The Complexities of Anti-Consumerism

I picked up some groceries at (New York's only) Trader Joe's last night and took them home on the subway. I was sitting next to a pretty young woman, probably no older than I am, with a beautiful little daughter who was probably three or so. You know how you can tell that some kids are going to grow up to be stunning? You could tell with this girl.

The mother was well-dressed, in boots, a nice pair of jeans, and a blazer. Her bag was a so-so Vuitton knockoff--the material was shiny in that Canal-Street kind of way. Her hair was chemically processed--it looked to me like Japanese straightening, not corner-beauty-shop lye straightening. Her little girl was dressed well, too, and tastefully--not in that miniature-adult way that children, especially girls, sometimes are--in pink sneakers, jeans, and a quilted coat. The daughter was clearly very bright: she was engaged and articulate throughout the subway ride in a way that made me associate her with the kids who win the leadership scholarships from the foundation at which I tutor.

The mother was holding a little pink bag on her lap. The plastic that had held the tag was still attached to the zipper. She asked her daughter, "Do you like the new bookbag I got you?" The girl was looking at something and didn't respond. The mother asked again, nudging her, and the girl looked up, flashed a huge smile, and kissed her mother on the cheek. "Yes, Mommy!"

Consumerism issues, an observer might say. The mother is clearly trying to maintain an image of having more money than she does (i.e. the knockoff bag) and trying to win her daughter's affection with material objects.

But.

Consider that this is a young black single mother (she was telling her daughter, quietly, that they were going "to Daddy's house," and when she counted the stops for her daughter, it was clear that the destination was pretty deep in the Bronx). Consider the stereotypes with which she has to contend. Consider what she feels when people look at her and her beautiful, precocious child and glaze over in that "God, not another young black single mother" way that she has learned to recognize. It differentiates her, this image that costs money to project. The money that she spends on clothing and on her daughter's sneakers, on aspirational handbags, buys her some peace on the subway, buys her, maybe, freedom from the weight of each judgment levied by the glances of strangers, conscious or otherwise.

It seemed clear to me, sitting next to her, that this woman understood in an instinctive way the class-coding of consumer goods, that by sheer force of will and strategic spending she planned to change her social identity and her daughter's, that she was determined that no one would ever look at her or at her daughter and sneer. Her meticulousness in other ways--the carefully-packed snacks, the stop-counting--seemed to bear this out.

People do sneer. People really do look at other people and think, "Oh no, not another one," and imagine squalid apartments and corner drug deals and absent fathers. We all do it. I am doing it here, in some way. I'm not sure it matters whether the tone of our imaginings is compassionate or revolted. It is terrifying to know that other people can claim your life in this way, that they feel entitled to have opinions about you. The weight of these collective imaginings really does affect the people on whose shoulders it presses down. There are consequences, real ones.

I can imagine this woman's efforts paying off. I can imagine her spending everything she has to keep her daughter in nice clothes and green vegetables. I can imagine her daughter getting a scholarship to a good college, getting a lucrative job, paying for her mother's retirement. There is some way in which we fulfill the prophecies of our sneakers and mittens and freezers. Is it a coincidence that this determined, meticulous, anxious woman has a smart, beautiful daughter whose shining future visibly unfurls before her?

I don't think it can be. I think the bill of goods this woman has purchased includes not only the pink sneakers and bookbag but a set of behaviors that is rewarded. This is how class functions. You can give a child a different class identity than yours--I've seen it done, for many of the first-generation American kids with whom I went to high school. They went off to Yale and Amherst and Dartmouth and then into the Peace Corps and finance firms and law school, and they do take for granted what they've been given, in the way that we all do, the way in which it's what they've always known and had, and it is hard to understand on a visceral level what giving it meant to their parents. It is hard for me to understand what giving me Keds and riding lessons and an American Girl doll and dance classes and a private education and trips to Europe means to my father. There is a gulf there, much as, perhaps, there will be between the mother and daughter on the train when the daughter grows up and does not understand, really, what it is to be afraid of the way people look at her.

So I don't think we can really tell this woman, with authority, that she shouldn't be spending so much money on clothes, or toys, or her hair. I think we have to remember that things have meaning--real meaning, a meaning that changes people and lives and, ultimately, the world. At the very least, I think we need to recognize on a visceral level that it takes a strength of character that I cannot even comprehend to stare back at the staring strangers and know that you are still a person, your own, unclaimable, regardless of what they have thought about your hair and your clothes and your parenting--about you--that it is not weakness to want them to stop so much as it is unfathomable strength to bear everything they unknowingly communicate.

I think this deserves more consideration than the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" can provide, much as the woman on the train deserves more consideration than the dismissiveness of a statistical, appraising glance.