Page 50 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

The Shadow of Whiteness . 35
strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to
embrace this idea you think so much of. (1988, 36-37)
Under slavery, bondsmen did not enter the marketplace primarily as con-
sumers; it was they who were consumed. What Kincaid so starkly illumi-
nates is that if one really thinks about the implications of consumption for
slaves, Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital, for instance, suddenly takes
on some entirely new resonances, and very uncomfortable ones at that.
Likewise, an idea like "conspicuous consumption" has some monstrous
aspects when the commodities being conspicuously consumed might be
human beings. Even though seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America
was a long way from constituting the kind of consumer society we have
today, the implications of slavery for shaping people's emotional and ma-
terial relations to the market must have been immense.
Moreover, the plot thickens, as it were, since contemporary commodi-
ty capitalism and, with it, modernity are widely viewed to have been
built upon the backs of slaves. Plantation organization and labor in par-
ticular have been highlighted as precursors to the rationalized labor and
internationally integrated economy that typified early industrialism
(Genovese 1974; Gilroy 1993; Mintz 1985; Wolf 1982). In the analysis
that follows, I examine slavery as a historical process that in its own time
shaped consumption by African slaves and their descendants in pro-
found ways. Looking at the domains of housing, personal possessions,
clothing, food, and labor, considering slavery and consumption together
reveals this process not only as deeply political but as one often violently
enforced. Furthermore, this perspective shows that the themes dominat-
ing public sphere depictions of black consumption have a long and ugly
past, and that many of these themes—like that of the vain and over-
dressed "Negro," or of the lazy thief—find their roots in the engineered
oppressions and deprivations of slavery.
Contemporary images of the slave plantation portray it, Tara-like, as
an enormous white house fronted with Greek columns, surrounded by
rolling lawns and filled with beautiful things. In these images the slave
quarters are markedly absent but might be imagined in contrast as rude
and sparsely furnished hovels. This image described the reality for only
a tiny minority of the wealthiest plantations. In a great number of more
modest slaveholding plantations and farms, slaves and masters lived to-
gether under the same roof, and we as yet know too little of the tensions
and contradictions precipitated by this sort of intimacy. In the ante-
bellum years a two-story structure was itself a sign of affluence, not