Black people on average spend 30% more on luxury goods and brands than White people in the same income group. Why? Because wearing designer and luxury brands is necessary for affluent Blacks to gain respect and status in the White world🧵
According to an Ipsos study, Affluent Blacks use clothes as a “readily processed indicator of class outweighing race.” The point of designer brands is beyond the clothes. The clothes are used to get the respect that is only conditionally granted by the White-dominated society.
Wharton Professor Nikolai Roussanov said,“If you’re a middle-class Black, it seems like in order to be perceived by Whites and other blacks as relatively well off, you have to show you have money. You have to spend more on things that are observable.”
The poor, Black and White, spend more on visible goods if they live in poor communities, because it gives them more relative status. But those living among wealthier people don't spend extra on visible expenditures, since they are too far behind to get more status from it.
According to a Wharton study, Blacks and Whites appear to have different spending habits only because Blacks tend to be concentrated in poor communities more than Whites.
In all races, people of a given income become less and less likely to emphasise conspicuous consumption as they get farther and farther behind their neighbors financially. When it becomes impossible to keep up with the Joneses, people just stop trying.
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