Page 58 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

The Shadow of Whiteness . 43

Incidents like this in some ways raise more questions than they an-
swer. To what degree was Jacobs's grandmother compelled to lend the
three hundred dollars to her mistress? How did she feel about the trans-
formation of that three hundred dollars from a portion of her child's
freedom into a silver candelabra? Jacobs's own sharp comments reveal
candidly the ironic cruelty of the situation, and she does not hide her re-
sentment that Dr. Flint's family will be handing down that candelabra
from generation to generation, while her own family maintains slavery
as its own generational legacy.

What's Wrong with This Picture?
Images of Poverty in the 1980s and 1990s

The material and symbolic constraints on the consumption of African
Americans so evident under slavery have not disappeared in the present
day—they have only transformed (in some cases barely) and transmogri-
fied, like the process of consumption itself. Disparities of race, class, and
gender continue to be enforced and maintained through consumption.
In the 1980s, the Michael Douglas character Gordon Gecko declared
that "greed is good" in the film Wall Street, an apt summary of an eco-
nomic period that saw an unprecedented widening of the gap between
rich and poor in the United States, a gap that has since developed into a
chasm of alarming size. At the same time, images of the welfare queen
and streetcorner drug dealer have become more ubiquitous. These im-
ages purposefully describe a kind of anticonsumer: the welfare mom has
amassed several Cadillacs, while the drug dealer loads himself down
with ill-gotten gold chains. In other words, they spend money they
haven't earned on things they shouldn't have. Unlike the proud "Brother
Payne," who in the eyes of a white property owner was more laughable
than scary and could be publicly shamed on the courthouse steps, these
two figures are the Barbie and Ken from hell: they are morally corrupt
consumers, dangerous and threatening. The evidence of their moral cor-
ruption is their very consumption. The power of these images cannot be
underestimated and they are embraced even, at times, among the com-
munities who are most damaged by them.
As the problems of deindustrialization and the rapid movement of
capital either to the American South or overseas accelerated during the
late 1970s and 1980s, so did the media hype and hysteria about patho-
logical inner-city dwellers. In response to the increasing variety and with
increasing virulence of portrayals of the pathological consumption of
blacks and other minorities during the 1980s, social science moved with