Page 85 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

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

multiple ways and serve as a way for them to articulate a sense of sexual
danger, as well as a wellspring of fantasies about "the man of my dreams,"
dating, and romance; a later vignette will show how shopping and roving
New Haven's downtown doubles as a sort of fishing expedition for
"slammin"' boys.
Natalia's use of her babysitting money to help pay for camp was not
unusual. The Newhallville children I knew were expected to spend part of
their pocket money on things they needed—underwear, socks, barrettes—
or to help pay for special activities like camp. In these and other ways,
kids are made acutely aware of the costliness of their maintenance and
their responsibilities as members of families and the extended kin group.
This awareness lays the foundation for an experience of consumption
that is deeply social, and where individual needs and desires must always
be measured and evaluated in reference to those of others.
Children's sense of endangerment makes them acutely aware of how
much they depend on their kin and kin networks, but kids do not always
view themselves as the endangered ones; on several occasions, and with
seemingly no connection to conversations or events taking place, chil-
dren spontaneously launched into discussions of what they would do if
their mothers died, or if someone was trying to hurt their mother. Chil-
dren's fierce protectiveness of their mothers was evident in these discus-
sions, which included detailed descriptions of how they would hurt or
kill threatening individuals by grabbing guns, knives, or any weapon
close at hand. At the same time, children also mentally laid escape routes
should their present situations fail them, as did Tionna when she said, "If
my grandmother died, I'd stay with my great-grandmother, and if she
died I'd have to find my way to Augusta, Georgia." Tionna's assumption
seems to be that if both her grandmother and great-grandmother died,
she would be alone and faced with the prospect of making her way by
herself to Augusta, Georgia, where a number of her great-grandmother's
relatives live.

Birthdays
July 17, 1992, was Natalia's tenth birthday, and on that same day her mother
moved into a new apartment two blocks from her previous one. Natalia invited
me to come to her birthday party. Natalia's mother had bought her an ice-
cream cake, and the cake was being stored in the freezer at Natalia's grand-
parents' house, about four blocks "down the hill" from Natasha's mother's new
home. The girls and I walked through the July heat to her grandparents' home
to get the cake.