Page 23 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

8 . Consumption in Context

being peculiarly "American" in any case: as Daniel Miller (1995b) writes,
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"none of us [is] a model of real consumption." McCracken's proposal
about consumption and culture in America suggests something much
more than consumption-as-status-brands: in contemporary society
everything is potentially commoditized and our lives are enmeshed with
consumption not only through brand-name and status items, but also
through the myriad other commodities bought and sold today, both tan-
gible and intangible.
The question is not so much whether poor African American children
can be demonstrated to share mainstream values because they desire to
consume status goods, an assertion made further problematic in that it im-
plies that the rest of black kids' lives are somehow un-American. Under-
standing the consumption of kids like those I knew in Newhallville re-
quires a broad inquiry into their consumer lives that goes beyond a
particular class of commodities and plumbs the connections between in-
dividual children, families, neighborhood, state, and nation. Moreover,
I do not consider "mainstream" U.S. consumer orientations a norm
against which these children's patterns ought to be measured or com-
pared, a position that privileges middle-class taste and values, contribut-
ing to a dynamic in which "blacks are condemned and negatively stereo-
typed for engaging in activities that white people undertake without a
second thought" (Austin 1994a, 225). Rather, I explicitly explore con-
temporary consumption as a sphere of inequality where differences in
consumption are the result of processes beyond that of the accretion of
individual desire. The consumer world I describe in this work is not one
where both the poor and the middle class find spiritual togetherness in
longing for the same things, nor is it one where the same items have simi-
lar "social biographies" (Kopytoff 1986) once they leave the store shelves.
While unwilling to take an unabashedly celebratory position regard-
ing consumer culture, neither am I willing to condemn it as utterly de-
humanizing. Both positions have been argued and explored in impor-
tant streams of scholarship. Contemporary commodity consumption
has been portrayed as creating false needs, substituting form for sub-
stance, and lulling the masses into illusory satisfactions. In the influen-
tial work of the Frankfurt school, scholars' passionate indictments of
mass consumption were spurred by the conviction that true human free-
dom and potential were fatally compromised when people settled for
what the profit-oriented capitalists were willing to provide them as wish
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and dream fulfillment (Adorno 1993; Marcuse 1964). Such theorists as
Jean Baudrillard have focused on the "system of objects" constituted in