Page 130 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Hemmed In and Shut Out . 115

much to buy, the merchandise changes very little from week to week, and
everybody in the neighborhood knows a lot about everybody else in any
case. Neither is their blackness an issue at Bob's; it is instead a point of
common ground. At Claire's and in the mall, the confluence of poor,
working-poor, working-class, and middle-class blacks and whites can at
times serve to fuel their fantasies about each other more than anything
else, as the Advocate's April Fool's Day front page attempted to illustrate.
Being black at Claire's is problematic, but often the excitement of the at-
mosphere is worth it. Being poor at the mall is not just a quiet matter of
how much money one is toting in a purse, pocket, or backpack. For kids
like Tionna, Asia, and Natalia, it shapes and directs the form and content
of most of their time there, either as a sort of specter haunting others'
suspicions about them, or as a painful reality forcing their simultaneous
admission that such suspicions are true, while asserting that their status
as human beings should not be diminished on the basis of their inability
to buy.