Page 128 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Hemmed In and Shut Out . 113

one that mingled understandings of race and class together—that fanned
the flames of community outrage over the police beating of Rodney
King. Against the backdrop of a changing economy that had left the
working class increasingly without work and local businesses without
business, the riots were what Fiske calls "loud public speech by those
whose voices are normally silenced or confined to their own media"
(484). In contrast, Farrakhan speaks publicly, loudly, and often. The or-
ganization that he heads, the Nation of Islam, explicitly points to the
economic realm as an arena of oppression of blacks and urges its follow-
ers to start their own businesses and to patronize stores that are black-
owned and -operated. In the words of one minister during a service at a
Nation of Islam temple that I attended in Connecticut in August 1992:
We all got to be teachers of the poor and underprivileged out there.
What you going to do, sit here and run around with a puff head and
keep it all to yourself? That's what the white man does. The white man
just keeps it all to himself. If you sit there and let that happen, you're
acting like a slave. You are afraid to go out and take what belongs to
us. The honorable Elijah Muhammad said that nothing's going to
happen to you. You can go to work and not worry, let God protect
you. But he's not going to come out of the sky with a machine gun
every time somebody calls you nigger. He's going to come out of you!

This excerpt from this minister's much longer social and spiritual
analysis of American society elides the social and cultural with the mate-
rial and economic. What the "white man just keeps all to himself" is a
little unclear—is it knowledge, resources, jobs, money? The vagueness
may be intentional and meant to indicate all of the above. Moreover, as
is often the case, class and race seem to be given some equivalency in
this speech, with blacks being "poor and underprivileged" and the white
man having everything.
The different social and consumer experiences available to children
in local groceries compared to downtown stores like Claire's are not two
halves of a whole. The familial and socially chaotic atmosphere of Bob's
does not compensate for the tension and mutual suspicion that charac-
terizes the social scene at Claire's; the array of merchandise at Claire's is
not an effective foil for the limited choice and higher cost of shopping in
the neighborhood's small groceries. The polarization of children's ex-
periences when downtown versus in neighborhood stores can be directly
traced to ongoing historical processes, including the economic decline
of the city and region and local policymaking. Children are themselves