Chicago Consumer Culture Community (C4) Talk April 5th, 2013

1. Consumer Culture & the Black
Middle Class
David Crockett
University of South Carolina

2. A Sign of Something People putting their clothes on
Going on Wrong? backwards. Isn’t that a sign of
something going on wrong? Are
you not paying attention? People
with their hat on backwards,
pants down around the crack.
Isn’t that a sign of something, or
are you waiting for Jesus to pull
his pants up?
–Bill Cosby, 2004, NAACP Annual
Convention
Black Mental Health Alliance
of Massachusetts (January,
2013)

3. Research
Question
What is the role
of consumption
in forming racial
and class
identity among
the Black
Middle-Class?

4. Consumer Acculturation Research on
Racial & Ethnic Identity
• Culture and ethnicity are lived
through (market-mediated)
objects
– Wallendorf and Reilly 1983;
Bouchet 1995; Firat 1995
• The Post-Assimilationist Turn:
boundary crossing
– Oswald 1999; Penaloza 1994;
Kjeldgaard, Arnould and
Askegaard 2005

5. Limits of Consumer Acculturation
Theory
… [B]y suggesting migrant identity
construction as being largely
voluntary, by theorizing
acculturation agents as under-
complex and robust, and by focusing
on single-sided ethnographic
accounts, these studies have not yet
sufficiently investigated how and to
what extent consumer acculturation
occurs within reflexive and mutually
influential networks of socio-cultural
adaptation.
– Luedicke (2011, p. 17)

6. Why Study
the Black
Middle-Class?

7. [Edward] King
observed, "a middle-
class is gradually
springing into
existence, bridging
the once impassable
gulf between the
'high up' and the 'low
down', and some of
the more intelligent
and respectable
Negroes are taking
rank in this class."
[…]

8. To white elite[s] in
the North and South
alike, the notion of a
fluid class structure
without clear racial
exclusivity was a
chilling prophecy.
 Mullins (1990)

9. • How does “democracy
of goods” mythology
acculturate BMC
consumers?
• How do BMC consumers
navigate multiple forms
of inequality?

10. Methodology
• Sample (ongoing): 13 BMC households
– “Friend of friend” and snowball approach
– Minimal screen for middle-class status
• College and white-collar job or business to capture
“core” vs. “elite” distinction (Lacy 2007)
– National sample, urban and rural
• Current: Southeastern US (i.e., Carolinas and Florida)
– In-depth interviews (residence) + focus group
(with all-male social group)

11. What Do We Already Know About
the Black Middle-Class?
1. Grown in size,
affluence, distance Separate Worlds
form BWC/poor •Wilson (1979)
•Ogbu (1998, 2003)
2. Intra-racial class
conflict is more
‘unstable equilibrium’ Unstable Equilibrium
than ‘separate • Anderson (1999)
worlds’ • Johnson (2001)
3. Complex relationship • Lacy (2007)
to whites and other • Patillo (2010)
minorities

12. What Do We Already
Know About the Black
Middle-Class?
Current research
privileges middle-
class cultural
capital
Overstates BMC
ability to dominate
acculturation

13. Emergent
Findings
• Constructing
Identity at the
Nexus of Race and
Class
– Theme 1:
Essentializiing
Racial Sameness

14. Essentializing Racial Sameness
Baxter: If you look at trend setting things in our
country. You start talking about fashion and other
trends—music—they come out of communities of
color. As soon as the black kids are running around—
everybody [black] got a [black] G.I. Joe—and having
fun, then the white kids start, “I got to have one of
those,” which helped boost their sales as well.
Baxter’s articulates essentialized
notions of blackness through his
Black G.I. Joe collection

15. Essentializing Racial Sameness
Baxter: They never made as many black ones as they
did white ones, but it really took [off] when at first
the white G.I. Joe’s weren’t selling. Black families who
were looking for something for their kids to have, and
this is the only positive representation we got? Yeah.
My mother made sure I had one.
Consumption should be an
indexical representation of
blackness

16. Emergent
Findings
• Constructing
Identity at the
Nexus of Race and
Class
– Theme 2:
Essentializing Status
Distinctions

17. Essentializing Status Distinctions: A Race-
Inflected Class Critique
Dee: …You know my parents worked hard all their lives.
They never had anything. They raised their children. I
would say we’re all successful. So, where did that [taste]
come from? I see these other people doing it. I said, “I
want that for my momma and daddy. I can do that. That’s
why I work everyday.” You have to have a hunger for that
which you have not had. You have to have a taste for
reaching another plane. And, as Martin Luther King would
say, “You gotta keep your eyes on the prize.” So it’s that
kind of thing.
Dee draws a moral boundary
around high CC consumption

18. Essentializing Status Distinctions: A Race-
Inflected Class Critique
Male 4: My daughter [has] two sons. She buys the handheld
Gameboys and what-do-you-call-it... I don’t buy them. My
[grandson’s school] was having an afterschool science program
for a week. He wanted to go, but she didn’t have the money for
that. We said “well, sign him up for it and we’ll pay for it.” That
I’ll pay for, and I don't mind doing it, but… it was another issue.
I think she used the money issue as [an excuse for] not
wanting to do it. When we said we’ll pay for it, now she’s
coming up with a different excuse…
Moral boundary chastises low-
status blacks’ consumption
priorities

19. Essentializing Status Distinctions: A Race-
Inflected Class Critique
Adam: Because my sister…lives in the deep country… I’m in a
subdivision in the country… [m]y sister and I talk about the way
we live and where we live, how it does remind us so much of
the neighborhood and the country that I grew up in, and the
same style houses. And no negative reflection on my
(other) siblings, but … they like living in your more upscale
neighborhoods. And I don’t know if they really go back
and spend time in the community like my sister and I do.
… It’s like, “[I] came from there, still have a fondness for it,
and will always keep that connection, or ties with it.”

20. Emergent Insights
• Exceptionalism Holds
Race and Class in
Dynamic Tension
– It keeps “the middle”
stable but fluid