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.
It really isn’t the lack of work. In almost all communities, the real honest-to-goodness no-bullshit tasks are staring folks in the face every day.
What is missing is a way to compensate the workers and to provide the materials and equipment for the work.
Money has been redlined from these neighborhoods.
Assets are owned by those who are using them for tax losses.
And laws prevent folks from, say, seizing a building, fixing it up, and leasing it out, sending the building owner a payment of his/her asset.
Or setting up a business without a business permit, even a vending cart.
So the outlaws go for the business that has the highest return on their time instead of breaking the laws in a way that could actually improve the community.
Interesting contradiction, isn’t it?
And Newtie would punish initiative even more by subsidizing the colonization of poor neighborhoods (urban or rural) in the name of enterprise zones.
And Newtie would punish initiative even more by subsidizing the colonization of poor neighborhoods (urban or rural) in the name of enterprise zones.
We’ve already been experimented on six days to never. Tuskegee anyone? This is slavery again. That’s all this Southern rat and his minions think about. Get the Negroes off white people’s backs by making them work again for nothing.
I say also, don’t discount the dog whistles either.
Gingrich also wants to talk to Obama about his people’s so-called problems in several debates. Thing is, it’s not only black folks who are jobless, although he wants to train the blame game squarely on those shiftless Negroes. Blame gaming the Negroes ignores the fact that other whites and other people of color are getting the shaft, too. And not because they aren’t skilled.
Or perhaps, he wants to reserve the good jobs–not offering pennies–for whites and Asians. But that is already happening in certain companies.
My job puts me in regular contact with the parents of such children. While some of these parents do in fact have regular jobs (often of the low-paying variety), many perform so-called odd jobs. That is, they perform off the books labor for small businesses as needed. Or, they will do yardwork/household maintenance for a few dollars.
A large part of the problem is the availability of transportation. It’s just not there. So they end up having to choose what’s in the neighborhood, and it’s usually not much.
Newt is willfully clueless.
A transportation problem that is made so much worse because of the migration of jobs to auto-dependent suburbs.
When I heard his comments, besides the dog whistle, I thought: “Newt is proposing a big new government program” a la CETA. Let’s find jobs in civil government and have the federal government pay young people to do those jobs so they can learn new skills, including work habits. What a great idea! Put this way, I think his base would find it just horrible to contemplate.
I hear you when it comes to the need for older teens to find work. But two caveats:
I guess those two points really do go together. I see it much more nuanced than “kids need jobs.” Its a function of age and future prospects they could be preparing for. You have to ask what these kids might be doing if their families made enough to adequately support them.
My other issue with Gingrich is that he has no such plan for upper income kids. What? They don’t need to learn how to work? You could just as easily make a case for the lack of work skills developed by trust fund babies.
There are huge things missing from this conversation.
Yes, well I wasn’t hiring anyone younger than 16, and most of them were 18 or older.
I’m not really addressing the whole child labor law aspect to his argument.
Guess I’ve always thought about opportunities lost. I see a poor neighborhood and think that hidden behind the poverty are layers of young and old who among them have doctors, mathematicians, scientists and leaders. But they are jailed by inopportunity.
In the 50’s my uncle did alot of work in Watts as a community research doctor and was the first to determine that when undernourished children were given a nutritious diet their IQ’s raised substantially. It was a blockbuster for its time but a good reminder today of an opportunity.
Putting aside ethics and character, I will say that my experience helping run a recidivism study where we collected data in a youth detention facility in Philly was one hell of an eye-opener. I don’t know about those kids’ ethics, but on the whole that was one damned smart bunch of kids I met idling their time away in junior prison there. Sometimes I think the smartest ghetto kids are among the most likely to end up in more serious criminal pursuits, simply because their brains make them feel more invulnerable.
That fossil Gingrich is still stuck in the 1990s. He’s talking about that beloved right-wing concept, the “culture of poverty.”
You know what cures a “culture of poverty?”
Help-wanted signs. It works every time.
It happened this showed up on my Yoono feed next to your article : a reminder of teen opportunity foreshadowing the man http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2011/11/2011112813233689170.html
you mean…when people get leather to make boots, they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps?
whaddya know….
uh huh
but, honestly, BooMan…
Newt was ringing the dogwhistle..
Yes, I know.
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.
Does he really know better? If he does, he’s a shitty Catholic, just for starters. When did Newt tour any inner cities? In his dreams?
with Al Sharpton. You can look it up.