Page 66 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

The Shadow of Whiteness . 51

starstruck teenager's bedroom walls. The doors of girls' dorm rooms at
the college where I teach look a lot like the walls of Tanisha's room and
are routinely plastered with ads for expensive clothes, popular movies,
and hunky stars.
Let's get real here. Tanisha's $120 gold caps might speak of flash and
cash, but they represent only about one-twentieth of the cost of the silver
or plastic orthodontia adorning the mouths of millions of middle-class
teens. Many might argue that my comparison of gold caps and braces
misses the most important point—that braces are good because they are
"needed" while gold caps are not and are, instead, wasteful or even
crass. This argument, however, takes us into the quicksand terrain already
visited by Herbert Marcuse (and before him, Bronislaw Malinowski) in
attempting to definitively delineate "real" from "fake" needs. Since all
people are cultural and social beings, and because needs are shaped and
defined by culture, trying to reduce "true" need to food, clothing, shelter,
and perhaps basic nurture is utterly inadequate.
What, in fact, makes braces "needed"? Would it actually be possible
to quantify the proportion of physiological need for orthodontia in rela-
tion to its cosmetic appeal? Moreover, regardless of how much Tanisha
or a kid like her might also "need" braces, she is hardly likely to receive
them. Why are her shoes stacked up neatly against the wall anyway? It
might well be because her closet is currently overflowing with Guess
jeans and Esprit sportswear. Perhaps she wants to put all those shoes on
display to impress her friends. But on the other hand, does she even have
a closet? To continue the reality check, remember that Tanisha lives in a
rental apartment in a New York slum, not a fancy condo on the river, or
even a modest single-family home in, say, Queens. Her ex-boyfriend is in
jail for murder. She wears Guess and Esprit, fashions whose prices top
out well below the $200 mark. She does not wear Chanel and Armani,
fashions whose prices begin well above the $200 mark. Those $120 gold
caps and "huge, gold-hoop earrings" may be the costliest things she
owns. The sum total of all of her possessions is probably not even
enough to pay for a set of braces.
It is important to the coherence of the article (and the ideology of com-
bat consumerism) that Tanisha does not appear to care about people, but
only about things. When asked about where Shaul got his money, she an-
swers with apparent callousness, "He was robbing people." She takes no
responsibility for her own desires run amok but blames it on her mother,
saying simply, "It's her fault." Though she is poor, she does not appear to
be working; though she is broke, her room is filled with brand-name