Page 73 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

58 . The Shadow of Whiteness

crowd and more at generating a nuanced understanding of the pres-
sures and problems that shape their lives. In both works a focus on
poverty and the most distressed urban communities remains. These
studies are not theoretically grounded in the study of consumption
(they have other overriding concerns), although one can extrapolate
from these and other pieces of research just how consumption might be
shaped by the conditions of poverty and alienation. Nightingale does
pay significant attention to what he calls "American consumer culture,"
but the theoretical perspective upon which he bases both his analysis of
this American consumer culture and the children he describes is not
clearly delineated.
Although stressing the structural factors at work in the immiseration
of today's urban poor, like most work in this vein, these authors stress
the isolation of "inner city" and "underclass" while at the same time
seeking to explore the political and economic connections between these
places and the larger society. Nightingale and Bourgois attempt to chal-
lenge the two-dimensional, highly selective images of urban minority
youth (nearly always portrayed as male) by presenting rich ethnographic
accounts of the lives of particular people in South Philadelphia and East
Harlem. Both authors reject the notion that the problems faced by their
subjects arise primarily from individual failings of character, motivation,
or self-discipline. Rather, through historical, political, economic, and so-
cial analyses, these authors attempt to draw connections between the
ghetto neighborhoods where they conducted their research, the nation,
and the world at large. Neither do these authors attempt to whitewash
the uglier aspects of the often-harsh conditions in which youth live and
the ways in which this, in turn, can harden their natures. The main draw-
back is in many ways their starting place: in the worst ghettos, among the
poorest of the poor. These sites effectively allow researchers to look at
the reality behind popular images and to counteract them with carefully
researched and reasoned accounts, but they have also, in a way, allowed
dominant discourse to lay the boundaries of the inquiry. The census de-
fines a ghetto tract as consisting of a population with 40 percent or more
living at or below the poverty line. This means, conversely, that poten-
tially a full 60 percent of the population is living above the poverty line,
though how far above might be the relevant question. At the very least,
the census definition of a ghetto tract indicates that economic diversity
might well be the rule, not the exception.
South Philadelphia and East Harlem stand with South Central Los
Angeles and Chicago's South Side as the nation's ur-ghettos, at the ex-