Page 127 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

1 1 2 . Hemmed In and Shut Out

racial power can be redirected along economic and legal axes. . . .
Store counters are the furniture of capitalism, the equivalent in the
sphere of consumption of the workbench in that of production. (Fiske
1994,481)
The disparaging glance or tone of voice directed at Newhallville children
in Claire's and in the mall is part and parcel with the social inequality
they experience in other aspects of their lives, and, as John Fiske notes, it
is in stores and across sales counters where minority consumers often
come face to face with social disempowerment that is fundamentally de-
humanizing. The tension that these children felt, tension over being ob-
served and judged when off their home turf, was particularly pronounced
in downtown stores but surfaced even on the street the minute they were
over the neighborhood's borderline: remember Tionna's shout at a pass-
ing car, "What are you looking at, you white people?" One wonders
what they might have answered.
Tionna's question is very much like Natalia's loud pronouncement
that "that white lady is following us around." Both suggest that in New
Haven whites and blacks view each other through a distorting lens. The
larger structural issues at work in creating neighborhood and downtown
spaces that are themselves implicated in the creation and perpetuation of
social and racial inequality in New Haven suggest that any significant
transformation of these children's experience must also involve funda-
mental changes in the city's geographic as well as social scene. Neverthe-
less, small changes in the consumer experiences of children, particularly
downtown, can work to transform what Fiske refers to as the "multiaxial
disempowerment" that can be the result of the transactions taking place
across the store counter, between clerk and customer. It is not the aim of
this chapter to suggest what those changes might be, but rather to sug-
gest the far-reaching implications of children's consumer experiences in
important consumer sites. The focus has been primarily upon places like
Bob's and Claire's, but the primary issues to be addressed, while ex-
pressed in these locations, concern society at large. Transforming urban
social spaces requires engagement with and understanding of these larger
social processes.
Both the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles and the growing power and
popularity of figures like Louis Farrakhan attest to the centrality of con-
sumption as a political arena and the store as the battlefield where the
struggle is bound to be waged. In Los Angeles it was to some extent a
festering resentment between local blacks and Korean store owners—