Page 76 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

The Shadow of Whiteness . 61

seen going on in Newhallville, this statement was nearly always met with
incredulity. More than once people responded with something to the ef-
fect of "There must have been something wrong with your sample."
I admit that such comments were disturbing because of the breezy
dismissal of my status as a social scientist and ethnographer. But, more
important, these comments also disturb me because so many people
seemed to prefer hanging on to ideas about poor black kids that had
been gleaned from the pseudo experience provided by the kinds of news
stories I have so extensively critiqued in the preceding pages. Like the
terms inner city and ghetto, the "Air Jordans" response to thinking
about poor and working-class black children and consumption obscures
more about those children than it reveals.
Before moving into the ethnographic material itself, then, I have felt
it necessary to explore the complex, twisted skein of ideas that sur-
rounds the question of consumption by African Americans. I am entirely
willing to concede that the lives and worlds I describe in the pages that
follow cannot be taken as a comprehensive portrait of all children like
these; by that same token, however, it must also be so that the legendary
crazed combat consumer is not the "real" truth either. Please leave all
Air Jordans at the door. The place you are about to enter is not the inner
city or the ghetto, but a place called Newhallville.