Page 95 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

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

design embroidered on the back. The jacket caught my eye and I stared at it for
several moments. "What are you looking at, Miss Chin?" demanded Natalia.
"I was looking at that guy's jacket," I said. She asked me, "What would you do
if someone came over here and asked you for a date?" "I'd probably say no,"
I answered. Tionna jumped in and set the scene, trying to get me into the
game. "What if you had been seein' him all around the mall and he'd been
seein' you and you had a crush on him and he has a crush on you and he's the
man of your dreams!" Natalia continued, "And he comes over and sits down
and says, 'Would you like to go on a date with me? Tonight. At eight o'clock.'"
I said that since he was the man of my dreams, maybe I'd meet him at a
restaurant, but I wouldn't give him my phone number or let him know where
my house was. "Why not?" they asked brightly.

In contrast to the girls' assurance that a man we ran across in Newhall-
ville "probably rapes little girls," in the mall setting, their romantic fan-
tasies take wing. Yet on our way to the mall the girls voiced some of their
lingering fear about sexual threat in their fractured version of "Jingle
Bells." As a commentary on their lives, the song is devastating. It speaks
not only of their hopelessness in feeling safe from men—something evi-
dent not only in this ditty but from many, many other encounters—but
emphasizes as well their sense of threat and even victimization in the con-
sumer sphere. And yet these girls are able to make these materials, mass-
produced and middle-America as they may be, speak about the particu-
lar issues being faced by them as "inner-city" children. These children
instantly recognized that even the dark-skinned Barbies have very little
relevance to their own lives. There were some moments where they
wrapped themselves in the fantasy life offered by these (and other) toys;
at other times, they acted upon or talked about the ways these toys repre-
sented to them a foreign, almost imaginary world.
The fantasy life offered by Barbie is akin to the romance fantasy the
girls spin for me when they catch me staring at a man's jacket. It is not
based in their own daily experience but partakes of a cultural fund of
similar scenarios—those found in fairytales, Harlequin romances, and
the like. Tionna and Natalia were not alone in creating such romantic
fantasies about my life, and how I would fall in love with a man. Cherie
also spun a startlingly similar tale for me, where a man took me on a se-
ries of increasingly impressive dates, culminating with a flight to New
Orleans and a ride in a limousine. It is, I believe, no accident that the
girls' fantasy lives took off so buoyantly when at the mall. One of the
safest places to be away from home, the mall provides children a space to
relax and play in ways they cannot in their own neighborhood.