Consuming Lines of Difference: The Politics of Wealth and Poverty along the Color Line

Abstract

Commentators on African American life have often focused on poverty, evaded recognition of African American wealth, and ignored the ways genteel affluence and impoverishment were constructed along turn-of-the-century color lines. Documentary research and archaeology at the Madam C.J. Walker home in Indianapolis, Indiana, illuminates how the continuum of wealth and poverty was defined and negotiated by one of African America's wealthiest early-20th-century entrepreneurs. The project provides an opportunity to compare the ways in which wealth was defined and experienced along the color line in the early 20th century, and how such notions of black affluence shaped racialized definitions of poverty and materiality.

The Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead: Post-Emancipation Transitions of an African American Family in Central Texas Vol. 2

“…Mullins (1999a:30) argues that an object's exchange value and price are not the same, nor are they always interchangeable. As a result, price cannot be used consistently to describe or explain material symbolism, social status, or wealth (Mullins et al 2011). Relying on price diminishes artifact values to a single mode of interpretation based on our perceived monetary values, reducing the overall meaning between the object and the consumer.…”