Page 22 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Consumption in Context . 7

in a store window on the way to a meeting. Buying a pack of gum at a gas
station. Playing with a toy. Riding a bus. Visiting a thrift shop. Doling
out portions of baked beans to your children. Scavenging dumpsters for
cans and food. Displaying a collection of teacups or plastic horses or
trophies. Trying on makeup samples in a department store. Contemplat-
ing your favorite sportcoat. Shoplifting. Talking with your best friend
about which strollers are best. The consumption process is not limited
only to the active: shopping and making purchases. Rather, it includes
engagement with a diverse range of materials, images, and ideas.
Like production, consumption is part of all societies, but contempo-
rary commodity consumption is most often the subject of inquiry and
critique. I make this point in part to underscore the fact that much con-
sumption theory deals with a historically specific form of consumption,
one dependent upon industrialization, mass production, commodity ex-
change, mass media, and, usually, capitalism. While contemporary com-
modity consumption is widely accepted as having first arisen in western
society (Belk 1988), it is today far from being an exclusively western cul-
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tural form, as the growing anthropological literature can attest. That
said, there is no question that, although not distinctive to it, commodity
consumption is a central feature of life in the United States; it is so im-
portant that Grant McCracken proposed that consumption has become
the basis for American culture and society (1988). This does not mean,
however, that American consumer culture can be considered to be uni-
form in either its form or content; the same diversity that typifies Ameri-
can cultures (immigrant, ethnic, racially marked, gendered) is also em-
bedded in consumer lives in the United States. That is, while American
culture is a consumer culture, it does not follow that consumer culture is
inherently American.
Both Carl Nightingale (1993) and Alex Kotlowitz (1999) have sug-
gested that poor African American children share mainstream American
values precisely because they are deeply engaged in consumer culture.
Like nearly all children in the United States, African American children
are deeply engaged in consumer culture, but their engagement with con-
sumption is not what makes them American. In conflating consumer cul-
ture with American culture these authors miss the point that consumer
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culture is diverse internally as well as globally. The idea of consumer
culture employed by Nightingale and Kotlowitz also centers on the de-
sire for brand-name and status items, reducing consumption to its most
ideologically charged aspects—aspects that are highly contested across
class, gender, and racial lines. These desires should not be understood as