Page 28 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Consumption in Context . 13

her of feminist geographers emphasize that space itself is experienced
and constructed in multiple rather than unitary ways (Holcomb 1986;
Rose 1984). Feminist geographers have not been alone in conceptualiz-
ing geographic spaces as being constructed and contested in multiple
ways by relations of class, race, and gender. From the very specifically lo-
cated work of Neil Smith on New York's Thompkins Square Park (1992)
to David Harvey's influential treatises on changes in capitalism and geog-
raphy (1989), geographers have been building perspectives that focus
upon making connections between the individual and a larger political
economy and have tended to avoid portraying the "inner city" as a world
apart. I find it useful to add the spatial dimension to the inquiry into
people's consumer lives because it leads the inquiry away from a tightly
focused attention on an individual and a commodity, making larger social
processes relevant. Furthermore, incorporating social geography as an
element in consumption, and particularly in the consumption of the poor,
exposes notions of self-perpetuating poverty as problematic: the process-
es at work in creating a terrain where downtown is hostile to black and
brown shoppers, and where only two major supermarkets lie within the
city's boundaries impinge forcefully on Newhallville residents' lives but
are not of their own making. In the section that follows, I turn to a de-
scription of that world, focusing especially on Newhallville.
Newhallville
Newhallville has long been a working-class neighborhood, but since the
1950s the residents have become increasingly impoverished. By the
1990s the once ethnically and economically diverse community now had
a 91.7 percent minority population and a poverty rate approaching 30
percent. Often referred to as "the 'Ville," Newhallville has a reputation
for being a tough, if not downright dangerous place to be. Nowhere is
this perception more strong than it is in the upper-middle-class, predomi-
nantly white neighborhoods lying adjacent to the 'Ville. Despite the proxi-
mity to the wealthiest parts of town, Newhallville is characterized by
multiple forms of isolation—geographic, social, economic, commercial—
and yet is intimately tied to the rest of the nation and globe in each of
these ways. Kids like Natalia and Asia are aware of these connections,
and this awareness can be seen most clearly in the area of consumerism
and popular culture. These kids see and know about nearly all the same
TV programs, stores, and goods that most other American kids do. Their
relationships to these commodities, and to the process of consumption
itself, are distinctive and characterized by complex and contradictory