Managing Racial Stigma in Consumer Culture

Racial inequality in the USA persists despite areas of meaningful and sustained progress largely because new forms emerge to replace those that have withered or been defeated ( Bloome, 2014 ). Racial inequality in the marketplace often takes the form of stigmatized encounters ( Henderson et al., 2016 ). Stigma is traditionally thought of as a discredited or disgraced identity and is experienced as an “assault on worth” ( Lamont et al., 2016 ). Any encounter in the marketplace can invoke stigmatized treatment (possibly accompanied by discriminatory treatment) whose effects on well-being the stigmatized must then try to minimize. Thus, it is important to understand how people manage stigma in the marketplace, a crucial site for the maintenance of racial inequality and anti-racist resistance.