Page 21 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

6 . Consumption in Context

consumer experience where desire is fettered by material deprivation and
social demands. These are ties that can bind, chafe, and cut, but they are
also ties that hold their world together.
After two years of field research in Newhallville my primary conclu-
sion was that the monumental pathology commonly perceived to be over-
running our "inner cities" was not exactly monumental in Newhallville
and, while present to some degree, was certainly only a small portion of
what consumption was about for local kids. What did I see if it was not
what we "know" is going on? The children in this study engage with the
consumer world by talking about Barbie as well as by playing with her;
by wanting an item, and not just possessing it; by knowing lyrics to com-
mercial jingles without ever having laid eyes or hands on the object itself.
Their engagements with the consumer world, at the material, ideological,
personal, and communal levels, are continually constrained by family,
friends, neighborhood, and larger social entities of city, state, and nation
and the global economy. Children's consumer lives not only speak of
these connections between themselves and the world at large but also
embody them. The issue is not so simple as the invasion of children's
worlds by masterminds of marketing: it is a long way from the corpo-
rate headquarters of Disney to the dining room. Despite the fact that
mass-produced items are on their face all alike, it is the context in which
they are used and understood by particular children that makes them
meaningful.
In Newhallville the pressures of fantasy worlds projected by tele-
vision, advertising, and the downtown mall collide with the profoundly
antifantasy experience of being both economically strapped and black in
the United States. From the outside, this mixture of consumer culture
and poverty has long been viewed as dangerously combustible, resulting
in crazed pathological consumers who kill for sneakers and are addicted
to brands. Such destructive images are based more on fiction than they
are on fact, and it is impossible to understand these children's lives as
consumers or as people through a filter of these assumptions. I do not
propose to replace such stereotypes with their opposite: an image of the
poor as noble and giving and at one with their deprivation. Rather, in
insisting that the stereotypes at both ends of the spectrum are flawed,
my aim is to describe a more complex and contradictory terrain.

Thinking about Consumption
Watching ads on TV. Throwing your TV away. Fantasizing about a car or
game or house or coat. Making budgets and clipping coupons. Glancing