Page 42 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

2.

The Shadow of Whiteness

When I began to write about Newhallville, there was no ready way to
do this because the available words—like the term inner city—are not
descriptive in the sense that they bring a reality to life. Rather, they take
aim at targets: in the words of one Newhallville resident, the term inner
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city is "just another way of saying niggers." Although Newhallville is a
mostly minority area and often referred to as "the ghetto" by both resi-
dents and outsiders, it is also economically diverse. The coded meaning
of such terms as inner city and ghetto precludes recognition or analysis
of such diversity. Similarly, in a culture where black children are as-
sumed to be poor, as they so often are in the United States, little room is
left for consideration of the working-class or middle-class black kid,
much less a community where children from a variety of social strata
live, play, and go to school together. Poverty is often itself portrayed as
remarkably flat and unelaborated, but the bald fact of poverty does not,
in fact, lead to lives that are all the same.
The problem of talking about consumption in a place like Newhall-
ville is not limited to vocabulary and language. Whether the questions
have come from political camps located left, right, or center, they have
often been phrased in terms of "What is wrong?" rather than asking
"What is happening?" The two questions open up vastly different spaces
of inquiry, one beginning from an assumption of problems, the other
more open to exploration and surprise. Beginning from an assumption
that the worst urban poverty is the best kind of poverty to pay attention
to, the public, books, documentaries, Hollywood films, and the nightly
news all tend to reaffirm daily the sense that the borders of the world's
most wild and untamed lands are contained within our urban land-
scapes, not outside them. These lands are continually being rediscovered,

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