Page 74 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

The Shadow of Whiteness . 59

treme end of poverty: eleven of the fifteen poorest census tracts in the
United States are Chicago housing projects (Staples 1996). Such areas
are hardly typical urban "inner city" communities—if such a thing can
even be seen to exist. Yet it is precisely because they represent such ex-
tremes that these communities are heavily studied. Urban poverty has
more faces, colors, and permutations than those seen in the nation's
most dramatically depressed areas; as some new work is beginning to
explore, there are "inner cities" that are predominantly white (Hartigan
1997). Recognition of the existence of such communities requires the
decoupling of much-reinforced assumptions about race and class.
Conclusion
Many researchers have insightfully documented why a kid like Shaul
Linyear might be impelled to kill for sneakers, but less attention has
been focused on the variety of other ways in which kids like this engage
with the world of consumption or the world in general: how do they get
money? Where do they shop? What do they buy? A prominent—but
still small—body of knowledge exists regarding selected aspects of the
consumer habits and practices and preferences of impoverished people,
generated by the disciplines of marketing and consumer behavior re-
search (Andreasen 1976; Caplovitz 1967; Honeycutt 1975). And yet,
Alan Andreasen, one of the most important and groundbreaking au-
thors in this area, has charged the academy at large with a sustained and
insupportable lack of interest in the consumption of the poor—whether
in empirical documentation or cultural interpretation (Andreasen 1986).
Ronald Hill and Debra Stephens (1997), in developing a model of
"impoverished-consumer behavior," wonder specifically about the im-
plications of poverty for children and consumption and close their ar-
ticle by writing, "Most children are socialized into the world of con-
sumption by care givers who have limited resources. How do children
come to terms with these limitations, and what coping strategies do they
employ?" (46).
This brings us back to the discussion of consumption and social in-
equality with which this chapter began. The political economy of con-
sumption, like Marx's political economy of production, involves atten-
tion to a total socially constructed system whose organization has
implications at the individual as well as institutional and ideological levels.
Rather than being a simple top-down process, where some overarching
and amorphous culture of consumption invades the inner city or children's
minds, the relationships between children, commodities, and symbols