Race and Retail: Consumption across the Color Line

by Mia Bay, Ann Fabian, Naa Oyo A. Kwate

Overview

Race has long shaped shopping experiences for many Americans. Retail exchanges and establishments have made headlines as flashpoints for conflict not only between blacks and whites, but also between whites, Mexicans, Asian Americans, and a wide variety of other ethnic groups, who have at times found themselves unwelcome at white-owned businesses. 
 
Race and Retail documents the extent to which retail establishments, both past and present, have often catered to specific ethnic and racial groups. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the original essays collected here explore selling and buying practices of nonwhite populations around the world and the barriers that shape these habits, such as racial discrimination, food deserts, and gentrification. The contributors highlight more contemporary issues by raising questions about how race informs business owners’ ideas about consumer demand, resulting in substandard quality and higher prices for minorities than in predominantly white neighborhoods.  In a wide-ranging exploration of the subject, they also address revitalization and gentrification in South Korean and Latino neighborhoods in California, Arab and Turkish coffeehouses and hookah lounges in South Paterson, New Jersey, and tourist capoeira consumption in Brazil.  
 
Race and Retail illuminates the complex play of forces at work in racialized retail markets and the everyday impact of those forces on minority consumers. The essays demonstrate how past practice remains in force in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813571706
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	08/04/2015
Series:	Rutgers Studies on Race and Ethnicity
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	324
Sales rank:	305,401
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

MIA BAY is a professor of history and co-director of the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University. She is the author of The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People 1830-1925. 

ANN FABIAN is a distinguished professor of history and co-director of the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead. 
 

Table of Contents

Contents
 
Introduction
 
Part I: Race, Place and Retail Spaces
 
Chapter 1: Traveling Black /Buying Black:  Retail and Roadside Accommodations during the Segregation Era
 
Chapter 2: Retail Messages in the Ghetto Belt
 
Chapter 3: The Other Migrants: Mexican Shoppers in American Borderlands
 
Chapter 4: Southern Retail Campaigns and the Struggle for Black Economic Freedom in the 1950s and 1960s
 
Chapter 5: Servicing a Racial Regime: Gender, Race and the Public Space of Department Stores in Baltimore, Maryland, and Johannesburg, South Africa, 1940-1970
 
Part II: Race, Retail and Communities 
 
Chapter 6: Athabascan Village Stores: Subsistence Shopping in Interior Alaska in the 1940s
 
Chapter 7: Deghettozing Chinatown: Race and Space in Postwar America
 
Chapter 8: Marketing Identity, Negotiating Boundaries: Ethnic Entrepreneurship in Paterson, New Jersey’s Narghile Lounges
 
Chapter 9: The Changing Politics of Latino Consumption: Debates in Downtown Santa Ana’s New Urbanist and Creative City Revitalization
 
Chapter 10: The Spatial Politics of Black Business Closure in Central Brooklyn
 
Part III: The Inner Landscapes of Racialized Consumption 
 
Chapter 11: Selling Voodoo in Migration Metropolises
 
Chapter 12: A Fantasy in Fashion: Luxury Dressing and African American Lifestyle Magazines in the 1980s
 
Chapter 13: Racial Discrimination in Retail Settings: A Liberation Psychology Perspective
 
Chapter 14: Does the Retail Environment Affect Mental Health?: Satisfaction with Neighborhood Retail and Social Well Being among African Americans in New York City
 
Notes on Contributors
 

Editorial Reviews

"This is the most important book on race and consumerism in many years."

author of Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947 - Kathy M. Newman

"Definitively establishes the importance of retail as a site where racial and ethnic identities are formed, negotiated, policed, or contested … Race and Retail is an excellent collection, one whose rich content amply rewards careful reading."

Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

"Providing effective analyses of how ethnicity affects people's experience as consumers as well as citizens, this cohesive collection will have a broad audience … Highly recommended."

CHOICE

"A fine resource for scholars and students alike, one that moves the field of consumer culture studies forward by enriching what we know and suggesting how much research - and much advocacy - still lie ahead."

The Journal of American History

"A fine resource for scholars and students alike, one that moves the field of consumer culture studies forward by enriching what we know and suggesting how much research - and much advocacy - still lie ahead."-- "The Journal of American History"

"Definitively establishes the importance of retail as a site where racial and ethnic identities are formed, negotiated, policed, or contested ... Race and Retail is an excellent collection, one whose rich content amply rewards careful reading."-- "Register of the Kentucky Historical Society"

"Providing effective analyses of how ethnicity affects people's experience as consumers as well as citizens, this cohesive collection will have a broad audience ... Highly recommended."-- "CHOICE"

"This is the most important book on race and consumerism in many years."--Kathy M. Newman "author of Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947"

From the Publisher

Featured on the weekly book list (http://bit.ly/1K5Phrs)

Chronicle of Higher Education