Poverty, Bling, and Color-Blind Racism

A second-hand and discount jewelry dealer in the Sacramento area called “Sharif’s Jewelers” is currently running TV commercials for the holiday season that feature images of the store, the jewelry, happy shoppers, and a narrator who describes the great deals shoppers can get at the stores. Just before the commercials end, the narration switches to an entirely different voice, a man with a strong Latino accent, who says “Remember, you don’t have to be rich and famous to shop at Sharif’s!”

As we learned from Where the Girls Are, marketing agents like TV commercials can have a profound effect not only on the identities of individuals and groups that are represented by the media, but also how those individuals and groups are perceived by others. In this case, by switching the narrating voice from a professional-sounding, ethnically-ambiguous man, to a voice that implies a racial minority status and concurrently advocates the acquisition of cheap jewelry, Sharif’s effectively is doing two things: it is racializing a lack of monetary resources (in other words, drawing a correlation between racial minority status and poverty), and also, maybe more importantly, Sharif’s is racializing a propensity to desire extravagant, irrational purchases.

This is the kind of mentality that enables color-blind racism, because with these kinds of influences present, over time these ideas about race, poverty, and irrational spending can come to be perceived as legitimate. Like Bonilla-Silva discussed, many white Americans tend to attribute poverty in racial minority communities to, among other things, their patterns of making poor financial decisions. These commercials reinforce that sentiment, and likely leave some viewers with ideas that suggest that if people of minority descent could probably pull themselves out of poverty if they could just stop spending all their money on bling.