Page 27 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

12 . Consumption in Context

unaccounted for, their consumer entanglements are not less real for the
lack of scholarly attention. As Regina Austin observes, the kind of bour-
geois intellectual attention that tends to be aimed at poor black con-
sumers often takes the form of moralizing and pronouncements of taste
(1994b). The not-so-subtle message often seems to be that if only those
people would get themselves on track (by wanting the right things,
dressing appropriately, buying the right foods), they too could be middle
class. And there's the rub—getting on track is not simply an issue of
willpower and stick-to-it-iveness. Consumption does not take place in a
vacuum-sealed world of signs and symbols, but rather in a messy mate-
rial world where other processes are also at work. Thus, while this book
is expressly concerned with the consumer lives of Newhallville children,
I also argue that these consumer lives cannot be understood apart from
the political and economic context and the productive milieu. This is not
meant to imply that consumption is ultimately reducible to questions of
production. The conditions present in the local, national, and even global
economies that create landscapes dominated by empty factories, aban-
doned homes, and empty lots, a social scene with poverty and joblessness
on the rise and education on the decline, are conditions that profoundly
influence the ways in which these children come to understand them-
selves and the world in which they live.
Asia and Natalia's comments about Barbie ("nice," not "dope"; why
not fat?; why not abused?) were generated less than two blocks away
from the rubble of the factory that once employed 12,000 people, across
the street from a now burned-out three-story apartment building, facing
a road badly patched and potholed and minimally maintained by the
city. Their comments and perceptions were not caused by these condi-
tions, but they were surely shaped by them—and would not have meant
quite the same thing if uttered by their upper-middle-class peers living in
the handsome brick and Tudor mansions a quarter of a mile away in the
Prospect Hill neighborhood. While those living in poor urban areas are
undoubtedly both isolated and alienated from the communities around
them, they are also connected to those places. This was particularly
clear in New Haven, where kids from Newhallville regularly left their
neighborhood to go to school, go downtown, visit relatives, or go to the
supermarket. The role of geographic space in the lives of the urban poor
is multidimensional, and a variety of places are important to them be-
yond the neighborhoods in which they live.
Feminist theorists have emphasized the multiple axes and experiences
of subjectivity (Moore 1988; Visweswaran 1994) and, similarly, a num-