Page 48 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

The Shadow of Whiteness . 33

One of Bourdieu's enduring contributions to the study of consump-
tion is his detailed analysis of the processes through which the apparent
homogeneity within groups is shaped. Contrary to popular belief, per-
sonal choice and preferences are not the main determinants of individual
consumption. Rather, the habitus offers opportunities for "controlled
improvisation," and the range of improvisations varies according to
one's position in and experience with the habitus (Bourdieu 1977). The
acquisition of cultural capital further shapes consumption choice and
opportunities. In this context choice is not free but constructed, not end-
less but bounded. Bourdieu's observation dovetails powerfully with the
recognition that the endless proliferation of choice in contemporary con-
sumer society is, in fact, an illusion. In addition to the Frankfurt school
critiques discussed earlier, Stuart Ewen (1976, 1988) and Susan Willis
(1991) have explored this theme, but without laying out as carefully as
has Bourdieu the mechanisms through which even the choices that are
potentially available present restrictions.
Bourdieu assumes that, given the choice, everyone would choose the
same things—that ultimately what members of a given society want is
more or less the same. Veblen's earlier account of social differentiation is
based on a similar assumption: the upper classes continually change
their consumption patterns because members of classes below them con-
tinually try to consume what people of the upper classes do. This notion
is implicit to the bulk of consumption studies, but Carrier and Heyman
find this assumption problematic, writing, "We do not think it is safe to
assume that people would consume the same things if they had the
money. We can neither neglect the question of whether people have the
money, nor the question of how people enact distinctive life trajectories
with the money they do have" (1997, 22).
So while Marx's observation that the possession of money can, for a
time, erase the appearance of class difference, creating spaces and situa-
tions where "specificity as a worker is extinguished," Bourdieu's notions
of habitus and cultural capital are helpful in understanding the limits to
extinguishing such specificity. Differences in consumption are not simply
differences of style determined largely by economic factors or prefer-
ences that may be acted upon freely within those economic limits. Ameri-
can society has, for more than two centuries, shaped and limited the con-
sumption of black communities through a combination of structural
factors, everyday social practices, and symbolic means.
Marx certainly never intended to imply that the consumer world actu-
ally constituted a realm of unbridled freedom as long as one had the price
of entry: "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the