Ar'n't I a Shopper?: The Politics of Black Women's Representation as Consumers in Cold War Era Advertising

In 1959, as television cameras rolled, U.S. president Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev came face-to-face at the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow. The world watched as the two global leaders faced off in front of a model of an American suburban kitchen and argued the supremacy of their respective nations. To make his case in the “Kitchen Debate,” Nixon highlighted the significance of American women and consumerism to progress, healthy families and a healthy economy. The American woman Nixon evoked was the middle-class, housewife ideal that dominated in post-World War II U.S. advertising and television shows. Presumed white, this ideal precluded consideration of how African Americans figured in the Cold War battle between U.S. capitalism and Soviet Communism. Several historians have detailed how, after World War II, U.S. business leaders, the media, and politicians increasingly tied Americans’ civic value to their consumerism, and advertisers particularly targeted women as “chief” or “professional” shoppers. Denied recognition as housewives or shoppers, however, African American women and, by extension, their families could not access the citizenship currency these roles held during the fifties. This paper examines how African Americans marketers promoted African American women’s shopper role through the marketing materials they encouraged major corporations such as Coca-Cola, Carnation Foods, and Pepsi-Cola to produce. These marketplace representations, I will argue, established blacks’ cultural identity as consumers, which, within a national culture characterized by anti-communism and mass consumerism, provided them essential ideological grounds from which to make claims of the state.