Page 64 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

The Shadow of Whiteness . 49

a demanding, materialistic girlfriend. Strangely, it is the mother and girl-
friend, and not Shaul, who dominate both the text and the photographs
accompanying the story. The girlfriend, Tanisha Franklin, is described in
obsessive detail that focuses almost exclusively on her consumption pref-
erences and her possessions. The breathless declaration from the early
part of the article portrays Shaul as a victim of a girl who might as well
be a spider weaving Moynihan's "tangled web of pathology": a lonely
boy looking for the love he can't get from his mother, " [he] fell for a girl
who had a closet full of Guess jeans and Esprit shirts—and wanted
more." Shaul has practically been pushed into this situation by the com-
bined pressures of these two women, one well-meaning but unable to
cope, the other self-indulgent and greedy. These highly gendered portray-
als are also typical. Women are either overtly materialistic and pushy, or
"trying to do the right thing" and utterly at a loss. The objects of their
desire tend to be clothes, jewelry, and the like. Men and boys, on the
other hand, tend to be portrayed as physically violent, often manipulated
by their love interests, and prone to grand gestures like carjacking and
robbing stores.
Tanisha is pictured sitting on her bed in her room. The accompanying
caption reads, "Lure of money: Tanisha Franklin, 15, in her bedroom
with letters written by Shaul from prison and her boxes of Nikes and
Reeboks. The two recently broke up." The caption, oddly random in its
juxtaposition of money, Tanisha, letters, Nikes and Reeboks, and a break-
up, nevertheless manages to communicate the idea that the nature of ma-
terialism among the urban poor is, quite simply, sick. Taken together, the
picture and accompanying story seem to imply that the real crime being
presented is the consumer desires of the unworthy poor; it is this crime
that supersedes even Shaul's act of murder in its senselessness, precisely
because the murder was spurred on by consumer greed. Tanisha, in par-
ticular, is depicted as being a selfish, shallow, and materialistic girl. Her
consumption is consistently contrasted with its antisocial outcomes: rob-
bery, breakup of relationships. While Shaul languishes in prison, she re-
mains free, lounging on her bed in a room stacked high with brand-name
shoes, dressed in Guess and Esprit clothes. The article goes on: " 'I'm like,
materialistic,' Tanisha said. 'Everybody tells me that. When I was grow-
ing up, my mother dressed me in Guess and stuff. It's her fault.'" Her
comments demonstrate her apparent lack of human decency: she seems
little troubled by the connection between her ex-boyfriend's crimes and
the stolen cash that was used to purchase her "boxes of Nikes and
Reeboks." The picture of her reclining on her bed recalls the shameless,