Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture.

By Elizabeth Chin (University of Minnesota Press, 2001)

One big challenge in teaching about consumer culture, I have found, involves keeping two points individually and simultaneously in view. First, studying the politics of consumption requires more than analyses, pleasing though they are to perform, of symbolic meanings attending individuals' consumer choices--what meanings items invite, what meanings people come up with about them, what meanings people express about themselves, intentionally or otherwise, through their acquisition and use of them. You've got to know if your "World Peace" t-shirt is assembled by people making fourteen cents an hour and that buying your clothes at the Salvation Army involves not just the practice of reduce, reuse, recycle but also support for an organization working to get "faith-based" organizations exempted from local anti-discrimination laws. Second, and somewhat conversely, the relations of individual consumers to consumer products are often much more critically astute, highly theorized, and symbolically rich than many studen ts, just like many people who are critics by trade, want to give them credit for. If you don't think you got wrecked by MTV when you were 10, who exactly are those people whose minds you now imagine to be controlled by TRL?

Elizabeth Chin's Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture makes both of these points accessibly and persuasively, through her study of one of the most stigmatized groups of consumers, young African Americans. The book centers on Chin's two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Newhallville, a section of New Haven, Connecticut, whose residents are primarily poor or working class, and predominantly of color. Focusing on the children in a 1991-1992 fifth -- grade class, she conducted various forms of "participant observation in homes, schools and neighborhoods, ranging from teaching in an after-school program to following kids around as they hung out; she also took twenty-three kids, mostly one at a time, on shopping trips with $20 to spend. She argues that "black kids" (more on this terminology later) are not the "combat consumers" many people stereotype them to be: at best superficial, duped into shallow, unthinking desire for brand-name goods; at worst amoral and predatory, ready to steal for A ir Jordans or kill for a bike, as, Chin reminds us, two children were falsely accused of doing.

They are, however, like all of us, affected by the social and economic circumstances in which they live. One of Chin's primary goals is "to highlight an aspect of contemporary consumption that has often been overlooked: its role as a medium through which social inequalities-most notably those of race, class, and gender-are formed, experienced, imposed, and resisted" (3). If the idea that social inequalities shape consumption seems too obvious to be one of the book's major points--Chin suggests herself that the lack of attention to it is "stunning" (29)--consider, if you can stomach it, Bush's call for all the children of "America" to send a dollar to the White House for the children of Afghanistan. Its potential to circulate as heartwarming depends on the suppression of any acknowledgment that not all kids in the US have spending money, and it seems to be playing pretty well, just like the idea that we should all stand up to the "evil doers" by shopping-patriotism as a consumer choice we all have resources to make.

Chin uses various strategies to elucidate relations between social inequalities and consumption. An early chapter on the history and current image of relations to consumption of people of African descent in the U.S. is followed by one that uses a great series of vignettes to illustrate how children in Newhallville engage consumption as a social process: trading food at lunch time, having (or not having) a birthday party, going downtown, talking about what other kids have or wear at school, negotiating who gets to eat what at home. (Ask your grandma about that half a donut; she bought it).

Subsequent chapters look more specifically at activities involving purchase. One contrasts the experience of visiting a little grocery-type store in the neighborhood, where the proprietor knows the kids and is an us vs. a "them" in terms of race, with trips to the mall that can be exciting, frustrating, and insulting all at once to kids who are well aware of the suspicion with which they are viewed. Another details the $20 shopping trips. Chin argues that although trips with an anthropologist and a little windfall cannot be seen to illustrate how kids really do spend money when they have it, "the strength of the patterns that do emerge provide a firm basis for understanding some of the social and cultural dynamics at work in these children's lives" (118). As she notices, for instance, children in Newhallville, unlike many middle- and upper-class counterparts, are made keenly aware of what it costs to feed, clothe, and care for them. Thus, they generally followed internal or external directives to spend part o f the money on needed items, as they usually had to do with gift money.

Most of the girls, and significantly none of the boys, also bought presents for family caregivers (138-140).

In a final chapter, Chin works from her interactions with the kids to reevaluate one well reputed supply-side attempt to fight the effects of racism through consumer culture: "ethnically correct" dolls. She suggests that despite popular arguments that kids need dolls with matching skin color, the kids she got to know pulled dolls across race lines without too much trouble, using "un-white hairdos" and the like. What created a gap in terms of relating to the doll were not visible markers of race but differences of class and economic status; the girls "were not asking for dolls who looked like them" but for "dolls who lived like them" (171).

Purchasing Power has much to make it worth teaching besides what I mentioned earlier: its readable argument for understanding consumption simultaneously to involve complicated individuals and matters beyond consumer choice. I read the book right after I had been struggling to get my mostly white, mostly financially well-off students in a course called "Visualizing Race" to articulate and question what they meant by the term "inner city." Chin, who based her decision not to use the term partly on the frequent attitude she found in Newhallville that the term, as one resident said, was "'just another way of saying niggers,'" suggests that it both camouflages economic diversity in many areas with that label and hides variation among people in similar economic circumstances. She writes that while "[p]overty is often itself portrayed as remarkably flat and unelaborared, ...the bald fact of poverty does not, in fact, lead to lives that are all the same" (27). Her detailed account of the kids' lives helps to illustra te that important point. She also provides a model for avoiding tendencies to demonize consumer culture or romanticize distance from it. Writing about one kid who had never been to Toys R Us, she notes that his lack of experience with contemporary consumer culture should not be seen as some kind of purity, an "uncontaminated state," but as a sign, form, and result of systemic deprivation and exclusion; no transportation, no money, no caregivers with extra time (122-23).

The book also guides us to avoid presuming who thinks what and who can do what. One fascinating observation Chin makes is that the kids she interviewed, just like those who consider black kids to be "amoral and pathological consumer[s]," believed that "everyone" at their school wore Air Jordans, although she counted only two pairs (137). On a similar note, there's a hilariously illustrated section in which she takes a ruler to the question of whether Mattel, as many of its social critics claimed, gave its supposedly "ethnically-correct" Shani doll a bigger butt than Barbie's, which, apparently, it didn't (157-58). An account in the book's afterword about how Chin taught a group of fifth-graders to do an oral history project presents a nice assessment of the kids' strengths and limitations, and an impressive model for working with them.

Some issues, I think, might have used more or different attention. Although I bought Chin's argument that contemporary images of blacks' relations to consumption have historical roots, I was not convinced by the paths she drew from, say, "enduring images of slaves sneaking into melon patches and henhouses" to current portrayals of welfare queens who are "too lazy to work but not to lazy to steal" (38-39). Her argument that one "evolved" into the other suggests a simplicity and directness in representational trajectories that the rest of her book well shows to be more complicated and contradictory. I was also surprised that, despite Chin's care about race terminology--"black kids" in her title comes, reasonably, from her observation that most people in Newhallville call themselves black--there was a gap between her demographic description of the area as "91.7 percent minority" (a phrase that itself suggests why "minority" is often questioned as a descriptive term) and the implication through out the text that the kids she studied were more specifically "black." For reasons I couldn't figure out, Chin seemed a bit circumspect about the racial identities of the kids and surprisingly non-analytical about the term "minority."

Chin's presentation of herself, too, though often astute, seems, in places, a bit reluctantly forthcoming. Her comments about the effects of her participation and identity on the interactions she analyzed seem often designed primarily to discount them. Smart reflections about whether class was sometimes a "more relevant divide" (22) from her subjects than race (Chin is "half white, half Chinese"), or about whether kids might have bought gifts with their money in order to impress her, sometimes got undermined by a "yes, but" structure or by relegation to footnotes. Given the popularity of the Dangerous Minds-type story about how one caring teacher can transform a child's life with a little special attention, I would also like to have seen Chin reflect on the relation of her narrative to the heroic-teacher-in-the-'hood genre, which was a bit too close for my comfort in Chin's decision to end the book with a paragraph about the kid who is following in her footsteps. On the whole, however, Chin does a great job o f showing that solutions don't lie in random acts of kindness any more than the relation of race to consumption is primarily about individuals using consumer culture to express racial identity. If you are looking for a careful study of live consumers in social, economic, and political context, this an excellent source to check out.

ERICA RAND teaches at Bates College in Art and in Women and Gender Studies. Her writing includes Barbie's Queer Accessories and a book in progress called "The Ellis Island Snow Globe: Sex, Money, Products, Nation." She is on the editorial board of Radical Teacher, and sometimes chooses her nail polish to match the "homeland security" alert system.