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.