Page 119 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

104 . Hemmed In and Shut Out

again. Rather, she returned there armored with the defiance a fifty-dollar
bill afforded her and toting a hefty measure of distrust along as well. This
was an encounter she was bound to repeat nearly every time she returned
downtown.
Children's experiences in the mall and in stores like Claire's, unlike
those in Bob's, are shaped by tensions around issues of race. These ten-
sions, in turn, are conflated with problems related to class. Situations
and interactions in which kids like Asia are made to feel inadequate or
even nonexistent often make shopping an undertaking fraught with dif-
ficulty, and their response is to don their street-tough personas. Such
problematic interactions—where black shoppers are assumed to be un-
able to make purchases, where they are steered toward inferior merchan-
dise, or where they are treated as if giving them attention is a waste of
time—are an important kind of received knowledge in Newhallville.
Deacon Rose, a member of Natalia's family parish, recounted to me one
of these stories from his younger days when he was visiting the segre-
gated South. Deacon Rose was living in Detroit but had gone down to
Mississippi to visit "this woman I was liking" and took her downtown
to look at dresses. They passed a store that had some nice silk dresses in
the window, went in, and began to look at them. The saleswoman, a
white lady, came over and said, "I think maybe you'll like these dresses
better over here," and showed them some cheaper, cotton dresses.
"They're probably more in your price," she said, and Deacon Rose imi-
tated her nasal vowels, raising his voice into a simpering falsetto. He
went on: "Well, I said to her, 'I don't want those cotton dresses. I want
one of these nice silk ones,' and she said, 'I think you'll like the price of
these other ones better.' Now she didn't know that I have twelve hun-
dred dollars in my pocket! I said, 'I like these silk ones and I think I'll
take a couple.'" Deacon Rose finished his tale by saying, "I bought the
dresses, but I don't think she liked it very much."
Deacon Rose's story has much in common with Asia's tale—the pivotal
event is confrontation with a store clerk who assumes (rightly or wrongly)
that the black customer has no money. For both Asia and Deacon Rose,
these encounters arouse a subsequent feeling of dehumanization. In both
stories, this feeling of dehumanization is countered by an ability to bran-
dish money in the salesclerk's face: Asia has a fifty-dollar bill, and Deacon
Rose twelve hundred dollars. In both cases, they were able to assert not
only did they have the money to buy what they wanted, but they had
substantially more than that: they were demonstrably not poor, but they
were, in fact, relatively loaded. But, as Deacon Rose emphasized at the