Buying the Dream: Identity,Authenticity,and Mass Consumption in Black America

Many African American hip-hop artists, including industry leader 50 Cent, use nigger in their lyrics. Popular rapper Nas, however, dropped his plan to title a 2008 album Nigger after strong criticism from black leaders, including Jesse Jackson. White rapper Eminem, on the other hand, refuses to use the "n" word in his performances. On the use of this epithet in American culture, see Jabari Asim, The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t & Why (Boston, 2007) and Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York, 2002). In April 2007, the CBS and MSNBC networks fired "shock jock" radio and television host Don Imus for referring to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as "nappy-headed hos" during his nationally broadcasted morning talk show. On the Imus controversy, see James Poniewozik, "The Imus Fallout: Who Can Say What?" Time 169, no. 17 (April 23, 2007): 32-38. Such controversies are not new; exploitative images of African Americans in the American media date back to at least nineteenth-century minstrel shows. On the history of minstrelsy, see Eric Lott’s excellent study, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1995).

On August 7, 2007, the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network organized "Day of Outrage" protests against degrading lyrics in the music industry in more than twenty American cities. Nostalgic for an earlier time, Sharpton told a group of demonstrators outside the Motown Museum, "I’m here in Motown in Detroit as a symbol of when music was not denigrating and was entertaining." Azam Ahmed, "Rallies Put Hip-Hop on Notice-Protesters Decry Offensive Lyrics," Chicago Tribune, August 8, 2007, News, 1.

Some businesses did anticipate the nation’s growing African American consumer market as early as the turn of the twentieth century. Sears, Roebuck and Co., for example, began marketing wigs to African Americans as early as 1903. See http://www.searsarchives.com/catalogs/history.htm (accessed June 11, 2008).

For examples, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003), Richard Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 (New York, 1983), and William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993).

For examples, see John Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1978), David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York, 1993), Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City (New York, 1983), Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986), and George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York, 1994).

Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York, 1990) and George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York, 1993).

Cohen examines African American consumerism in Making a New Deal, 148-54. Also see Robert E. Weems, Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1998).

Baldwin’s analysis of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson borrows from Jeffrey T. Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (Urbana, 1990), 30-47.

Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cam-bridge, MA, 1988).

See, for examples, the works of Aaron Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Claude McKay, and James Weldon Johnson.

On power and identity, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1977).

Robin D. G. Kelley , "The Riddle of the Zoot: Malcolm Little and Black Cultural Politics During World War II," in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994 ), 161-82.

On the cultural contributions of Chicago’s South Side Bronzeville neighborhood, see Robert Bone, "Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance," Callaloo 28 (Summer 1986): 446-68. On Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Avenue, see Christina Royster-Hemby, "Street of Dreams: Pennsylvania Avenue Was Once the Center of Black Life and Culture in Baltimore-Can It Be Again?" Baltimore’s City Paper, two-part series (February 16 and February 23, 2005). And on Washington’s U Street, see Alicia Ault, "U Street: The Corridor is Cool Again," New York Times, April 14, 2006, F1.

On the cultural benefits provided by the density of ghettos, see St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York, 1945), 379-97.

See Cohen’s A Consumers’ Republic and Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988).

For E. Franklin Frazier’s critiques of materialism in African American communities, see Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class (Glencoe, IL, 1957) and The Negro Church in America (New York, 1964).

Baldwin takes this quotation from E. Franklin Frazier, "Chicago: A Cross Section of Negro Life," Opportunity 7, no. 3 (March 1929): 70-73.

See Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York, 1999), Craig Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (New York, 1998), and Werner, Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul (New York, 2004).

See, e.g., Ron Walters, "Barack Obama and the Politics of Blackness," Journal of Black Studies 38, no. 1 (September 2007): 7-29.