Page 75 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

60 . The Shadow of Whiteness
are contradictory, dynamic, and complex. Moreover, the commodities
and resources in question are not limited to candy, toys, and sneakers,
but include housing stock, public funds, and geographic space. The ways
in which urban communities have been reshaped by the differential dis-
position of collective resources is in part a question of consumption: if
consumption includes buying and spending, the use of federal funds to
create housing projects and to profoundly reshape the preexisting com-
munities of color is surely in large part a consumer question. The social
inequalities of race, economics, and gender are also enacted in these
spheres, shaping individuals, institutions, and ideology. Examining the
role of children in these processes illuminates something about their own
lives, capabilities, and perceptions. But paying attention to the consump-
tion of children does not shed light solely on the limited sphere of child-
hood experience. Because they are members of society, and because what
children do and think has an impact on the world around them, examin-
ing consumption through the lens of childhood also opens up an under-
standing of the entire society of which these children are part.
Despite the massive amount that has been written on distressed urban
communities, the vocabulary used to describe and define them is aston-
ishingly limited. Dense, evocative terms like inner city now operate as
quick descriptors behind which lurk a host of meanings and assumptions
that are loaded like a semiautomatic: poor, black, drugs, gangs, violence,
Latino, welfare, joblessness. The long history of focused scholarly atten-
tion given to Chicago's South Side, for instance, obscures the range of
kinds of urban distress that are to be found in American cities (Kotlowitz
1991; Park, Burgess, Duncan, and Wirth 1925; Wilson 1987; Wiseman
1997). Moreover, a common conceptual thread in the majority of these
works is the pathologizing of black consumption: an assumption that to
enter the "inner city" is to cross the border into Austin's "Nation of
Thieves."
Let me close this chapter by telling a story. Most researchers develop a
kind of cocktail party one-liner for describing the projects they are work-
ing on, and in my case, when people asked me about my research in New
Haven, I would answer something like this: "I'm studying the role of
consumption in the lives of poor and working-class black children."
Here I would more often than not get a knowing look. "Ah," the re-
sponse would be, "you must have seen a lot of Air Jordans," referring to
the legendarily expensive basketball shoes. "Actually, no," I'd answer. "I
only saw two pairs of Air Jordans on the kids I worked with." Rather
than piquing my acquaintance's interest in what kinds of things I had