Page 102 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

"What Are You Looking At, You White People?" . 87

The clearly imposed limits on Christmas wanting and getting did not,
however, mean that the holiday was not meaningful to Newhallville kids.
The careful elaboration of the exact prices of their presents was often a
kind of bragging, as when Natalia pointed out the cost of her gold ear-
rings. It is true, as well, that knowing how long and hard many caretakers
had worked in order to get children special gifts—putting items on lay-
away months ahead, for example—made children feel especially loved
and valued.

Babies
Tionna, Natalia, and I were hanging out in my kitchen, and Tionna asked me
when I was going to have a baby. Then she caught herself and said, "No,
don't have any babies, Miss Chin." "Why?" I asked. "Because then you won't
have any time to pay attention to us!" she answered, smiling. "Yeah," Natalia
piped up from the chair where she sat next to me. "We'll come over and ring
the doorbell and you'll say, Tm sorry, you can't come in today, I had to stay
up all night taking care of my baby and I'm tired.'" We bandied this idea
about for a moment and then Natalia looked me straight in the face and said,
"Did you know I had a baby?" She paused for dramatic effect, her face utterly
deadpan. "I put it in the dumpster." Another pause.
I started playing along. "What happened?" I asked. "Well, I couldn't keep it
because I didn't want my family to know about it," she said. "Besides, I didn't
know who the father was. I've been with so many men," she added with a sigh.
Natalia had just turned eleven a couple of months ago. "I just kept shooting
back all this food so my family would think I was just getting fat," she went on.
"I had a baby, too," Tionna said. "I put it in the garbage. I had all these
people's garbage, a whole lot of it, and I put the baby in the bottom of the can
and put the garbage on top. Then the garbage men came, and they recycled
it! They recycled my baby!"

The baby in the garbage can scenario, much like the "man of my dreams"
scenario from our trip to the mall, is one widely available to the girls on
television and in the newspapers. Like meeting the man of your dreams,
the baby in the garbage can (or garbage chute or dumpster or toilet) does
occasionally happen and is not simply an urban legend. It is a stereotype,
much like the killer drug dealers who wear Air Jordans and drive Mer-
cedes, propagated in the media out of all proportion to its actual rate of
occurrence. Like Barbie, Nintendo, and Nike Air sneakers, these images
are mass produced, consumed the way commodities are. Though they are
not paid for in currency, these images, when used, do exact a price.