Page 18 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Consumption in Context . 3

sphere normalcy is represented by the white middle class. In such a
world, poor consumers are not only an oxymoron but an active threat to
a cultural apparatus that is predicated upon the ability to buy.
This ethnography explores the consumer lives of poor and working-
class minority children living in New Haven, Connecticut, a medium-
sized New England city. Although the culture of consumption has been
written about extensively, the breadth and complexity of consumption
within contemporary industrialized societies has not yet seen much at-
tention, particularly among anthropologists. In looking at the consumer
lives of poor and working-class, racial-minority children, this work aims
not only to explore and illustrate the ways in which contemporary com-
modity consumption is internally differentiated, but also to highlight an
aspect of contemporary consumption that often has been overlooked: its
role as a medium through which social inequalities—most notably of
race, class, and gender—are formed, experienced, imposed, and resisted
(Belk 1995; Carrier and Heyman 1997).
The question of the relationship between social inequality and con-
sumption is important now because class, gender, sexuality, and race are
often portrayed in popular forums as being consumer choices of indi-
viduals rather than being shaped in any important way by economics,
history, or politics. The historical experiences of African Americans pose
especially strong challenges to these notions: slavery and segregation,
for example, have shaped the ways African Americans have engaged
with the consumer sphere from the outset, both in terms of limiting their
ability to consume and in constructing enslaved people as objects of the
consumer desire of others. These processes, which were enforced from
without as well as experienced from within, have profoundly influenced
the consumption practices and beliefs not only of African Americans but
of the "mainstream" as well—albeit in different ways. Tying the small
details of children's daily activities, such as visiting the neighborhood
store or the downtown mall, to ongoing structural processes illustrates
that the context in which children engage with consumption shapes
both the choices available to them and the choices that they make. In
other words, the context of consumption matters, and matters quite a
bit. In Newhallville girls walking to the neighborhood store fear rape,
not racism. In contrast, at the mall they combat the perception that they
are shoplifters because they are black, while fantasizing elaborately
1
about romantic encounters. Even popular media images of crazed and
brand-addicted "inner city" youth willing to kill for the items they want
are commodities that circulate among people and are consumed by