Page 121 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

106 . Hemmed In and Shut Out

identified as Javan Reed, a/k/a Dwayne Black Person, who lives in a
black neighborhood where everybody deals drugs, in for questioning.
Sources wouldn't say on the record whether Reed a/k/a Person is guilty
as hell.
In order to retain white, middle-class, suburban-dwelling shoppers,
malls in Connecticut, including New Haven, have been aggressive in tak-
ing steps in attempting to reduce the presence of minority youth. Trumbull
Shopping Park, another Connecticut mall, fought a legal battle in order
to gain the right to ban public transit from making stops on its property
on Friday and Saturday nights. Their express reason for making this de-
cision was security problems arising from teenagers—most of whom
were minority youth from the nearby city of Bridgeport ("Mall Wins
Ruling on Limiting Bus Service" 1995). In the early 1980s New Haven
had employed a similar strategy, moving bus stops from directly in front
of the mall to relocate them across the street on the town green. This
move was not as obstructive as that employed by Trumbull Shopping
Park, but involved a considerable increase in discomfort for bus riders
and was widely thought to be racially motivated. The original bus stops,
located in front of the mall, were placed on a covered walkway open to
the street that provided at least some protection from rain and snow.
Across the way on the green, two rather small bus shelters hardly provid-
ed the same amount of protection from harsh weather conditions.
Regardless of the reasons for which consumers who are older, more
affluent, or lighter skinned have abandoned Chapel Square, it is primari-
ly youth and teens (mostly minority) who now constitute the mall's most
important market ("A Teen-Age Pall at the Mall" 1993). Shop owners
have had to develop subtle means of discouraging young people from
spending too much time in the mall's public spaces, while attempting to
continue to entice them to spend their money in its commercial venues.
These strategies include an increasingly visible uniformed security force
and the use of piped music featuring genres thought to be unappealing to
undesirable youth. In a variation of what Russell Baker (1992) jokingly
called "the Beethoven Defense," the New Haven mall often features
songs by the likes of Frank Sinatra. For kids who prefer the driving bass
and salty lyrics of urban hip-hop music, the crooning of Sinatra grates on
their ears as annoyingly as fingernails across a blackboard. That's the
theory anyway.
The Chapel Square mall is not unusual in its attempts to maintain a
profile as a safe, communal location that exists in distinct opposition to