Page 17 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

2 . Consumption in Context

don't think of fat Barbie ... you don't think of pregnant Barbie. You never,
ever ... think of an abused Barbie.

A few minutes later, Natalia announced into the tape recorder: "I
would like to say that Barbie is dope. But y'all probably don't know
what that means so I will say that Barbie is nice!" Asia commandeered
the tape recorder and took on an Oprah-like persona. Pretending to ad-
dress an invisible, nationwide television audience, she announced, "The
[dramatic pause] Streets [dramatic pause] of Newhallville [dramatic
pause] . . . Next on the Asia Show," intoning her words with the same
overblown, mock solemnity pioneered on daytime talk shows.
Natalia and Asia's critique is about Barbie, but it is aimed at an imagi-
nary national television audience. The forms of distance recognized by
these girls in their dialogue—distance from commodities like Barbie, dis-
tance from the projected media audience, and distance from me—are
central to their experience of the world of consumption and to their ex-
periences of the world in general. As Natalia and Asia played at being
talk-show hosts, they demonstrated an understanding that the primary
consumers of media and the images it produces are neither generated in
places like Newhallville nor aimed at people who live there. Natalia rec-
ognizes that audiences beyond the immediate vicinity literally do not
speak her language, and she roughly translates the richly evocative
"dope" with its hip and funky connotations as the equivalent of the
word "nice," a word saturated with notions of propriety, acceptability,
and adherence to the norm. Asia's stance as she addresses this audience is
critical, playful, and ironic all at once. She knows that the audience for
Oprah (or the Asia Show) is not interested in "the streets of Newhallville"
as they exist and how their residents experience them, but rather audi-
ences want to see and hear about "The [dramatic pause] Streets [dramatic
pause] of Newhallville [dramatic pause] ..." Just as the imagined tele-
vision audience does not speak their language, Barbie does not represent
a future to which Natalia or Asia can seriously or even imaginatively as-
pire. The specific alternatives these girls pose for Barbie address impera-
tives particular to their own lives: they wonder why there is no Barbie
that is fat, or pregnant, or abused—a Barbie bearing the signs of being
the kind of kid who might be living in Newhallville and having a life
more rather than less like their own. Natalia and Asia's questions and
observations are not just about Barbie. As poor black girls in a consumer
world that does not extend full citizenship to them, what they are ques-
tioning goes beyond a single toy. They understand that in the consumer