Race and Retail: Consumption across the Color Line

RETAIL

Introduction

Mia Bay and Ann Fabian

In December 2013, Barneys, Macy’s, and several other major New York retailers announced plans to adopt a Customers’ Bill of Rights in the wake of several high-profile incidents in which store officials accused black customers of theft. In June 2013, for instance, the actor Robert Brown, a star of HBO’s Treme, was handcuffed and paraded through Macy’s by two undercover police officers who took him to a small room located in a hidden corner of Macy’s—just steps from the pantyhose department.¹ Known as Room 140, it contains two chain-link holding cells. Acting on tip from a Macy’s employee, the police officers handcuffed Brown to a bench inside one of cells while they verified his identification and checked the credit card he used to buy a $1,350 Movado watch—even though the clerk who sold Brown the watch had already reviewed both. I didn’t know there was a jail inside Macy’s, said Brown, who was stunned by the incident. He also reported that the officers kept telling him, Your card is fake. You’re going to jail.²

Brown’s case hit the news, but he is far from the first member of a minority group to end up in one of Macy’s holding cells. Macy’s has a long history of profiling African American, Latino, and other ethnic minority customers. In 2005, the retailer paid New York State $600,000 to settle a complaint that its New York department stores engaged in racial profiling and the unlawful handcuffing of customers detained on suspicion of shoplifting.³ Nor is Macy’s the only store with a history of such complaints. New York City’s Commission on Human Rights is currently investigating the loss prevention practices that have inspired similar complaints at seventeen other major retailers.⁴

A voluntary reform measure adopted by such stores, the new Customers’ Bill of Rights aims to discourage the racial profiling and detention of minority group customers—a practice colloquially known as shop-and-frisk stops. The one-page bill is designed to be publicly posted by participating retailers and proclaims, "Profiling is an unacceptable practice and will not be tolerated. It also affirms the participating establishment’s commitment to ensuring that all shoppers, guests, and employees are treated with dignity and respect and are free from unreasonable searches, profiling, and discrimination of any kind. To that end, the retailers who post the bill commit to the use of internal programs to test compliance with our strict prohibition against profiling practices; promise to require store employees to respect the basic civil and legal rights of any person suspected of shoplifting or other crime committed on store property; and promise that employees who violate the company’s prohibition on profiling will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment."⁵

Detractors describe the Customers’ Bill of Rights as a marketing ploy that is unlikely to put an end to the racial discrimination experienced by many shoppers.⁶ And while its impact remains to be seen, many of its provisions reiterate civil and legal rights already accorded to all shoppers by law—which have not prevented such discrimination in the past. Moreover, the Customers’ Bill of Rights takes on a problem that goes well beyond the customer service policies of any particular store. Retail discrimination against people of color has deep roots in the social and economic divisions that structure American society and create patterns of wealth, poverty, and social mobility that vary from group to group.

As the essays of this book underscore, race and ethnicity have socioeconomic reverberations that have long shaped the shopping experiences of all Americans. Who we are often dictates what we buy, where we can buy it, how much we pay for it, and in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, even what we want to buy. In a society marked by economic disparities that map out along racial and ethnic lines, race and ethnicity have often served as rough proxies for class—tools that retailers, realtors, restaurateurs, marketers, advertisers, and a wide variety of other purveyors of goods and services use to separate the affluent customers whose patronage they value from poorer shoppers whose patronage seems far less promising. Although many Americans see consumption as a matter of individual preference in which anyone can buy anything they can afford to pay for, who we are shapes our experience of the market. Patterns of racial, ethnic, and economic segregation shape American consumers’ retail opportunities, experiences, and preferences in much the same way that they shape the demographic composition of our nation’s housing projects, ethnic enclaves, affluent suburbs, inner-city neighborhoods, and gated communities.

Our shopping experiences mirror the social, economic, ethnic, and racial contours of our neighborhoods. Whether they are designed for a specific group or are the product of complex histories of demographic change, most American neighborhoods tend to be home to populations largely made up of members of the same racial or ethnic group. Historians of modern American consumer culture often trace its origins to the last decades of the nineteenth century, an era marked by heightened racial and ethnic divisions. During these years, mass production and urbanization made all Americans increasingly dependent on goods made by unknown hands.⁷ These developments also fostered the emergence of a consumer world shaped by Jim Crow racial segregation in the South, other, more informal forms racial discrimination in the North, and the proliferation of ethnic enclaves of new immigrant workers in the North’s rapidly industrializing cities. As the sociologist Douglass Massey notes, such newcomers, regardless of their race or nationality, have usually settled in enclaves located close to an urban core, in areas of mixed land use, old housing, poor services, and low or decreasing socioeconomic status, creating a diversity of segregation patterns that have varied over time without ever disappearing altogether.⁸

As they achieved prosperity, many immigrant groups assimilated into mainstream American society, leaving their old neighborhoods behind for white-majority areas that offered more amenities and improved conditions.⁹ But even though the out-migration of white ethnics helped create the affluent suburbs that now surround most American cities, socioeconomic mobility and assimilation have never been equally available to all. The blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other minority group members who began to migrate to American cities in increasingly large numbers in the twentieth century were often subject to restrictive covenants, redlining, racially discriminatory federal housing policies, and other forms of discrimination that limited their economic opportunities and residential mobility. And these complex patterns of settlement and remigration—and the ongoing economic inequalities they fostered—created the highly racialized geographies that structure contemporary residential and retail landscapes.¹⁰

Although less ubiquitous than they once were, white-majority residential neighborhoods still made up over 80 percent of all U.S. neighborhoods in 2010, while black-majority and Hispanic-majority neighborhoods number 4.7 and 5.3 percent of all neighborhoods, respectively. Only 6.4 percent of neighborhoods are racial or ethnically mixed enough to have no clear majority.¹¹ Residents in these divided neighborhoods quite naturally end up in certain stores and businesses, where they confront retail opportunities and experiences that also vary by neighborhood.

Retail varies from place to place because the racially and ethnically segregated neighborhoods in which modern-day Americans live are not just neighborhoods; to marketers they are geodemographic clusters of consumers.¹² Marked out by market researchers, these clusters divide consumers into segments defined by both geography and demography, using zip code and other census data on race, ethnicity, age, and other social characteristics to predict who will buy what and how much they will pay for it. Geodemographic cluster models of this kind often help determine what kinds of stores set up shop in specific neighborhoods, creating striking racial and ethnic disparities in consumer access to variety of different goods. High-quality fresh food, to cite an obvious example, is more readily available in affluent white neighborhoods than in poorer black and Hispanic neighborhoods—which are geodemographic clusters that supermarkets consider to be unprofitable. As numerous studies show, residents of urban food deserts have limited access to well-stocked supermarkets or grocery stores. Instead, they have to make their food purchases at convenience stores and fast food outlets, where fresh food is scarce—and often costly.¹³

Both Robert Brown’s hours in a Macy’s cell and the store’s agreement to post a Customers’ Bill of Rights suggest that racialized understandings of consumption extend beyond neighborhoods to create associations between particular kinds of people and particular kinds of products—a process that helps explain why Macy’s employees found it easy to assume that Brown could not afford an expensive watch. Marketing campaigns often target specific demographics and frequently include images that link certain types of goods to certain types of people. Although luxury goods, such as expensive watches, are sometimes advertised in campaigns featuring black celebrities, they are generally marketed to wealthy white people, which is one reason why Brown’s purchase seemed so suspicious. Had he spent the same amount of money on a more utilitarian and less luxurious purchase, like a modestly priced bed or sofa, his visit to Macy’s might have been uneventful.

There have been similar events at other high-end retailers. In October 2013, acting on a tip from a Barneys employee, NYPD detectives took Trayon Christian, an African American student from Queens, into custody after he bought a $350 Ferragamo belt at the Madison Avenue store. In a lawsuit filed against the store and the police department, Christian reported that the detectives asked him how a young black man such as himself could afford to purchase such an expensive belt.¹⁴ Barneys is of the opinion that he [Christian] doesn’t fit the profile of someone who should be shopping at Barneys, noted Christian’s lawyer.¹⁵

Profiling and the confrontations it provokes give us a glimpse into the tangled relations of race and retail. The arrests at Macy’s and Barneys highlight the social consequences of the structural inequalities that run through our consumer economy. Part of the problem, these cases suggest, is that while race is often a proxy for class among retailers who are perfecting their loss-prevention practices, minority group consumers are individuals who cannot be easily reduced to a race or a class. Instead, black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American consumers, like other shoppers, may be rich, poor, or in between, and they enter stores with consumer preferences and desires that are not only mediated by class but are also shaped by advertisements and the suggestions of marketers that the expensive commodities on display at high-end retail stores are available to anyone with money enough to buy them. Advertisements for the Movado watch that Brown purchased feature black celebrities such as Jennifer Hudson, Wynton Marsalis, and Blair Underwood, which may be one reason why the watch appealed to Brown, who is a black celebrity himself. But both the Macy’s staff and the police saw him as a black consumer rather than a celebrity and therefore unlikely to be able to afford the watch.

Meanwhile, Trayon Christian was subject to similar suspicions, which proved equally wrong in his case. Christian, a college student who used his paycheck from his work-study job to splurge on a Ferragamo belt, was not a typical Barneys consumer. In fact, he said, he had never bought anything at Barneys. But the Ferragamo belt had a cachet that extended beyond Barneys’ largely white and wealthy customer base. He’d seen the belt on a lot of his favorite celebrities, including rapper Juelz Santana.¹⁶

In late summer of 2014, both Macy’s and Barneys consented to pay fines to the New York attorney general’s office and to adopt policies to curtail the racial profiling that leads to wrongful detentions of minority shoppers.¹⁷ But whether such measures will prove effective remains an open question. Macy’s 2005 racial profiling settlement addressed similar issues with little lasting effect.

As sites where stereotypes about race and class meet the complexities of race and class on the ground, retail exchanges and shopping establishments have been persistent flashpoints for conflict not only between blacks and whites but also between whites, Mexicans, Asian Americans, and a wide variety of other ethnic groups, whose members have at times found themselves unwelcome at various white-owned businesses. Likewise, as business owners, members of minority groups can also find themselves at odds with white neighbors and with real estate developers who have their eyes on property in gentrifying neighborhoods. Retail can also be a site of tensions across minority group lines, as is seen in the troubled histories of contact, conflict, and outright violence between groups such as Korean shopkeepers and their black and Latino customers in Los Angeles.

As such histories illustrate, race and ethnicity have long shaped the economic well-being, purchasing power, and daily consumption experiences of all Americans. Yet the subject of race and retail is surprisingly understudied. Just as marketers have not always been attentive to the needs of black, Latino, Asian, and other minority-group consumers, scholars have not always fully captured the degree to which race and ethnicity shape day-to-day retail experiences of every kind.

Part of the problem may simply be the vast scope of subject, which crisscrosses decades, disciplines, and subfields in ways that makes any comprehensive study of race and retail a challenge. Instead, we have studies from a variety of fields that document inequalities in the world of consumption. Economists, for example, have shown that minority-group consumers often pay more than whites for houses, cars, and others goods; scholars of public health have compiled data documenting the presence of food deserts in black and Hispanic neighborhoods and tried to assess the costs in physical health and personal well-being; ethnic studies scholars and urban historians have explored the long histories of Chinatowns, Koreatowns, and barrios in U.S. cities and traced both the tastes of ethnic consumers and the marketing of ethnicity to outsiders; historians, geographers, and political scientists have chronicled the emergence of white suburbs and gated communities where residents shop at malls that are largely inaccessible to nonwhite consumers; scholars of consumer culture have described the importance of women as consumers, charted the rise of various ethnic markets, and examined the ways minority group consumers have tried to use their purchasing power to advance their status in American society; and those who describe the United States as a consumers’ republic capture the extent to which our economic lives influence our standing as citizens.¹⁸

Taken together, such studies underscore that there is nothing postracial about American shopping. But few works bring together this far-flung scholarship to present an interdisciplinary consideration of the complex play of forces at work in racialized retail markets. This volume is designed to start a conversation about these issues.

Race and Retail: Consumption across the Color Line grew out of a conference that brought together a small group of interdisciplinary scholars doing pioneering work on the history and character of racialized retail markets; the susceptibility of those markets to forces such as supply and demand; the impact of racially segmented markets on consumers and on the racial and ethnic communities they serve; the role of ideas about race and ethnicity in structuring such markets and in identifying highly racialized consumption communities; the use of racial identities and ethnic identities in the marketing and sale of goods and services; and the question of whether restructuring retail and consumption can foster social justice. Taken together, these questions require answers that are beyond the scope of both our conference and this book, but as these essays make clear, they generate a wide-ranging conversation about the complex connections between race and retail.

Our collection includes works by authors from the fields of history; sociology; urban planning; public health; business; geography; Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino studies; and southern studies, whose scholarship testifies to the interdisciplinary breadth and significance of questions about race and retail and delves into the complexities of racialized markets across a geography that extends from Alaska to the American South. As authors move through this territory, their essays document the extent to which retail establishments, both past and present, have often catered to specific ethnic and racial groups, creating patterns of commercial segregation that mirror the residential segregation that continues to divide towns and cities into racial and ethnic neighborhoods. They also offer analyses of the everyday impact of these patterns and chart their impact on minority consumers, neighborhood life, urban planning, racial and ethnic entrepreneurship, consumer activism, labor market discrimination, and market-driven visions of racial uplift.

We have divided the work of our contributors into three broad groupings. Part I of the book, Race, Place, and Retail Spaces, begins with an essay by Mia Bay entitled "Traveling Black/Buying Black: Retail and Roadside Accommodations during the Segregation Era." Bay’s essay explores the challenges black travelers faced during the segregation era, many of which involved restrictions on consumption. Not only were African Americans barred from purchasing many travel services (such as tickets for whites-only railway cars and seats on some buses and planes), they had trouble obtaining everyday necessities on the road. Railroad dining cars, airport restaurants, and gas stations often refused to serve blacks. The inability of black to buy goods and services from such vendors complicates versions of U.S. consumer history that stress the power of the purse.

Although focused on modern-day consumers, the section’s second essay, Naa Oyo A. Kwate’s "Retail Messages in the Ghetto Belt," likewise explores the limited power exercised by black consumers. Kwate’s empirical study of the statistics that marketers and retailers use to determine and justify decisions on where to locate high-quality stores helps explain the distinct retail geography that characterizes predominately black neighborhoods. Her evidence suggests that the market research tools provided by organizations such Esri, one the world’s leading providers of GIS mapping software, segment consumers by race in ways that mask the economic complexity of black neighborhoods. Kwate’s research points to the decisions that have often left consumers in poor neighborhoods with unhealthy choices such as fast food restaurants and liquor stores.

Geraldo L. Cadava’s essay, "The Other Migrants: Mexican Shoppers in American Borderlands," looks at ethnic market segmentation and the neglect of minority group consumers from a transnational perspective. Cadava recounts the history of how federal policies policing the Mexican border have been enacted with no regard to encouraging or even preserving the stream of wealthy Mexican border crossers who have long come the United States to shop. Mexican consumers, who are the economic lifeblood of U.S. border towns such as Phoenix and Laredo, are largely invisible to most Americans, who have difficulty seeing Mexican border crossers as anything other than illegal immigrants who take money from the United States rather than making any contribution to its economy.

Two works on the complex intersection between labor and consumption in the retail marketplace round out this section. Traci Parker’s "Southern Retail Campaigns and the Struggle for Black Economic Freedom in the 1950s and 1960s explores the ways that African American campaigns for full access to retail establishments have always been about both labor and consumption. In the 1930s, black activists sought to link the two by staging campaigns that urged customers, Don’t buy where you can’t work." As Parker explains, the sit-in protesters of the 1960s also sought to promote the hiring of black workers. At stake in all these movements, Parker argues, is a conviction that black shoppers and black workers all shared a common fate and could not advance without supporting each other. Her essay offers a historical account of the workings of linked fate in the fascinating career of African American saleswoman Doretha Davis, who integrated the selling floor at W. T. Grant’s in Charlotte during the 1960s.

In "Servicing a Racial Regime: Gender, Race, and the Public Space of Department Stores in Baltimore, Maryland, and Johannesburg, South Africa, 1940–1970, sociologist Bridget Kenny takes up the tangled issues of race, gender, labor, and retail, comparing shopping experiences in the segregated cities of Baltimore and Johannesburg. Kenny asks why department stores became such important arenas for protest. Attentive to both struggles over labor and the experiences of consumers, Kenny’s research suggests that black and white shoppers and workers alike framed question of access to department stores as a struggle over a set of relations understood to be the ‘market.’" Access to the genteel department store market offered consumers respectability, status, and inclusion not only through commodities they purchased but also through their interactions with the gendered and racialized labor forces of these stores.

The essays in Part II, "Race, Retail, and Communities, investigate how race and ethnicity configure the marketplaces and shopping experiences of particular communities. It begins with an essay by historian John W. Heaton, Athabascan Village Stores: Subsistence Shopping in Interior Alaska in the 1940s." Heaton chronicles the complex interaction between traditional Athabascan practices of subsistence and Alaska’s twentieth-century market economy. His research establishes a place for Native Alaskans in modern American consumer culture and argues that Native subsistence shoppers found the means to reproduce their cultural identity even as they purchased name-brand luxury items and mass-produced commercial goods.

In "Deghettoizing Chinatown: Race and Space in Postwar America, historian Ellen D. Wu traces the role of commercial spaces in the slow transformation of Asian Americans from aliens ineligible for citizenship to a distinctly not black model minority." Drawing on research that focuses on the two decades following World War II and highlights the backdrop of Cold War politics, Wu chronicles the work of ethnic entrepreneurs, social scientists, policy makers, and ordinary residents of San Francisco’s Chinatown who welcomed shopping tourists to stores and restaurants and promoted Chinatown and Chinese American businesses as an exotic alternative to the urban poverty of stigmatized black ghettoes.

Wu’s study of Chinatown is followed by geographer Neiset Bayouth’s "Marketing Identity, Negotiating Boundaries: Ethnic Entrepreneurship, Retail and Consumption in the Coffeehouses and Narghile Lounges of Paterson, New Jersey." Bayouth’s study of coffeehouses and narghile or hookah lounges explores the ways that commercial districts both express and help shape ethnic identities. The kinds of coffeehouses and hookah lounges she describes have a long history in the Arab world, dating back to rest stops along sixteenth-century trade routes. But their meaning and functions have changed in the twenty-first-century United States. What can their successes and failures teach us about Arab American businesses? How do they cater to college students and to Paterson’s Hispanic community?

The next essay, "The Changing Politics of Latino Consumption: Debates Related to Downtown Santa Ana’s New Urbanist and Creative City Redevelopment, by ethnic studies scholars Johana Londoño and Erualdo R. González, explores the politics behind developments in Latino urban spaces. Here, Londoño and González, who have been studying Latino neighborhoods in Santa Ana, California, and Union City, New Jersey, focus on developments in the former community, a predominantly Latino city in the heart of conservative Orange County. They are particularly interested in the ways the collection of ideas known as New Urbanism or the creative city" helps explain decisions by zoning boards and city councils to bypass the needs of working-class Latinos and cater to non-ethnic white middle-class consumers. Once again, a racial or ethnic logic seems to supersede the pure economic calculation that celebrates the $1 billion buying power of Latino consumers.

In "The Spatial Politics of Black Business Closure in Central Brooklyn," urban planner Stacey A. Sutton looks closely at several black-owned businesses in rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods. Her research focuses on the histories of decades-old black-owned businesses and explores the effects of the selective enforcement of building and fire codes, which puts small entrepreneurs at a tremendous financial disadvantage. Studying a Haitian American–owned tire shop, Sutton discovers that officials from the fire department visited the building eight times in 2010 and each time used fire code violations to limit the number of tires the owner could have on site. Business suffered. When small businesses such as this tire shop close, civic leaders and real estate developers are very ready to welcome high-end businesses and big-box stores.

The third section is entitled The Inner Landscapes of Racialized Consumption. In "Selling Voodoo in Migration Metropolises," Melissa L. Cooper, a scholar of southern studies, describes the racial dimensions and marketing appeal of a fascination with voodoo practices that swept cities in the United States early in the twentieth century. According to Cooper, voodoo was one of several of the invented African survivals of the period. Her essay describes the movies, advertisements, and voodoo experts who sought commercial profits in voodoo.

In "‘A Fantasy in Fashion’: Luxury Dressing and African American Lifestyle Magazines in the 1980s, cultural historian Siobhan Carter-David studies popular magazines aimed at black audiences in the 1980s and argues that their feature stories, advertisements, and editorials offered visions of an elite consumer world open to middle-class black audiences—a sort of racial uplift through consumerism, style, and fashion. She analyzes the ways these magazines (most of which were short lived) marketed an aesthetics of opulence. The 1980s was a decade of contrasts," she writes, when a taste for luxurious display trumped careful saving and actual economic security—or so it seemed in the world of glossy magazines that offered fantastic spreads depicting black wealth and comfort. The economic downturn of 1987 brought publishers and readers back to earth, but the fantasy gives Carter-David a chance to explore how, during this brief period, black audiences imagined a conspicuous participation in the marketplace.

Essays by scholars of public health and business who investigate the psychological effects of the racial workings of retail environments conclude the book. Again, something more than simple economics is at play. Jerome D. Williams, Geraldine Rosa Henderson, and their colleagues at the Rutgers Business School at Newark explore the psychological costs and consequences of retail discrimination. In "Racial Discrimination in Retail Settings: A Liberation Psychology Perspective, they take up the kinds of experiences we described in the opening of this introduction. How does consumer racial profiling plague black shoppers? Their research documents how patterns of discrimination create feelings of humiliation and violation among many black shoppers. While narrow interpretations of equal protection statutes may make it difficult to win suits against retail establishments, Williams, Henderson, and their collaborators suggest that lessons of liberation psychology"—efforts to see things from the perspective of oppressed groups—might help to create more equitable retail environments.

In "Does Retail Environment Affect Mental Health? Satisfaction with Neighborhood Retail and Social Well-Being among African Americans in New York City, Azure B. Thompson and Sharese N. Porter approach the psychological impact of retail racism from a different perspective. Taking Central Harlem as their case study, Thompson and Porter examined the mental health of black consumers in neighborhoods where fresh food is scarce and advertisements for cigarettes and alcohol and fast-food chains abound. The results of their community-based research documented that the residents of Central Harlem are deeply dissatisfied with their retail environment. But they also showed, much to Thompson and Porter’s surprise, that the dissatisfaction might be best regarded as healthy: The many respondents who reported being dissatisfied with retail, these authors note, had better social well-being than those who reported being satisfied with retail. Thompson and Porter conclude by speculating that their findings may well support other medical evidence suggesting that individuals who can express their experience with racism face lower health risks than do individuals who internalize it. However, they also remain concerned about the long-term effects of the inequitable distribution of unhealthy retail in Black neighborhoods and call for an environmental justice approach to retail equity" that would offer structural solutions to this deep-rooted problem.

The essays in this book suggest that such solutions will be hard to come by. Read together, they document myriad intersections between race and retail and open up still more avenues for investigation. They show that retail racism has a long history that extends beyond the shop floor into marketing, advertising, and employment, and persists to this day. But at the same time, our authors leave open the possibility of future progress by also showing that the connections between race and retail do not begin and end with questions of discrimination. Instead, they illustrate that consumption is a capacious site of ethnic entrepreneurship, identity building, racial and ethnic uplift, and cultural continuity and change, all of which combine to make dynamic interactions around race and retail an ongoing and potentially changeable central force in American social and economic life.

NOTES

1. On Macy’s holding cells, see Andrea Elliott, In Stores, Private Handcuffs for Sticky Fingers, New York Times, June 17, 2003.

2. ‘Treme’ Actor Arrested at Macy’s for Buying Mother a $1,350 Watch, DNAinfo.com, DNAinfo New York, October 25, 2013, http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20131025/civic-center/actor-third-person-sue-nypd-for-shopping-while-black, accessed February 1, 2014; Kerry Burke, Ginger Adams Otis, and Dareh Gregorian, Rob Brown, Star of ‘Treme,’ Says He Was Arrested at Macy’s after Buying Mom Watch, NY Daily News, October 25, 2013, http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/black-man-sues-macy-cuffed-making-legit-purchase-article-1.1496735, accessed February 1, 2014.

3. Andrea Elliot, Macy’s Settles Complaint of Racial Profiling for $600,000, New York Times, January 4, 2005.

4. Adrianne Pasquarelli, Lawmakers Target Racial Profiling by Retailers, Crain’s New York Business, November 25, 2013, http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20131125/RETAIL_AP-PAREL/131129926/lawmakers-target-racial-profiling-by-retailers, accessed February 1, 2014.

5. Customer’s Bill of Rights, National Action Network, http://nationalactionnetwork.net/press/national-action-network-rev-al-sharpton-along-with-other-civil-rights-groups-and-the-retail-council-of-new-york-draft-historic-customers-bill-of-rights-against-racial-profiling/.

6. Katie Mcdonough, Macy’s and Barneys Introduce ‘Customer’s Bill of Rights’ to Address Racial Profiling, Salon.com, December 10, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/macys_and_barneys_introduce_customers_bill_of_rights_to_address_racial_profiling/.

7 Wesley Clair Mitchell quoted in William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011), 7.

8. Douglas Massey, Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Conditions in U.S. Metropolitan Areas, in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, vol. 1, ed. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2001), 391.

9. Ibid.

10. For a searing recent account of the history of racial segregation its economic impact on black Americans, see Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations, The Atlantic, May 14, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/. The more detailed historical works on which Coates draws include Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Picador, 2010); Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010); and Thomas M. Shapiro and Melvin L. Oliver, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1997).

11. Barrett A. Lee, John Iceland, Gregory Sharp, Racial and Ethnic Diversity Goes Local: Charting Change in American Communities over Three Decades, 12, working paper, Russell Sage Foundation, September 2012, http://www.russellsage.org/research/reports/racial-ethnic-diversity.

12. For a more detailed overview of the role of geodemography in marketing, see Austin Troy, Geodemographic Segmentation, in Encyclopedia of GIS, ed. Shashi Shekhar and Hui Xiong (New York: Springer US, 2008), 347–355.

13. See, for example, Julie Beaulac, Elizabeth Kristjansson, and Steven Cummins, A Systematic Review of Food Deserts, 1966–2007, Preventing Chronic Disease 6, no. 3 (2009): 1–10; and M. verPloeg, V. Breneman, T. Farrigan, K. Hamrick, D. Hopkins, P. Kaufman, B. H. Lin, et al., Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food: Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences: Report to Congress, ERS Report Summary, June 2009, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, http://ers.usda.gov/publications/ap-administrative-publication/ap-036.aspx#.U7X277HSikc.

14. Julee Wilson, Black College Student Arrested for Buying a Designer Belt, Barneys & NYPD Slapped with Lawsuit, Huffington Post, October 23, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/23/trayon-christian-lawsuit-barneys-new-york-nypd_n_4148490.html.

15. ‘Treme’ Actor Arrested at Macy’s for Buying Mother a $1,350 Watch; Kerry Burke, Mark Morales, Barbara Ross, and Ginger Adams Otis, Barneys Accused Teen of Using Fake Debit Card for $349 Belt Because He’s a ‘Young Black American Male,’ New York Daily News, October 22, 2013, http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/barneys-accused-stealing-black-teen-article-1.1493101, accessed August 21, 2014.

16. Wilson, Black College Student Arrested.

17. Alan Feuer, Macy’s to Pay $650,000 to Resolve Bias Inquiry, New York Times, August 20, 2014, A19.

18. Kenneth J. Arrow, What Has Economic to Say about Racial Discrimination? Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, no. 2 (1998): 91–100; John Yinger, Evidence on Discrimination in Consumer Markets, Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, no. 2 (1998): 23–40; P. A. Riach and J. Rich, Field Experiments of Discrimination in the Market Place, The Economic Journal 112, no. 483 (2002): 480–518; Mary J. Fischer and Douglas S. Massey, The Ecology of Racial Discrimination, City & Community 3, no. 3 (2004): 221–241; M. verPloeg, V. Breneman, T. Farrigan, K. Hamrick, D. Hopkins, P. Kaufman, B. H. Lin, et al., Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food: Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences; Renee E. Walker, Christopher R. Keane, and Jessica G. Burke, Disparities and Access to Healthy Food in the United States: A Review of Food Deserts Literature, Health & Place 16, no. 5 (2010): 876–884; Vanessa Künnemann and Ruth Mayer, eds., Chinatowns in a Transnational World: Myths and Realities of an Urban Phenomenon (New York: Routledge, 2011); David R. Diaz, Barrio Urbanism: Chicanos, Planning, and American Cities (New York: Routledge, 2005); Marye C. Tharp, Marketing and Consumer Identity in Multicultural America (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2001); Marilyn Halter, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (New York: Schocken, 2007); Alexis McCrossen, ed., Consumer Culture in the United States–Mexico Borderlands (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009); Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich, Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965–1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic (New York: Vintage Books, 2003); Shiho Imai, Creating the Nisei Market: Race and Citizenship in Hawai’i’s Japanese American Consumer Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010); Robert E. Weems, Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

Part I

Race, Place, and Retail Spaces

1

Traveling Black/Buying Black

Retail and Roadside Accommodations during the Segregation Era

Mia Bay

A Jim Crow traveling kit used by African American minister Joseph K. Bowler when he traveled south of the Mason-Dixon line illustrates some of practical obstacles black travelers faced in the segregated South. The kit, which Bowler described to a reporter for the Chicago Defender in 1922, was designed to allow the minister, a Massachusetts resident, to travel through the South in relative comfort. It included a pair of soiled overalls purchased from an auto mechanic, a supply of salmon and other canned goods, and a miniature gasoline stove and small table top the size of a scrub board. Bowler wore the overalls to avoid the expense of soiling good clothes in the dirty Jim Crow coaches, where white conductors and news vendors often spat tobacco juice on the seats . . . [and] the white farmers use[d] the Jim Crow coaches as luggage cars in which to transport chickens and hogs. But the key components of his kit addressed the distinctive retail geography African Americans were forced to negotiate when traveling Jim Crow. He carried food supplies and a small tabletop and a stove so he could make and eat his own meals. The dining car is a closed corporation as far as our people are concerned, Bowler explained, further noting that white people below the Mason Dixon line maintain that we are animals, virtually camels, and can go without food or water for several days.¹

While Jim Crow kits as elaborate as Bowler’s may have been rare, throughout the segregation era few African American travelers hit the road without well-founded worries about where they would be able to buy food and other necessities. Moreover, such worries were not limited to the South or alleviated by the advent of new forms of transportation such as long-distance buses, driving, and flying. African American travelers initially saw buses, automobiles, and planes as offering an escape from Jim Crow, but all would prove deeply disappointing in this regard. Both bus lines and airlines adopted forms of segregated seating. And even traveling by car did not guarantee black travelers access to roadside accommodations of any kind—a problem those who traveled by plane and bus also faced. Indeed, instead of offering genuine alternatives to segregation, these new forms of transportation complicated the Jim Crow map black travelers navigated by adding new way stations where African American travelers could find themselves unable to purchase food, drink, or other