Page 8 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Preface

Native Positions
For most of its residents, New Haven, Connecticut, is a patchwork of
clearly delineated neighborhoods that can veer quite suddenly from the
abjectly poor to the fabulously wealthy. Largely divided along lines of
black and white, these groups often regard each other with mutual fear
and suspicion. One day as I was walking through a white, middle-class
area toward Newhallville, the predominantly African American neigh-
borhood that is the focus of this book, I ran into a woman who had
been a classmate of mine in the fourth grade. The daughter of a Yale pro-
fessor, she was now a banker living and practicing in Germany. When she
learned that I was on my way to Newhallville, she made a stunning ad-
mission. For years, her father had driven her through Newhallville in the
mornings on the way to school, and for her it had always been a frighten-
ing neighborhood that they moved through swiftly, with the doors
locked and windows closed. Her admission was that she still had night-
mares about driving through that neighborhood; she was ashamed about
the symbolic terror the place still held for her, at least in her dreams.
Several weeks later, as a winter evening was descending on the 'Ville, a
Newhallville woman asked me where I was walking to. I told her I was
headed over the hill—into the neighborhood where I had run into my
childhood friend. "You walk over there?" she asked with incredulity.
"It's dangerous in that neighborhood! There's never any people around!"
Most middle-class white people might be surprised to think that a
poor, black woman would think of their quiet, tree-lined neighborhood
as dangerous. Of course, perhaps the woman meant dangerous for some-
one like her—that a black woman walking in a white neighborhood

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