I’m of three minds about the controversy surrounding Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) recent comments about the work ethic of men living in our inner cities. Taken in isolation, the comments were deeply stereotypical and disrespectful. Any effort to take the racial assumptions out of his comments will fail for the simple reason that we know which ethnic groups predominate in our inner cities. Let’s look at the part of the interview he did with Bill Bennett that caused an uproar:
“And so, that’s this tailspin or spiral that we’re looking at in our communities. You know your buddy (conservative scholar) Charles Murray or (public policy professor) Bob Putnam over at Harvard, those guys have written books on this, which is we have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities, in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work; and so there’s a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
As a kind of gesture of good faith, I’d like to warn all conservatives that you cannot cite Charles Murray approvingly on any matter touching on race without getting accused of peddling racism. It’s going to happen to you every time so, before you cite him, you should decide if it is really your desire to be seen in that light by a large number of people.
Having said that, if you read that Ryan excerpt in context, it doesn’t sound nearly as bad as it does in isolation. The basic premise he was addressing is that kids need mentors who will teach them certain values, including the importance of work, and that if kids are growing up without mentors it can lead to a cycle of grinding poverty. Put more innocuously, if you have very high persistent unemployment in the inner cities, you are going to have a lot of adults who aren’t holding down jobs and setting that example for their kids. But there are still two big problems with what Ryan said.
First, he went too far and argued that there are “generations of [black/Latino] men not even thinking about working.” This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how ghetto economics work. In 2004, I was a community organizer for ACORN/Project Vote working out of an office in predominantly black North Philadelphia. My job was to hire, train, and deploy (mainly) young adults from that blighted and crime-ridden community to do voter registration and Get Out the Vote drives in suburban Montgomery County. When I put an advertisement in the paper, I was completely deluged with people looking for work. My challenge was to try to find the people who would stick with it and succeed, but I had to turn most applicants away. The hunger for work was overwhelming.
I discovered over time that nearly everyone had a way of making money, despite the fact that they were officially unemployed. I learned about a shadow economy that encompassed more than a mere black market. There were the legitimate under-the-table jobs that aren’t accounted for in government statistics and are taken on day-to-day: unloading trucks, working as a construction laborer. There were the semi-legitimate jobs: using your car as an unlicensed taxi. There were the hustles: making DVD’s of movies with a camcorder, selling fake auto-tags for inspection and registration. There were other non-violent criminal enterprises, like selling stolen t-shirts and the like. Ironically, I found that the people who were the best at getting people to register to vote were the people who set their alarm clocks for early in the morning so that they could go out and work their hustle and make some money. They worked extremely hard, and when given something legitimate to do, they excelled. The reason these people came to me in droves for a low-paying job is because they craved the legitimacy of socially-approved work. Their community was absolutely starved for that kind of work.
That being said, a lot of these young adults were not prepared to enter a standard work place. I had tremendous difficulty getting them to provide all the documentation that you need to get a legitimate job. So many of them had no Social Security card, or driver’s license, or any clue where to find their birth certificate. They also spoke a dialect ill-suited for most workplaces, and they didn’t have the computer skills that are required for a lot of entry-level jobs. But they wanted those skills and I gave out a lot of advice about how to get them. Most of all, I came to love and respect these people and their culture, and not to look down on them as shiftless layabouts or violent criminals. Of course, there are plenty of those in our ghettos, too, but they aren’t the kind to answer my job postings.
Paul Ryan has a cartoonish view of the people who live in our inner cities, in part, because he doesn’t know them. Because he doesn’t know them, he doesn’t understand what they need. He’s right that they need jobs and would benefit from more mentors, but their work ethic is just fine. They work hard. What they need is legitimate work and access to the education and job-training that is required for legitimate work.
And that gets to the second thing wrong with Ryan’s remarks. His prescriptions won’t create jobs in our ghettos. If anything, by pulling a huge amount of capital out of our ghettos, he’ll increase the poverty rate and make it harder for people to pool enough money to take a step up.
This problem of persistent intergenerational poverty in our inner cities is vexing, but alleviating it isn’t rocket science. You need a combination of more jobs for low-skilled workers and big investments in job training. Because the manufacturing base in this country is no longer very low-skilled, the job training component is more important than ever.
So, the really offensive thing about Paul Ryan’s comments isn’t so much that he said that black and Latino men in our cities don’t even think about working. The offensive thing is that he thinks that convincing them to think about working will actually get them a job.
They’re already working. Everybody’s got to eat.
Here is a related TED Talk by Cameron Russell – Ryan may want to check it out himself…
Once again, it boils down to one very simple concept. The conservative mind is simply unable to conceive that there is any world in existence, outside of their own personal experience, where there are people with ambition, drive, morals and a generous spirit who might have difficulty succeeding in life.
To conservatives, people who don’t succeed are simply not trying sufficiently. They have so successfully swallowed their own bullshit for so many years, while safely ensconced in their own protective, self-confirming bubble, that they are simply unable to identify with any one else’s personal circumstances which might have differed from their own.
That whole shitpile Ryan stepped into during the election, when he thought that stopping by a closed soup kitchen and scrubbing a few already clean pots would somehow demonstrate his identification with those “po-folks”, is a perfect synopsis of the impossibility of his task. You have to do more than cruise through the inner city in the safety of your locked car, peering out the windows at people like they are animals in a cage, in order to develop any sense of what their real lives are like. Yet somehow, people like Ryan feel they have the legitimacy to judge and criticize these people; like he ever had to deal with the kind of choice these people are forced to make every day when they wake up.
I don’t believe most conservatives will ever develop an empathic sense, outside of those Rob Portman kinds of moments when they are faced with a personal situation which flies in the face of their rigid ideological underpinnings. And even then, their very well practiced cognitive dissonance will allow them the ability to rationalize an exception for their own personal cases because, of course, they are not like “all those others”. And most everyone in their tribe will allow this exception to stand so they can maintain cohesion within the ranks, and not lose sight of the larger goal of whittling away at those who are outside their mainstream. You know, the “takers”.
It is just another example of their almost inherent lack of any ability to feel empathy. I, too, might be willing to give Ryan some benefit of the doubt that he didn’t really intend to come across as such a heartless and, possibly bigoted, asshole. But the fact of the matter is, he still seems incapable of recognizing the way in which his remarks would be interpreted by someone who might not have had the good fortune, like he did, to have the opportunity to succeed, in large measure, because of the “heavy hand of big government”.
Exactly this.
Modern American Conservatism is based around the notion that everyone has the same exact opportunity as everyone else, no matter their background.
Empathy just doesn’t exist with these people, unless they actually go through something themselves. See: Kock, David and cancer, or, Cheney, Dick and gay marriage.
They live in their own reality where everything they’ve accomplished was done through their own hard work with maybe a little help from their tribe.
They look at poor people and tell themselves that they choose to be poor, because they themselves aren’t poor. They often didn’t grow up in abject poverty. They likely had two parents. Their neighborhood wasn’t in an inner city where there is no infusion of money into schools or other programs to make life better. Etc, etc, ad nauseum.
So, they simple-mindedly see poor people as inherently lazy people. They don’t understand what it is like to grow up in abject poverty, in a shitty school system and in a shitty neighborhood where the only people making enough money to support themselves comfortably are likely doing it illegally. They actually believe it is easy to live poor, because everything is paid for by other people, even though NOTHING is actually paid for by other people.
Conservatives imagine life living in a dangerous, dilapidated Section 8 apartment as comfortable. They don’t understand that there is constant anxiety about getting food, paying bills, staying afloat, and not becoming a victim of violent crime.
They don’t understand that there are all sorts of biological hormones that are released when you’re under stress like that. That many of these young men who “never work” were also fetuses not getting enough proper nutrition, children not getting enough proper nutrition, and teenagers not getting enough proper nutrition. All of these biological factors that exist outside of “common sense” understandings of being poor.
Poverty is an artifact of a society that doesn’t care about people who aren’t in your immediate family or tribe, and nothing else.
Republicans hate poor people, because they are poor. But they are fine with poverty, because the more poverty there is, the less money is evenly distributed, which means there is more money for the taking. Period.
I believe The Monopoly Analogy is the best explanation of the problem with Conservative “thinking” on this matter, if that’s what we want to call it…
Very well said, Booman.
One additional point: Everything you said (and Rep. Ryan said) about persistent poverty in “our inner cities” can be said with equal veracity about persistent poverty in “our small towns” and “our rural areas”.
For a fictional account, folks can read something like Carolyn Chute’s brilliant book, “The Beans of Egypt, Maine”.
As my own “kind gesture of good faith”, I’ll add a warning to conservatives that you can’t talk about problems in “our inner cities” and fail to mention problems in “our small towns” without many people considering your remarks to be racist.
Very good point about our small towns and rural areas. I would maintain that the GOP has been waging (and winning) a war against the poor and middle class since about (just to pick a year) 1980 or so. Some are still fixed on skin color, but their bottom line is that they don’t like anybody not as well off as them. (but I could be wrong)
Understanding goes beyond Ryan’s reading material. I would make a wild guess that even you, Boo, would never have gained a full understanding of how the people you worked with made a living had you not learned from first hand-experience. Reading even the best informed books just can’t imbibe the smells, friendships, humor, stories and character of a culture much less a neighborhood.
It’s why Obama’s community organizing background gave him the insight into the value of neighborhoods that were going untapped.
Strange that a country that celebrates people who come from an disadvantaged background and become wildly successful-the American Way-can’t imagine that there are perhaps hundreds of thousands with the character to succeed who are trapped by bad policies and cannot, I repeat, cannot escape.
Ryan’s comments were, as usual, representative of a person who views things from a great distance and can’t see the people standing on their roofs shouting ‘help’!
I submit that his comments were textbook poor hating because they judgementally ascribed highly negative/insulting characteristics to a group of people simply because they are poor.
A related issue is the idea that the job of politicians (who are public servants at least in name) begins and ends with taking judgemental postures about social problems. Common to both parties, this attitude is intrinsic to the right. Ideally they see the job of public servant/administrator simply dissappearing behind a phallanx of preacher’s robes on the one hand and corporate suits on the other, all preaching the prosperity gospel of the atomistic, self-reliant “traditional family”.
It’s long past time people start asking what exactly these sanctimonious sermons actually do as far as improving people’s welfare? Are they not simply a gilded cover and worthless excuse for doing nothing at all, for preserving unto perpetuity the precise economic inequality that create poverty in the first place?
Thanks for your comment. Ryan’s words are more than just “textbook poor hating”. They’re textbook “inner-city” poor hating…which is code language for hating dark-skinned people.
Obviously it’s racist too.
Ryan is a fascinating example of conservative politics. He’s smart enough to realize that the GOP can’t ignore the issues of poverty. And he may have accidentally imbibed enough Catholic teachings on the poor to realize they need help.
But he’s stuck by his ideological blinders – Rand and Murray.
More here (blegging…)
http://zombieland-nowbrainfree.blogspot.com/2014/03/paul-ryans-outreach.html
Bullshit. He chose his god — Mammon — and worships it with all his heart, and all his soul, and all his mind. The rest is just to fleece the rubes.
“Where thy treasure is, there will your heart be.” Matthew 6:21
Paul Ryan didn’t imbibe anything except the need to dress up cold hearted money worship and dedication to low taxes for the people who have it as something that is buttressed by ‘facts’ or ‘science’ etc.
Selfish people absolutely depend on the non-selfish people to misinterpret their selfishness as being a difference of opinion, or a lack of understanding, etc.
It needs to be identified for what it is – simple FYIGM, please just go away (and preferably just die, as fast and quietly as possible).
The only cause of poverty is people not having enough money.
Positing anything else — work ethic, education, culture, drugs, even — for those up front enough to go there — race — is just trolling for an argument about something else.
Some of those arguments are worth having, some aren’t — but none of them are actually about poverty.
To reduce the incidence of poverty you give money to poor people. Period.
The really offensive thing about Paul Ryan’s comments is that he is not thinking about how to get jobs into the inner cities!
We need a Restoration Corp in the cities- restore the infastructure, restore and re-establish green spaces for regional agriculture, restore derelict buildings for habitation, etc.
What advice did you give to people to fix the problem that they “spoke a dialect ill-suited for most workplaces”? A part of me thinks that fixing this seemingly superficial aspect is an underrated condition for increasing “access to the education and job-training that is required for legitimate work”.
That really explains itself. They have televisions. They know how white people talk. For those who can imagine going to a community or vocational school to learn the skills they’ll need to work in a typical workplace, they already know that they’ll have to work on their speech. What they often don’t know is where to get the resources to go to school or how to go about enrolling, choosing a field, etc.
” They know how white people talk. “
Sadly that sentence is emblematic of the problem. Millions of Americans of all classes and colors speak effective public idioms when in business, cultural or educational environments. It is not “white English.”
What we as a society have lost is the capacity to understand (teach and model) there is a time and place for any dialect. Effective communication is the goal and the intelligent person makes judgements about which dialect or language to use at any specific time. We all should both bi-dialect and bi-lingual.
the difference is that I don’t have to adjust my speech in the workplace. The only thing I have to do differently is to watch my mouth so I don’t drop f bombs on people. But my grammar and pronunciation is the same as ever.
The kids we’re talking about have to make a major effort to even approximate an effective public idiom. They can do it, but it’s not natural or easy.
I’m still trying to figure out where the jobs and mentors are supposed to come from. It appears that government money follows different rules than private (i.e., real) money. If you’re a private corporation, and you want to create jobs in a given neighborhood, or say you want to provide mentors to children who need them, then obviously you’re going to have to invest some money.
Government money, on the other hand, appears to create a job and mentor vacuum. It might be more proper to call it antimoney, since it’s actually the removal of antimoney from a neighborhood that causes jobs and mentors to materialize.
It’s a puzzling phenomenon, but we know it’s true because Paul Ryan said so.
I have nothing substantive to add, but I’d like to address this to Martin:
I don’t have a lot of disposable income due to enormous medical debts incurred when my wife was diagnosed with cancer a few months after my job was offshored to India — when we had no health insurance. Consequently, I’m not able to donate to my favorite bloggers as often or as much as I wish. But I always try to kick in a few bucks here when asked.
Pieces like this are the reason why. Not many bloggers are able to educate me the way Martin does. Thanks for the great work.
I feel your pain and that’s because I’ve walked in your shoes, except not the cancer shoes.
I don’t think he deserves any points for this. It looks to me like another classic dog whistle, about the absent black father/uncle/older brother, brought up as another way of saying the government can’t do anything about “these people” because it’s their fault. Is he offering any proposals for supplying the “inner city” with mentors? He hasn’t as a congressman been very supportive of efforts to reduce the number of black men in prison, anyway.
Say it over and over and over again.
There are some things that are automatically non-starters with Black people who are not slave catching sambos.
Quoting Charles Murray is one of them.
Excellent post, Booman.
Speaking of Murray, six standard deviations on the bell curve accounts for over 99.5% of a population. That’s 3 sigmas above the mean and 3 below the mean. What I don’t understand is how the Republican party was captured by the 4th sigma from the mean.
I had to shorten the post’s subject. Hope you’re feeling better, and you have a great rest of the weekend.
Earlier in the year we hd a bunch of temps, mostly from the inner city. They were surprised that the work was so hard and they were right! The jobs that were open were running mail sorting machines on the graveyard shift. Standing and feeding mail or sweeping the sorted mail from the machine’s output bins. Management had many of them feeding AND sweeping all alone, which entails running back and forth from the front to the back and not doing a very good job of either. My 80 year old hard Right friend, the FDR hater I mentioned yesterday, told them to tell the union steward because it is a contract violation. They didn’t want to complain. He told them they wouldn’t get in trouble because the Union wants to know about violations and the steward only has to witness it personally. there being no need for the individual to file a grievance, the steward would handle it all. They were so fearful of losing the job that they just shook their head.
Feudalism sure does encourage hard work!
“I give people Ayn Rand, with trappings”
— Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan
…and they have the gall to call themselves Christians.
Intergenerational poverty is not just an issue in inner cities; it exists in all of the economy’s sacrifice zones for the people assigned to ensure there is no wage inflation. It is true on reservations, in isolated Appalachian communities, in migrant labor communities during the off-season and often year-round, and in pockets of rural and urban communities all over the country.
Ryan focuses on race to ignore the fact that it is a deliberate policy system imposed by Congress, legislatures and local governments at the behest of business owners and CEOs.
A large number of visibly unemployed people or even people working in the uncertainties of the informal economy is a feature of the American economy. In the case of day-labor and a lot of other occupations it is also a way for folks on both sides of the transaction to avoid taxes, especially Social Security taxes.
In the 1930s, the search for legitimacy in employment was coded as the search for dignity. That is still the issue.