Abstract
In an 1880s tour of New York City neighborhoods, Jacob Riis (1971: 118) seemed perplexed that “even where the wolf howls at the door, [African America] makes a bold and gorgeous front.” Much like the subsequent century of scholars, Riis presumed African Americans’ genteel household material culture was an insubstantial facade contradicting their objective identity. Riis reduced commodities in African-American homes to a meaningless “front” which Black consumers fabricated to conceal their “authentic” racial identity. Consumer discourses explicitly and tacitly promised a host of material advantages, civil privileges, and social possibilities, yet Riis denied such rights to African Americans because he assumed consumer culture’s prospects were exclusive to Whites.
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Mullins, P.R. (1999). “A Bold and Gorgeous Front”. In: Leone, M.P., Potter, P.B. (eds) Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4767-9_7
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