Page 46 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

The Shadow of Whiteness . 31

items (Fiske 1994; Gilens 1996); exposure to these media images has
been shown to influence white viewers' opinions on public policy (Pan
and Kosicki 1996). When, as they so often do, these beliefs then manifest
in subtle forms (the clutching of a purse or crossing the street to avoid
scary people) or more dramatic forms like imposing curfews, they can be
dangerous and damaging. Moreover, the misperceptions about the epi-
demic rates of poverty and violence, pathological consumption, and
problematic families in the "inner city" or the "ghetto" or among the
"underclass" are often applied, by extension, to the entire black popula-
tion. Thus, while these images portray the poorest of the poor, it is not
only poor African Americans who suffer from their effects.
New York Times editorial writer Brent Staples describes the effect of
other people's fear of him upon his own behavior in a 1994 essay (Staples
1994). Staples went to the University of Chicago in 1973 as a Ph.D. stu-
dent in psychology. As a 6-foot r/2-inch tall black man in an oversized
peacoat, he realized, he looked big and "fearsome." After learning he
could calm the fears of others by whistling Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" (an
act that indicated something about his cultural capital), something broke
inside Staples and, rather than trying to prove he was not a frightening
potential criminal, he took the opposite approach:
I held a special contempt for people who cowered in their cars as they
waited for the light to change at 57th and Woodlawn. The intersection
was always deserted at night, except for a car or two stuck at the red.
Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! They hammered down the door locks when I
came into view. Once I had hustled across the street, head down, try-
ing to seem harmless. Now I turned brazenly into the headlights and
laughed. Once across, I paced the sidewalk, glaring until the light
changed. They'd made me terrifying. Now I'd show them how terrify-
ing I could be.

These same prejudices and assumptions are at work in consumption, and
minority consumers must daily face treatment not generally encountered
by whites, particularly in retail settings. Recognition of these problems is
on the rise but has not yet erased the need for consumers of color to de-
velop strategies akin to whistling "The Four Seasons."
A strong sense that the market, and hence the realm of consumption, is
a democratic and color-blind sphere underlies much popular and scholar-
ly discussion of the consumer world; much theory on consumption seems
to have accepted the promise implicit in commodity capitalism that class
or race need be no barrier to consumption—that money is the main hurdle