Page 26 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Consumption in Context . 11

chies, and the social politics of language. Like Davila's study of the His-
panic market, my work seeks to understand consumption as embedded
in everyday politics, resonating with the larger political economy in
which consumer items, images, and opportunities are generated. This
explicitly political terrain is fraught with tensions, many arising from
the multiple forms of social inequality that permeate most contempo-
rary lives and identities: those of race, class, gender, age, and sexuality.

Consumption and Social Inequality
Much research on the consumer lives of those who are poor and/or mi-
nority has been generated within the concepts of "disadvantaged con-
sumers" or the "ghetto market." Interest in these areas was sparked in the
late 1960s, precipitated by widespread urban unrest and the 1967 riots in
major U.S. cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and New
Haven (Andreasen 1975; Caplovitz 1967; Honeycutt 1975; Sturdivant
1969). Looting—or what Fiske (1994), in an examination of the 1991
Los Angeles riots, calls "radical shopping"—was an important element
in these riots, alerting consumer and marketing researchers to the effects
of race, class, poverty, and ghettoization on consumers. It could be ar-
gued that the problems sparking the riots of 1967 have actually intensi-
fied since that time (real wages are down, social welfare budgets are
shrinking along with municipal tax rolls, businesses are fleeing "inner
city" areas, and so on), yet the interest in the consumer lives of those who
are not middle class seems largely to have fizzled. Alan Andreasen charges
that "these changing and worsening problems [are] subject to sustained
neglect on the part of academic researchers" (1986,113).
Extant studies document the particular difficulties typically faced by
disadvantaged consumers: local stores carrying inferior brands for inflat-
ed prices, high incidence of time-payment at usurious rates of interest;
poor access to well-stocked supermarkets and pharmacies; an absence of
local banks; and a dearth of businesses such as dry cleaners, hardware
stores, and the like (Alwitt 1995; Andreasen 1975,1976,1986; Honeycutt
1975). These studies document as well the money-management strategies
adopted by households where earnings often are not generous enough to
cover the cost of rent, food, and transportation, much less such essentials
as cleaning supplies, telephone service, school pencils and notebooks,
household appliances, clothing, and medical care (Edin 1991; Honeycutt
1975; Okongwu 1996).
Much consumption theory founders on the question of poor con-
sumers because it implicitly assumes that consumers are, first and fore-
most, middle class. And yet, although poor consumers remain largely