Paths to Respectability: Consumption and Stigma Management in the Contemporary Black Middle Class
基于对中产阶级非裔美国人的民族志访谈和观察，研究了两种应对种族污名的策略（“辨别并回避”和“去污名化”）如何通过消费行为实现，并分析了其成功与失败的条件。
Abstract When confronted with racial stigma, how do people manage it? What specific arrangements of objects and tactics do they mobilize to make everyday life more tolerable (if not more equal)? The politics of respectability (respectability) is one such arrangement. Respectability makes life more tolerable by offering a counternarrative that disavows stigma through status-oriented displays. This strategy of action emerged alongside mass consumer culture in the late 19th century, but what relevance does it have to those who are stigmatized in contemporary consumer culture? Based on ethnographic interviews and observations with middle-class African Americans, respectability remains an important strategy that has undergone profound changes since its origins while still operating in similar ways. In the late 20th century it fractured into two related but distinct counternarratives: (1) “discern and avoid,” which seeks distance from whatever is stigmatized, and (2) “destigmatize,” using black culture as a source of high status. Perceptions of how well either counternarrative manages stigma depend on how ideology, strategy, and consumption are connected via specific sociohistorical features of place and individual power resources. I illustrate those connections through four cases that show perceived success and perceived failure for each counternarrative.