Newt Gingrich recently had the following to say about poor kids in poor neighborhoods:
“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” the former House speaker said at a campaign event at the Nationwide Insurance offices. “So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.”
Most of the reaction has been focused on two things. First, that Gingrich was blowing his dogwhistle and taking a shot at black people. Second, that he’s factually wrong. Charles Blow took the latter approach. My reaction was a little different.
I’ve worked with poor kids in poor neighborhoods. In 2004, as a county coordinator for Project Vote, I worked out of the North Philadelphia ACORN office. Part of my job was to interview (mostly) black kids, hire the ones I thought were promising, and train them to do voter registration and Get Out the Vote canvassing campaigns.
Of course, I wasn’t dealing with a totally representative sample of the neighborhood. Everyone I dealt with was actively seeking legal work. Very few of them had other “legit” jobs. And, in any case, I knew nothing about their parents or their parents’ employment status. If kids had full-time work, they weren’t coming to see me. Almost everyone I hired was flat broke, which presented a problem when the ACORN home office in New Orleans was slow processing paperwork or issuing checks. There were utility bills that needed to be paid.
I learned some valuable things during my months working with these kids. I learned so much I could go on writing about it forever. One thing I learned was that the best canvassers and the most reliable workers were the ones who had learned how to master some hustle. By hustle, I mean roughly what Newt Gingrich meant. In our American ghettos, where there are way too few jobs to keep people legitimately employed, there are microeconomics and black markets. People find a way to survive. I knew kids who sold fraudulent car tags for inspection and registration. I knew kids who sold bootleg DVD’s. I knew kids who magically “found” boxes of t-shirts. I knew kids who, lucky enough to own or have access to a car, operated as a taxi service. Technically, they were all committing crimes to a greater or lesser extent. But they were the kids with the best work ethic, the ones most likely to keep their word, the best leaders, the most ambitious, the least lazy, and the ones I’d trust most to carry out a task without supervision. And they were smart. Really smart. Yes, they were street smart, but they were intellectually sharp, too. These kids could have handled college. And, what’s more, when a legitimate job opened up, they were first in line to apply.
So, when I read what Gingrich wrote, my first reaction wasn’t to question the ways in which he was wrong but to ponder the ways in which he was right. The problem is that there are not enough legitimate jobs in our inner cities. The answer isn’t to have people scrub toilets. But they need something legitimate to do.
Don’t get me wrong. Mr. Gingrich wasn’t making a constructive suggestion. He was pandering to people’s worst prejudices for political gain. He’s a despicable person. And he knows better than to question the work ethic of these kids and their parents because he’s toured our inner cities and met with them. I am not conceding anything to Gingrich’s point.
Yet, he opened the door for a conversation. We are wasting so much talent in our cities and in our poor black (and brown) communities. I can’t tell you how many kids I met who had every thing they needed to be successful but a legitimate shot to get started. And they were driven to petty crimes by sheer necessity. It’s a sad thing when the kids with the best character are also the ones with the most effective hustles. And, of course, it’s only a small step from the petty crime to the major one. The major crimes pay better. These kids want legitimate jobs. They are capable of doing the work. And that gets squandered, over and over again.
Things are undoubtedly much worse today than they were in 2004. Programs that pluck talented kids out the inner city and give them a chance will pay off many times over. But the real solution is to bring jobs back to our cities and give even the less talented a real shot at a middle class life.
It’s not work ethic that is a problem. It’s a lack of work.
