Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

When faced with the concept of "Black Kids and American Consumer Culture," I immediately turn my thoughts to the image of African American males killing each other for a specific brand of basketball shoe. Conversely, Elizabeth Chin defeats this myth of "combat consumerism" in her recent ethnographic study Purchasing Power. By studying a group of young African American children in Newhallville, Connecticut, Chin develops and explains a new brand of consumer culture that many previous anthropologists fail to recognize. Chin's research contradicts the stereotypical images in society and those portrayed by the media. She defines a new image of African American youth consumer culture-one that goes against commodity fetishism and the need for brand name goods. She discovers one that deals with the harsh world of being poor and black where opportunity and survival are major factors of consumer culture. Chin demonstrates the complexity of this issue by displaying how it is woven in with and affected by society. In this way, she relates consumerism to social injustices, race relations, class diversity, gender differences, cultural baggage and social relationships. Thus, Elizabeth Chin's book Purchasing Power is an informative and profound piece that intrigues the reader with an alternative image of Black Kids and American Consumer Culture. Throughout her book, Elizabeth Chin does a tremendous job of blending anthropological research information (both others' and her own), and her engaging style of prose writing. This is evident from the onset of the book. In her first two chapters, Chin not only effectively conveys the purpose and results of her work (pp. 4-6), but also does so in a way that the reader is intrigued by the personal stories she tells about the children she interviewed in Newhallville. Her ongoing connections between theories and real life issues with Asia, Natalia, and Tionna are especially strong at the beginning of the book. In this way, readers are compelled to not only understand Chin's idea of the consumer sphere as a medium for social inequality (p. 23), but also to learn and discover what consumer life is like for the specific children interviewed. In chapter two, Shadow of Whiteness, Chin briefly relates several different ideas from theorists such as Marx, Willis, Genovese and Fisk to her work. For some readers who are less familiar with these pieces, this section might seem somewhat confusing and a little burdensome. In this situation, more background information on the main ideas of the theorists' works would have been helpful. However, one must understand that Chin's overall purpose of the book is not to explain previous anthropological research, but to explain how her participant-observer approach to her ethnographic study of Newhallville children is important to consumer culture. Chin's Shadow of Whiteness chapter is also very strong with the discussion of similarities between slavery and present-day consum