Hill (2006) ‘New Commodities, New Consumers: Selling Blackness in a Global Marketplace’, Ethnicities 6(3

ABSTRACT Because current literature on globalization largely neglects racism, it fails to explain the experiences of contemporary African American youth within the new racialized social class formations of globalization. I suggest that because African American youth live within the borders of the sole remaining world super-power, their experiences might shed light on social class relations of advanced capi-talism as refracted through the lens of race, gender, age and sexuality. First, I investigate how shifting the focus of class analysis from production to consumption sheds light on how African American youth participate in a reconfigured black body politics that is increasingly aligned with the ever expanding consumer markets of advanced capitalism. Second, I use the sex work industry as a template for examin-ing how young African American women and men participate in new forms of commodification that sell blackness in the global marketplace. KEY WORDS African Americans ● body ● capitalism ● commodification ● consumerism ● globalization ● hip hop ● racism ● social class ● youth It’s just me against the world, baby, me against the world. I got nothin ’ to lose – it’s just me against the world. (Tupac Shakur) In the eyes of many Americans, African American youth such as hip hop legend Tupac Shakur constitute a threatening and unwanted population. No longer needed for cheap, unskilled labor in fields and factories, poor and working-class black youth find few job opportunities in the large, urban metropolitan areas where most now reside. Legal and undocumented immigrants now do the dirty work in the hotels, laundries, restaurants and construction sites of a growing service economy. Warehoused in inner city ghettos that now comprise the new unit of racial segregation, poor black youth face declining opportunities and an increasingly punitive socia