USA TODAY International Edition
Be more like ‘ woke’ LEGO to build up our children
Who doesn’t love LEGO? I sure do, unless I step on them, which doesn’t happen often, although I expect the risk will grow with each new grandchild.
That’s why I was perplexed to hear that these beloved plastic bricks have been snarled in an international media controversy. Last fall, the LEGO Group announced a new line of LEGO figures meant to celebrate human diversity.
These “re- imagined” characters are meant to display a wide array of traits you don’t often see in mass- produced toys, including vitiligo, Down syndrome, anxiety disorder and limb differences. The move has put LEGO smack in the middle of a fierce battlefront in our overheated culture wars. Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have blasted the company for going “woke.”
I don’t think I need to take up too much of this space or your time explaining why diversity in toys is nothing to get upset about and is actually a good thing. Children learn through play. As they explore the vast world and their place in it, they come to understand who they are and where they belong.
LEGO’s mission of presenting all children should be celebrated
We all differ in what we look like, what we know and what we can and cannot do. If popular toys like LEGO can give more children, especially those with disabilities, a more complete sense of all that is human and familiar – familiar as in “family” – God bless them.
The LEGO Group seems to take this mission seriously. In announcing its newest “LEGO Friends” characters, it cited a recent study it conducted among parents and young children that found “an overwhelming desire for more representation in play and more discussion on diversity.”
The research found that 73% of children felt that there were not enough toys with characters that represented them.
Honoring those kids’ wishes seems pretty worthwhile to me. And completely benign.
It’s worth pausing to examine why it has gotten some people so mightily riled.
“Woke” is more than just a word to yell at the TV. It has become shorthand for an array of cultural and political arguments, some of them petty, many of them disturbing. People who use it as a slur may find it hard to define, but they know “woke” when they see it – when they encounter views different from theirs about things such as identity, sexuality, history and science. It allows them to dismiss uncomfortable truths about racism, ignorance, violence and exclusion.
For those on the receiving end of the dismissal, that’s a problem.
We’ve come a long way since the first Special Olympics
Advocating and organizing for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities used to be problematic. It was once a radical act – let’s call it “woke.” When the first athletes of Special Olympics gathered in Chicago in 1968, racing around Soldier Field, some onlookers were dismayed.
Many well- intentioned people, including many loving parents, called it reckless that we would hold this type of competition. The kids would freak out. They would be embarrassed – or embarrassing. They would hurt themselves. Their hearts would give out.
Better for them to stay where they were: Indoors. In institutions. Invisible.
Wherever and whenever they are able, people who have been shut out are saying: Enough. We are through with that. We deserve to be included. We demand it.
If you go to a Special Olympics event, you will witness it – that ferocious thirst for inclusion, cloaked in joy.
In the outcry over “wokeness,” this is where it gets real. When the word is as an all- purpose insult, delivered with a smirk, the message is clear to the people being tarnished: Your concerns are ridiculous or contemptible. Stop trying to upend the way we’ve always done things. What you do, what you talk about, how you live your life – we hate it, which means we hate you.
And we don’t want to see you. Some people don’t want to see those LEGO figures, and they don’t want others to see them, either. But they’re not going to stop this changing world from evolving into the future. LGBTQ+ people, people of color, people with differences are challenging long- dominant views and prejudices about language, perceptions, politics, ways of life.
The process is messy. It can be painful. But it’s also full of hope, and incredibly constructive.
Constructive! Here’s a thought – to get through these turbulent times together, maybe we should all be more like LEGO. Colorful. Unbreakable. Able to easily click with others, even though we are all different shapes, colors and kinds.
Always ready to build something new and beautiful. Enjoy us, respect us, have us around. Just don’t step on us, and you’ll be fine.
If popular toys like LEGO can give more children, especially those with disabilities, a more complete sense of all that is human and familiar – familiar as in “family” – God bless them.