Page 61 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

46 . The Shadow of Whiteness

misinformation in the Moynihan report. These include a number of
classics: Tally's Corner (Liebow 1967), Soulside (Hannerz 1969), and,
more recently, Ain't No Makin' It (MacLeod 1987). In this last work,
Jay MacLeod looks at two groups of male youths, one white, one black,
and seeks to understand the perpetuation of poverty not just as being
generated from within, via the culture of poverty, but through a more
complex process of social reproduction involving institutional and
structural factors. Like sociology, anthropology has shown a sustained
interest in questions of U.S. urban poverty and social inequality (Gregory
1998; Mullings 1987; Sharff 1998; Susser 1982).
These empirical responses have been tremendously important, but be-
cause few have chosen to attack the images themselves head on social sci-
ence has to some degree allowed these portrayals to continue their circu-
lation unabated (Wilson 1988 is an exception, albeit an unpublished
one). Scholarly critiques of the assumptions and ideas behind notions of
the undeserving poor or pathological underclass have given relatively
little attention to the question of the symbolic aspects of the debate. The
field of cultural studies has been an exception, especially the recent work
of John Fiske (1993, 1994), who shows how power and disempower-
ment can be enacted through material and symbolic channels. Moreover,
when young people themselves are consulted about their responses to
these images and symbols, they can propose options not envisioned by
most other observers. When Dierdre Kelly examined symbolic discourses
around teenage pregnancy, three of the dominant discourses centered
around blaming the girl, blaming the family, or blaming society. Teen
mothers themselves, though, asserted that the problem was that the idea
of blame itself was wrong (Kelly 1996).
Contemporary consumption is, of course, up to its neck in symbolic is-
sues, and some theorists, like Wolfgang Haug (1986) and Jean Baudrillard
(1981, 1986, 1988), have gone so far as to argue that symbols are the
only issue that remains. While I cannot bring myself to go quite this far,
the questions of poverty, racism, and social inequality in the United
States today are in large part questions about consumption (who buys
what, who possesses what, and how do they get it?), which means that
they are questions of symbolic importance as well. It is therefore un-
surprising that symbolic imagery has been one of the primary weapons
mobilized in attacks on the poor and underclass and that battles have
often taken place over the airwaves. As the old advertising adage goes,
"sell the sizzle and not the steak."
Gangsta rap, fashion, advertisements, and national newspaper articles