Page 129 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

114. Hemmed In and Shut Out

participant in creating the relationships (or lack thereof) that emerge as
they deal with store personnel, clerks, and other customers. Their ac-
tions are not reactive or predetermined, and in some cases, kids mobilize
their own stereotypes about distrustful store owners even before those
store owners can demonstrate their distrust. Kids often begin to exhibit
the very kinds of loud and disruptive behavior they know will make
people uncomfortable in an attempt at some kind of a social preemptive
strike. These attempts at rejecting the power of others over their own lives
recall the resistance of the working-class "lads" in Paul Willis's classic
account of South London youth (1977). These lads, painfully aware that
school officials deemed them worthy of little else than monotonous
blue-collar factory work, knew they were capable of more and rejected
the school's assessment of themselves by skipping classes, doing poorly
in school, and otherwise opting not to work within the system. This
strategy, paradoxically, ensured that all they were equipped to do once
they graduated was the very unskilled work they wanted to escape. Simi-
larly, for minority kids downtown, the loud and raucous behavior, the
antics and running around provide the satisfaction of a symbolic nose-
thumbing at the powers-that-be while also convincing store personnel
and security that close monitoring and distrust are well founded and
should be continued.
This chapter has analyzed some of the contextual factors shaping the
ways in which a store is thought about, used, and understood by children
like those from Newhallville. Shoppers are not anonymous, historyless
individuals when they walk in the door, and stores are not monolithic
spaces that, many have argued, affect all who enter in predictable ways
(see, for example, Halton 1992; Reece 1986; Williams 1982; Willis 1991).
In the confrontation between historically situated people and socially
constructed spaces, people are reconstructed as particular people in that
space. The attempts of malls across the nation to selectively inhibit the ac-
cess of segments of the population by refusing to allow public transporta-
tion to operate on their property is one way in which mall operators rec-
ognize differences between shoppers as being of great importance.
Not only are people handled and influenced differentially when within
"democratic" commercial spaces like malls, but depending on the par-
ticular place, the impact and results of these incidents can vary widely.
Newhallville children are different kinds of people when they are in
Claire's than when they are at Bob's, and the difference lies in part in the
ways in which they engage with the social spaces they occupy. It does not
matter much when kids are at Bob's that they might be poor. There is not