Page 90 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

"What Are You Looking At, You White People?" . 75

deal of her free time sleeping. There were programs she liked and watched
fairly regularly, all of them evening shows. Like most Newhallville fami-
lies I knew, Tionna's family imposed few rules on her watching, the pri-
mary one being that she had to finish her homework before watching
television. The lack of rules did not mean, however, that Tionna was
3
glued to the set four hours a day. She was much more interested in
spending time with her friends, usually outside, or often playing when in-
side. Even when watching TV, Tionna engaged in a variety of activities si-
multaneously—from braiding her hair (or her dolls' hair) to talking on
the phone with friends. This seemed typical of Newhallville kids, who
could be found outside playing during daylight hours all through the
summer and after school. Part of this may be because many children did
not have access to private places within their homes, where their play
would not disrupt adults.

School Exchange
Being at school provides children with a wide range of experiences, and
important among them is being around lots of other kids all day long.
They exchange information about styles and fashions in dance, music,
clothes, hair, jewelry, television, and toys; they gossip about each other
and each other's families. They engage in complex trading and sharing
and even selling interactions, often clandestinely. Early in Tionna's fifth-
grade year, her classmate Stephen sparked a gimp craze and sold lengths
of the colored plastic cord to most children in the room. At nearly every
time of day kids were busily weaving the bright gimp into keychains or
necklaces, until Lucy Asian, their teacher, had to ban it except for cer-
tain approved times.
One afternoon, during an art class, Tionna, Cherie and I fell into con-
versation about what they wanted for Christmas. "What about that ice-
cream maker, do you want that?" Cherie asked Tionna. Cherie contin-
ued, "My mother said that the one they make now isn't that good. The
one they used to have is what they should come out with now." Tionna
said in the voice of experience, "I had it, and I made that ice cream with it
and it was corny so I took it back." She then started describing another
thing she wanted, and though neither she nor Cherie knew the name of
it, they both knew what they were talking about. "It's like a book bag,"
Tionna told me, "but you wear it on the front. You can feel the baby
kicking and then you open it and you see if you got twins or triplets or
quadruples." "You can feel what it was like when your mother was preg-
nant?" the art teacher asked them. "Well, not really," Tionna answered.