I am not sure how I feel about the way entrepreneurship is defined here but I am not surprised that being a conniving petty criminal as a kid is a good indicator that you’ll be a successful entrepreneur. I have come to think of the entire conservative movement as a club for rule-breaking entrepreneurs. They fucking hate rules. They hate the IRS and the EPA and OSHA and the NLRB. They don’t want anyone telling them what to do and they don’t want to admit that they owe even one penny of their wealth to anything but their hard work and cunning. They are as sociopathic in their individualism as they are in their religious belief, which is all about their personal salvation and not at all about social justice.
I’ve come to actively dislike this class of people and doubt that they are compatible with a sustainable civilized future. The white privilege aspect of this interests me less than the political implications. But I’ll give my own anecdotal assessment.
When I worked for ACORN in the North Philly ghetto, the really smart kids were the ones who had figured out a hustle. There weren’t any legitimate jobs that didn’t require a long bus ride, so the name of the game was to work the black market. Some people made and sold bootleg copies of movies. Others counterfeited car registration and inspection stickers. Others jacked t-shirts off trucks. Others ran unlicensed taxis. These kids stood out for a couple of reasons. First, they were smart enough to stay away from gangs and drugs, which would land them quickly in jail or the morgue. Second, they weren’t waiting around for something to happen. They set their alarm clocks, got up early, and went to work on their hustle. They worked hard and didn’t stop until they’d reached their goal. These folks were my best employees. They were good with people. They could follow instructions and carry out complex plans. They were natural leaders. And it was obvious to me that they could succeed at legitimate business if they got a combination of start-up capital and some kind of road-map.
There were plenty of other kids who were really kind, nice people but who didn’t have the skills or motivation or direction to be successful. They were too meek to gang-bang. They weren’t sure how to figure out a hustle, let alone how to be good at it. They lacked self-confidence and people skills. And they just weren’t good at registering voters or motivating them to get to the polls. Some of my saddest days in the job were when I had to fire these kids. Counseling them was even harder. When I heard about their family life and lack of resources, just trying to get them set up in a vocational school could seem like a Herculean task. What do you tell a kid who comes to you for advice if you can’t figure out any way that they can pull anything legitimate off?
Now, these people I’ve been talking about were all black. And there’s no doubt that society was itching to lock them up for the slightest infraction. In the suburbs, I see white kids getting away with all manner of crime without having to pay any consequence. I’ve seen white teenagers break into a home and have a little drug party and get off with nothing more than a stern talking-to. I’ve seen serious vandalism result in a small fine. I’ve seen naked kids out of their minds on hallucinogens turned over to their parents without a record being made of it. These white kids aren’t locked up; some of them are setting off for college as I write this. But the black kids I knew in North Philadelphia didn’t get second or third chances. And many of them showed a lot more self-starting motivation and smarts than the white kids I’ve met in the suburbs. If we invested in them, I know they would pay us back many times over.
Some of them might even become conservative Republicans.
