Page 72 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

The Shadow of Whiteness . 57
fare dependency, teenage motherhood; that these depravities lead to
murder, drugs, sex crimes.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, with his singular ability
to voice what many think but would never actually say in polite company,
has provided us with some especially clear examples of this train of
thought. When a pregnant woman and her two small children were mur-
dered in Chicago, reportedly because the murderers wanted to steal her
unborn baby and sell it on the black market—the ultimate in combat
consumerism—Gingrich announced that the crime was "the final culmi-
nation of a drug-addicted underclass with no sense of humanity, no sense
of the rules of life in which human beings respect each other. Let's talk
about what the welfare state has created. . . . Let's talk about the moral
decay of the world the left is defending" ("Gingrich Links Slaying of
Family to 'Welfare State'" 1995). At the time that Gingrich made his
comments, whether the killers were receiving federal or state aid or
whether they had problems with drugs was unknown, much less being ir-
relevant. In fact, as it turns out, it was the victim who was the welfare re-
cipient. One wonders if Gingrich's response, upon learning this, might
have been something to the effect that she probably would not have been
murdered had she not been mooching off the state.
I would hope that few would conclude, as Gingrich apparently did,
that the horrendous Chicago crime could only have been committed by
drug-addicted welfare recipients. And yet, Gingrich's potent ideological
soup—where lack of morals correlates with low economic status to cre-
ate monstrous consumer pathologies—bears a strong resemblance to the
equally potent (yet incoherent) juxtaposition of images seen in the New
York Times when describing Shaul's girlfriend Tanisha, the Eric Morse
killing, and in the Ryan Harris case. The main problem with the images
in the New York Times and trains of thought offered by Gingrich is that
they are based on cases selected precisely for their shock value. What is
needed is a more even-handed, less shock-oriented approach to the de-
tails of particular lives and communities, one that addresses contextual
issues as being in fact central to the question.

Making Connections
Two more well-known examples embodying the paradoxes inherent in
attempting to retrieve a humane understanding of the "inner city" as it
is often called, are Carl Nightingale's On the Edge (1993) and Philippe
Bourgois's In Search of Respect (1995). These notable recent efforts are
aimed less at hardening our hearts against the swinging gold earring