Page 19 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

4 . Consumption in Context

them; as a belief that shapes not only the behavior of many toward these
children, but also children's perceptions of themselves, this myth em-
bodies contemporary consumption at its most ephemerally complex.
Karl Marx's oft-cited observation emphasized that people make their
own history, but under "circumstances directly found, given and trans-
mitted from the past" (Marx [1852] 1963). These kids undertake con-
sumption under the same circumstances that shape all other aspects of
their lives: wrenching economic change, rising social unrest, transforma-
tion of urban landscapes, all in an atmosphere of intensifying racism.
Class, race, and gender differences in consumption cannot be attributed
simply to neutralizing notions of product preferences or shopping habits,
individual likes and dislikes. Rather, these differences may instead be
viewed as being in large part expressions of or responses to structural op-
pression, which is itself often created and enforced through consumer
channels.
In ethnographically documenting the ways in which Newhallville
children engage with the realm of consumption, this work aims to show
that social inequality cannot be reduced to a lifestyle choice, although
individual choices—good and bad—are vital. When Asia speaks of "The
[dramatic pause] Streets [dramatic pause] of Newhallville [dramatic
pause] ..." she draws upon popular imagery that portrays those streets
as rife with vice, crime, and dissolution. In invoking these imaginary
streets, Asia underscores the function of these stereotypes as a sort of so-
cial currency. Some people may "buy into" being on welfare, others "buy
into" ideas about what it means to be on welfare, dealing drugs, poor,
black, and so on.
Over the past century, each new generation has entered a new con-
sumer world where the forms and avenues for consumption and corn-
modification have multiplied exponentially. The twentieth century saw
rapid and dramatic changes in the realms of private and public life that
became subject to commodification, fetishization, and marketing. In
Japan, for instance, it is possible for lonely businessmen to "rent" a fami-
ly, complete with children who will sit down to dinner and have "family"
conversation. For children like those in this study, born in the United
States in the mid-1980s, the incursions made by commodity processes into
their lives were more complete, compelling, and in some instances more
pernicious than ever before. These children had been targeted as con-
sumers since before birth; the 1980s saw a burgeoning of child-oriented
commodities from the experiential (Gymboree and Chuck E. Cheese) to
the Barbification or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-ization of just about