Page 62 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

The Shadow of Whiteness . 47

saturate broadcast channels and advertising images with innumerable
powerful depictions of minority youth as destructive and out-of-control
consumers. These ideas are misguided. More important, we need to look
closely at some of those representations and explore how they produce
and reproduce images of the pathological poor. Fiske (1994) has already
shown in an article about the 1992 Los Angeles uprising that the news
media selectively excised footage of white looters from newscast cover-
age, thus further entrenching widely held beliefs about black consumer
violence. The close association of violence and consumption in represen-
tations of poor minority youth—and, increasingly, killer children—is un-
mistakable, particularly in the news media. These images are also highly
gendered, focusing on the deadly violence of boys on the one hand and the
out-of-control materialism of girls on the other. Examining some recent
accounts from the New York Times shows how the selective use of images
already noted by Fiske is typical even of those news publications with
reputations for objectivity. These articles, many of them splashed across
the front page, are typical of a genre of news story that reports on "com-
bat consumerism," that is, consumption accomplished through violence.

For Gold Earrings and Protection, More Girls Take to Violence
For Aleysha J., the road to crime has been paved with huge gold ear-
rings and name-brand clothes. At Aleysha's high school in the Bronx,
popularity comes from looking the part. Aleysha's mother has no
money to buy her nice things so the diminutive 15-year-old steals
them, an act that she feels makes her equal parts bad girl and liberated
woman.
"It's like I don't want to do it, but my friends put a lot of pressure
on me," said Aleysha. . . . "Then I see something I want so bad I just
take it. The worst time, I pulled a knife on this girl, but I never hurt
anybody. I just want things." (Lee 1991)
Aleysha's pathetic plaint, "I just want things," seems to capture the prob-
lem succinctly. Because she apparently doesn't have much money, she
ends up in what many believe to be an all-too-common situation: "Then
I see something I want so bad I just take it." The New York Times, along
with most urban newspapers, has consistently reported on such stories,
which are focused on deadly desires for status items practiced by minori-
ty youth who in their most extreme manifestation are now described as
the dreaded "superpredators." Stories in this vein began appearing in the
early 1980s with news clips about young men shooting and being shot