Page 193 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

178 . Conclusion

anything to acquire the goods they want. Without denying the grains of
truth upon which such stories are based, I would like to suggest that
there is an entire beach to travel between the grain at one end of this
spectrum and the grain at the other. Presenting constrained consumption
as a kind of irrational, primitive, and shrunken consumer desire trivial-
izes the real limits within which the poor must attempt to provision their
households, clothe their members, educate their children, and so forth.
Families have a great deal at stake in instilling in their children such val-
ues as "spending my money wisely" and sharing resources among house-
holders. Mastering these skills is, in fact, more realistic than it is fatalistic
or irrational. Despite American mythological beliefs to the contrary,
most of those who are born poor are likely to die poor, despite their best
efforts to improve their economic and social status. Without spending
their money wisely and teaching Natalia and her brother a thing or two
about thrift, Natalia's elderly grandparents had hardly a hope of raising
their two grandchildren on their income of $18,000 a year, despite the
fact that they owned their modest home and grew vegetables on a good-
sized plot alongside the house. As children revealed in their shopping
trips, these are lessons they have learned well even at the age of ten.
Rather than being at base a kind of limitation, this is an important form
of social knowledge and cultural action, and they are skills that among
the middle class would be viewed not as horizon-tightening but as signs
of maturity and responsibility. Or perhaps not. Today, middle-class sav-
ings rates are the lowest in a century, consumer debt is reaching new
heights, and middle-class consumption seems to be characterized by a
general lack of fiscal responsibility.
Because consumption is at its root a social process, it is enmeshed with
the full range of social action from positive, altruistic expressions to de-
structive and violent outbursts. The realm of consumption offers ample
space for people to find profound meaning in their worlds and existence,
to integrate (rather than fragment) a sense of self, and to utter or to per-
form commentaries about what they see and feel in daily living. Children
in Newhallville often turned the consumer sphere to their own expressive
and prosocial purposes, using shopping as a way to create connections to
their family and friends, as a sphere of creative play, or a realm in which
they could construct critical assessments of the world around them. The
consumer lives of these children from Newhallville show the complex
ways in which forces of ideology, hegemony, and power can be bent—if
only temporarily—into the contours of a particular life. These children
do not necessarily view racial boundaries (at least as embodied in their