Page 162 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Ethnically Correct Dolls . 147

adept at throwing out sophisticated stock phrases assessing the current
state of race relations. I had a memorable comeuppance when Sugar, a
twelve-year-old girl, was demonstrating some especially sexually explicit
"Jamaican" dance steps. Watching her splayed out on the floor and mak-
ing graphically detailed humping motions, I blurted, "That's disgust-
ing! " Utterly composed, she shot back, "That's not disgusting, that's my
culture."
Sugar's response to my comment instantly and effectively placed our
interaction within the arena of racial and cultural difference. Had her
grandmother, who was her primary caretaker, witnessed the same
demonstration, the conflict was more likely to have been framed in terms
of age and authority. (I can imagine it: Sugar's grandmother sees what
she is doing and tells Sugar in no uncertain terms that she is to quit it.
Sugar is mortified, if only because she is worried about being punished.)
At one level, Sugar was well aware that invoking our supposedly funda-
mental differences was the surest way to shut me up. At another level,
however, Sugar attempted to shape the situation so that my only grounds
for objection could be along racial and cultural lines, thus denying the
possibility that age and authority had anything to do with my relation-
ship with her. Her response seemed to say that my being taken aback by a
twelve-year-old barely pubescent girl so enthusiastically bumping and
grinding a schoolroom floor could not be made of the same stuff of her
grandmother's objections. The sophistication of Sugar's response is at
once as shallow as it is deep, and shares this quality with other seemingly
off-the-cuff statements that kids in Newhallville would make about race
and difference in their worlds.
Statements like Sugar's, while a sign of kids' acuity, are also a kind
of diversionary device. Their impressive ability to adroitly disparage or
mobilize the social and geographic dividing lines between black and
white, the haves and the have-nots, the ghetto and the suburb, or any
of the other classic oppositions is diversionary because children's rela-
tionships to race and racism are more complex than the sound bites
they have so skillfully mastered: to say "that's my culture" is in some
ways to say nothing at all, but to say everything as well. This very mas-
tery of the canned observation enables these children to evade the raw
and brittle nature of their own racial experience and the racialized ter-
ritories they traverse. The effectiveness of speech like Sugar's lies as
much in its ability to prevent discussion as it does in an ability to pro-
mote it.
Despite the constraints posed by sound-bite discussion and racialized