On Shopping for Identity

This is a really neat book that pulls in a couple of different directions. First, Halter is interested in the ethnic revival, which originally took place in the 1960s and 1970s. In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, Chicano activism, and the American Indian Movement—all of which asserted a sense of ethnic pride, white Americans of immigrant descent began to assert a pride in their own ethnicity after decades of having “assimilated.” Italian, Jewish, and Irish pride, for instance, became more prominent during this period, in large part as a way to assert specific forms of white identity in the wake of increasing visibility towards racial minorities (perhaps an attempt by them to maintain white dominance?).

Second, Halter examines American capitalism and consumption at a moment where different companies achieved, for the most part, parity in the quality of their products. Coca-Cola and Pepsi, for instance, held the same quality. The same is true of Tide, Cheer, and Gain. Because of parity in quality, it became difficult for consumers to distinguish between products, meaning that mass-advertising would do little good. As a result, corporate marketing shifted from mass-marketing, which attempted to appeal to the entire American public, to segmented marketing. One of the key forms of segmentation in corporate marketing was to appeal to customers based on ethnic markers. Dunkin Donuts, for example, began to appeal to Jewish consumers by using Yiddish words in their advertisements, and Colgate-Palmolive sent Spanish-speaking demonstrators to Latin American neighborhoods.

One of Halter’s interventions is her recognition that Americans stopped developing their identity around their communities and instead increasingly attached identity to the products they consumed. By uniting shifts in marketing with the ethnic revival, Halter clarifies the importance of consumer culture in signifying ethnic identity, further reinforcing it. Ultimately, one component of the shift from “assimilation” to “cultural pluralism” as the major paradigm in American society was the marriage of ethnicity and consumption. This is not the last word on the discussion over cultural pluralism and assimilation in American identity, but Halter does an excellent job of clarifying what seems to be an important segment of it.

A lot of what is in here seems obvious, but I don’t think it had really ever been stated in these terms before. The examples also make for a fascinating read.