police sets, and the page currently shows two police figures with cop shades, and the top one is smirking. Compare this to the more generic, smiling officer from older sets. Implications of skin tone aside (which is a big thing to set aside), the more detailed characters add a range of emotions that becomes more loaded when you're representing characters whose stated role is to "serve and protect," yet they look kind of like smarmy assholes.
posted by filthy light thief at 3:09 PM on June 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

Lego is all about glorifying makers over thinkers.
posted by biffa at 4:06 PM on June 19, 2020

Wow, the Black Lives Matter mosaic link is very well written. I have only an intro level knowledge of LEGO, but I appreciate the level of care that went into their statement and it reminds me that hobbies can be VERY possessive and insular, unthinkingly so. Thank you for posting.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:19 AM on June 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

> Lego is all about glorifying makers over thinkers

Have you not looked at any of the links in this post?
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:33 PM on June 20, 2020 [2 favorites]