Page 67 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

52 . The Shadow of Whiteness

clothes, her body adorned with eminently visible gold jewelry. Brand-
name clothes and fancy jewelry are signs of her transgressions. And so, in
this way, preferences in fashion, style, and brands become signs of moral
behavior. In modern civic spaces such as malls, fashion, style and brand
of clothing are the basis on which individuals are singled out for being
observed, harassed, or ejected by security personnel (Lewis 1989; "Teen-
Age Pall at the Mall" 1993; "Mall Wins Ruling on Limiting Bus Service"
1995; "Wary Mall Bans Backward Caps" 1995). As increasing numbers
of cities in the United States attempt to impose curfews on urban youth,
the criminalization of an age-class and of its perceived behaviors has
moved beyond the public imagination into public policy. More disturb-
ing than the imposition of curfews and other restrictive measures is the
dramatic upsurge in legislation designed to prosecute minors as adults,
particularly in murder cases: in 1995 alone seven hundred such pieces of
legislation were introduced nationwide (Staples 1996).
The much-publicized murder of five-year-old Eric Morse prompted
such a piece of legislation. He was thrown to his death from an aban-
doned fourteenth-floor apartment by a pair of boys who were at the
time ten and eleven years old. Eric's older brother Derrick, who was also
there, had tried to save his brother, careening down the stairs hoping to
catch him at the bottom. The murder, gruesome by any standard, took
place in the Ida B. Wells homes, one of Chicago's most notoriously trou-
bled housing projects. Many papers reported that the two boys had
tossed Eric to his death for refusing to steal candy for them, a piece of
information that made a shocking incident simply monstrous. As it
turns out the boys likely had a more complicated reason for "punish-
ing" Eric, one hinging on gang-style revenge, since Eric had tattled on
the boys earlier that day (Jones and Newman 1997). Nitpicking over
whether the murder was undertaken out of desire for stolen sourballs or
some twisted sense of gangsta honor might seem to be beside the point,
but it is striking that all news accounts chose to stick to the simplistic—
and frankly more hair-raising—explanation that the boys wanted
shoplifted candy. It is a detail that highlights the boys' amorality and,
rather than the murder being a senseless crime, it becomes something
that illustrates the inhuman pathologies thought to be generated by
places like the Ida B. Wells. Gangsta honor is at least some kind of moral
code; killing a little kid because he won't steal five- and ten-cent candies
is completely beyond the pale.
One New York Times story described the boys as examples of "the
youngest of the bad" and as "potent symbols of fear of a future overrun
by cold-hearted child criminals" (Terry 1996). The article profiled the