Page 192 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Conclusion . 177

off) various spaces for play, fears, and fantasies. Triumphantly slapped
down on the counter in Asia's imagined rebuke of a judgmental cashier, a
fifty-dollar bill can be unlike the sweaty handfuls of change the girls
place on Bob's counter. The fifty-dollar bill is charged with racial conflict
and the received humiliation of being thought to be poor; there is little or
no shame in scraping together a pile of coins to buy cheese crackers at
Bob's, where you can expect the black storekeeper to not only sell you
snacks but to fill your ear with advice offered in the uncompromising
tones of a strict grandfather.
This book has centered its attention on the ways in which consump-
tion is implicated in the exercise of oppression and in responses to such
oppression. Because much of the oppression operative in the consumer
sphere is symbolic, much of this book has been generated in tension
with stories told about the consumption of the poor and of racial mi-
norities. I have endeavored to show in my analysis of consumption
under slavery and the production of images of black pathological con-
sumption, for instance, that such oppression is operative at both the
symbolic and material levels, both of which have real and telling effects
on people's lives. Such images and portrayals are an important element
in the politics of consumption, a politics that portrays the consumption
of the poor as being, on the one hand, problematic because they do not
want enough and, on the other, dangerous because they want too much.
Tales of constrained consumption are often used as examples to show
why the poor cannot get ahead, and a lack of consumer desire is often
seen as preventing the poor from attaining middle-class status. At the
same time, we have the apocalyptic stories about the pathological con-
sumption of the poor. Rather than not wanting enough, these poor people
want too much. In this vein, terms like compensatory consumption sur-
face with regularity. The beauty of this discourse is that whether consum-
ing too little or too much, the supposed consumer orientation of the poor
explains their poverty.
It must be remembered that these stories are tales mostly told by the
privileged about the poor and working class. They are not the stories that
the poor and working class tell about themselves. As such, they are arti-
facts of the power wielded in the cultural arena, where, as the proverb
says, "Hunters will only remain heroes until lions begin writing history."
On the one hand, these tales suggest that the poor are materially impover-
ished and that their imaginations lack richness. Alternatively, the impli-
cation is that the poor cannot or will not grasp the difference between
fantasy and reality and, despite the real limits on their incomes, will do