Page 126 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Hemmed In and Shut Out . 1 1 1

Despite widespread feelings in New Haven that the mall is not a par-
ticularly safe or comfortable space to be, the things that these kids say
about the mall and the things that they do there indicate that, for them,
the mall offers freedoms unavailable elsewhere, while also imposing par-
ticular forms of restraint. "Kids come here to stay out of trouble and to
shop," said sixteen-year-old Cherie Lee in an interview with the New
York Times ("A Teen-Age Pall at the Mall" 1993). Yet even as a store
like Claire's offers an opportunity for independent, grown-up shopping,
it also exposes children to another grown-up experience: being directly
confronted with racism.
At the New Haven mall, pointed efforts at constraining the activities
and limiting the presence of minority youth permeate the atmosphere.
Security guards help to provide the safety kids seek but also ensure that
safety in part through an intense monitoring of minority kids. Children
are hardly unaware that they are at best only temporarily welcome in
most mall spaces—and then only under certain circumstances—and that
they are almost if not wholly unwelcome in others. Natalia's sudden and
loud announcement in Claire's that "that white lady is following us
around" is an acknowledgment of this state of affairs as well as an overt
challenge to them. Natalia may have had the gumption to make this
challenge because she did, in fact, have a twenty-dollar bill in her pock-
et. Similarly, Asia's insistent conviction that a salesclerk in Claire's was
laughing at her because she had no money could only be defused by re-
turning to the store to brandish money and retrieve her self-confidence.
Under these circumstances, Claire's is a location for Newhallville girls
that is chock-full of complexity and conflict, where their race marks
them—at least in their own minds—for monitoring and judgment. The
loud and often disruptive behavior of Newhallville kids in the mall can
be seen, in part, as an assertion of their right not only to be where they
are but also their right to exist outside the borders of their neighborhood.
These girls' shouts and suspicions point to their growing awareness that
to be black in this world, unlike in Newhallville, is to be other, and to be
suspect; to be black in Newhallville, however, is to be shut out from
places like downtown, and hemmed into a neighborhood with pleasures
and dangers of its own.

Conclusion
[R]acial, economic, legal and social disempowerment can be con-
densed into a glance or a tone of voice. . . . The store is a key site
where this multiaxial disempowerment is put into practice. It is where