Page 43 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

28 . The Shadow of Whiteness

to the apparent shock of many. Every few years a documentary like Hoop
Dreams breaks into the public consciousness as if describing a new and
unknown tribe. In the late 1960s Jonathan Kozol's descriptions of the fe-
rocity of economic and racial oppression in Boston public schools (Kozol
1967) were a revelatory slap in the face; nearly thirty years later his Savage
Inequalities (Kozol 1991) surprised and angered the public afresh—and
with no apparent sensation of collective deja vu. These accounts are mov-
ing and important, but I am continually mystified by the assertion (most
often made by book reviewers, perhaps) that they speak about some-
thing we did not know before. The most disheartening examples of this
kind of social amnesia are the stunningly similar reports written after the
Watts riots of 1968 and the South Central riots of 1992 (Fogelson 1969;
Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners 1992).
From Oscar Lewis's La Vida (1966) to Philippe Bourgois's In Search
of Respect (1995), the ethnography of poverty has tended to focus on
harsh material realities and, while highlighting the point that those who
live in poverty can think and speak about their situations with great in-
sight, has not often addressed the ways in which those who are economi-
cally strapped understand and manipulate the symbolic world around
them. This has had the effect of making it appear as if it is primarily the
educated (white) middle class that has the tools for critically examining
modern consumer culture, and hearkens back to nineteenth-century
European beliefs that "primitive man" spent so much time attempting
to scrape together some food, clothing, and shelter that "he" had no
time to engage in philosophizing, creating religion, making music or art.
Thinking about urban or minority poverty as being just an economic
problem is a limited perspective. In a society that criminalizes the con-
sumption of urban minority youth, what is needed is not just a question-
ing of that assumption, but a realistic assessment of what that consump-
tion is. The popular image of minority youth as addicted to brands and
indiscriminately willing to kill for status items assumes that they lack so-
phistication in dealing with the complex symbols, claims, and imagery
of marketing and advertising. A quick peek at music videos, or a short
listen to just about any popular (much less underground) rap music,
shows not only that minority youth know the difference between ad
hype and material reality, but that they can manipulate, appropriate,
and reformulate this symbolic material with a sharp, critical eye, a
music sample, or an ironic gesture.
Regina Austin charges that African American consumers have been
widely portrayed in both popular and scholarly literature as "a nation