The fads, fashions, and media in popular consumer culture frequently make recreational and ideological "fun" of poverty and lower class living. It is a phenomenon that puts poor whites, poor blacks, women, gays, handicapped people, and other traditional minorities back in "their place" by prioritizing self-aggrandizing materialism and individual desires over the collective good and constitutes a form of cultural denial. In this book, Halnon delineates how incarceration, segregation, stigmatization, cultural and social consecration, and carnivalization work in the production and consumption of inequality.

The fads, fashions, and media in popular consumer culture frequently make recreational and ideological "fun" of poverty and lower class living. In this book, Halnon delineates how incarceration, segregation, stigmatization, cultural and social consecration, and carnivalization work in the production and consumption of inequality.