Page 83 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

68 . "What Are You Looking At, You White People?"

Schools have become sites of growing importance for direct appeals to
children's buying power. The most important development here is Chan-
nel One, a news program complete with commercials that is piped into
schools, including those in New Haven. Corporate incursions into the
schools are especially problematic since they often take the form of mak-
ing donations of needed equipment or supplies in exchange for exposing
students to commercials, advertising, or prominent logos. Channel One
has entered large numbers of schools (many of them public) primarily be-
cause it provides schools with video equipment in exchange for having
children watch its morning news program complete with advertisements
for national brands of sneakers, soft drinks, and snacks.
Children today enter few environments that do not subject them to
market pressures, and their relationship to advertising and the market is
radically different from that of people only ten or fifteen years older. Des-
pite the pervasiveness of advertisements and marketing pressures, or per-
haps because of them, children today are quite often adept at critically
analyzing industry attempts to create desires for their products, much
more so than their parents or grandparents were when they were young.
In Newhallville, where many grandparents remember rural Southern
childhoods without electricity or indoor plumbing—let alone televisions
or shopping malls—generational gaps are especially great. This dynamic
creates enormous tension and conflict, particularly among household
members—even over something as apparently insignificant as a glazed
donut.

Summer Jobs and Sexual Politics
Tionna did not receive a regular allowance, but Celia, her grandmother, pro-
vided her with pocket money when she needed it. Occasionally, if Tionna was
going to go downtown with a friend, her grandmother might give her ten dol-
lars to spend. (At around age ten, many Newhallville kids were allowed to go
downtown with friends and without adults.) During the summer of 1992 Tionna
and Natalia had a job dropping off Natalia's young niece and nephew at the
babysitter in the morning and then picking them up again to take them home in
the afternoon. Natalia's older brother, the father of the two children, worked in
a local hair salon. He gave the girls five dollars a week for doing this chore and
they split the money. It seemed to me that aside from the money the girls really
enjoyed this job because it meant pushing two babies along in a stroller and
being able to boss and take care of these younger children who were about
one-and-a-half and two-and-a-half years old.