Page 63 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

48 . The Shadow of Whiteness
over shearling jackets or Cazal eyeglass frames (the kind worn by Spike
Lee as he played the character Mars Blackmon in his film She's Gotta
Have It). In the 1990s the reported objects of violent desire more often
have been status shoes, especially Air Jordans; the 1990s have also seen
the emergence of carjackings as another potent form of combat con-
sumerism, all the more threatening because carjacking directly involves
cross-class confrontation at its most dramatically brutal.
The structure and content of these accounts are remarkably stable
across media and through time and in this way primarily serve to ce-
ment dominant and ahistorical narratives about the consumption of the
poor rather than to provide any contextually situated insight. Explicitly
or implicitly, these narratives consistently portray as pathological the
ways in which poor minority youth enter and participate in the con-
sumer sphere. Although dramatic combat consumption is no more rep-
resentative of minority desires and practices in general than the equally
illegal and obscene excesses of, say, Leona Helmsley (who actually
served prison time for tax evasion), Ms. Helmsley's behavior is rarely to
be taken as representative of the wealthy. 7

A Boy in Search of Respect Discovers How to Kill
Cynthia Kierstedt's 15-year-old son, big as a linebacker, foolish as a
child, was handcuffed to the wall of a Brooklyn police station house.
He had just been arrested in the killing of a man who delivered candy
bars to bodegas. . . . He later said he had robbed the man so he could
buy a pair of Nikes to replace his three-month-old pair. "The sneakers
I had was messed up," he said. "I'd walk down the block and people
who know me would start laughing."
. . . Shaul was reared by a mother who worked at an office by day
and attended college at night, hoping for a better life for herself and
her four children. He was a passable student in grade school, but this
behavior soured in junior high. He failed eighth grade, and in the long,
lonely afternoons and evenings, he hung out with bad-news friends
and fell for a girl who had a closet full of Guess jeans and Esprit shirts—
and wanted more. (Dugger 1994)

Combat consumer Shaul Linyear had a deadly desire for new sneakers.
We have the standard elements for a kid whose values are all out of
whack: an overworked single mother whose commitment to a better life
paradoxically forces her to neglect her children who must endure "long,
lonely afternoons and evenings," "bad-news friends," and, to top it off,