on The Meaning of Work
The Washington Post has a good series focusing on issues specific to black men. The article linked below goes to the heart of what we have been discussing here, focusing on one young man's struggle to break out of unemployment and poverty. The article itself is well written, balanced and fair.
What I think is interesting about subject Chris Dansby's situation is that it is not only a common one for his caste, but also that his predicament defies the narrow rhetorical solutions trumpeted by many of our ideologues. In reality, there is no one solution for his problems.
If there were more government resources available to him it would benefit Dansby, but it wouldn't completely solve his issues, many of which are internal: part of his problem is that he repeatedly gets demoralized and just stops going to his low paying jobs, therefor he never builds momentum and moves up the ladder.
On the other side, while an increased level of personal responsibility would greatly help him, that wouldn't solve his problems either: he lacks the mobility to drive to better jobs, and the training to get anything beyond entry level employment. Even more devastating is that he lacks an understanding of how work works, that you are supposed to climb yourself up slowly, one job at a time. That you don't quit one job until you have another one, and that you find a way to get the training that will put even more lucrative jobs within reach.
In a stunning bit of dialogue, Dansby reveals that he thinks a GED is enough to guarantee him a higher paying job. This, of course, hasn't been true since the 1950s. But with an absentee father, and a mother who never learned the keys to mobility herself, nobody is around to tell him this basic fact. Danby's knowledge of the way the world works is so inadequate that it seems as if just one day of good instruction would do him a world of difference.
Maybe that's what the black middle-class needs to be doing, going back into poor black areas on a regularly basis and sharing the personal information we have on social mobility. Not hollow "You are somebody!" slogans, or "You came from kings!" history lessons, or even vague "Stay in school! Go to college!" directions either, but very pragmatic, nuts and bolts instructions for gaining access to the middle-class dream.
Read the article and try this: based on what you learn of him in the piece, how would you counsel Chris Dansby on entering into the middle-class before he's thirty? Or do you think that that goal is impossible for him?
The Meaning of Work
Labels: Personal Essays
6 Comments:
The strength of these types of articles is that they are able to dig deeply into one person's life and provide a rich account in so doing.
But one of the problems here is that while these articles do a fair job of digging deep into one person's issues, they don't do as good a job at digging deep into the things that cause his problems. And this in turn makes it easier to take the "two-handed" approach to solutions...even though it is clear that one "hand" comes before the other.
Living in neighborhoods characterized by concentrated poverty, attending public schools that train children for jobs that haven't existed in fifty years, these things don't have anything to do with personal responsibility. But they have a great deal to do with what individuals living in these conditions has to be personally responsible for. Calling for personal responsibility in these circumstances IS narrow...because there is very very little that these individuals can really be personally responsible for.
On the other hand, calling for the same level of structural intervention that the Nationals got when they had DC resources used to build a baseball stadium? The same resources Jay-Z will get when they move the Nets to Brooklyn?
Nothing narrow about that approach at all.
Thanks, Lester.
I think you are a 100% right on all of the circumstances that created his situation. And on what should happen to remedy it, nothing narrow indeed.
But on a pragmatic level, what should this guy, and the thousands like him, do? Sit home and wait for society to change, if ever? Or accept that he got screwed and try to figure out how to unscrew himself?
How can a nail unscrew itself?
I don't know what types of midrange steps brothers like him can take as individuals. I've worked in one of those dead-end jobs before, and it was one of the hardest things I'd ever done.
All I know is what WILL happen to them. Some of them can probably be saved by literally BEING saved in a religious sense. Some of them can probably be saved by a (probably male) mentor taking an interest in them. But most of them will end up being statistics...unless they organize themselves (they don't have to wait), or some policy entrepreneur figures out a way to leverage them to provide some type of new service to the cities they live in.
But this seems like one more part of the problem for brothers like the one in the article: we don't offer them real world, practical options. While all the systematic conditions are CLEARLY the cause our discussions of those conditions come across as masturbatory (at best). Does our identifying these causes really help him? Will our comment posts/scholarly papers/books or academic texts give this dude the slightest leg up? Nope.
One nice thing about the (mythical) Father Figure is that he eventaully slaps his hand on your back and says, I know you don't like it but tomorrow morning you have to go back to work. At times I fear that we're all so busy "understanding" the causes of our collective damage that we don't tell each other some real world truth. For instance: a man works.
I'm not saying this will magically solve everything, or even anything, but we don't even SAY it to each other anymore. Now we say, "But you have to understand what led him or her to this predicament..."
People, all people, need to understand their lives within a larger framework. Hell, we even just need to let off steam and talk about how HARD life can be. But then your real family, the people who love you, still say: Get your ass back out there tomorrow. They say it not because they want to throw you to the wolves, they say it because the believe you can actually do it. That's how you know they love you.
Victor, we DO say this. All the time. We say it to each other, that is, to those with our status. We say it to those in our circles without our status--to our cousins, or to our brothers, or to our boys who either made different choices than we did or who never had those choices to begin with.
The real world truth is that telling someone to love himself MAY save one person. So in that way without other options you might as well tell him, than not. But telling someone you love them, or telling them to love themselves is about as narrow a solution as you can get, isn't it? It is really only tailored to the individual person, it doesn't givem them anything but an emotional resource that has a narrow lifespan. Again, better than nothing...but how much? And at the same time we're telling folks to love themselves we've taken a whole other set of options off of the table.
I AM interested in this as an academic question--why do the words of Juan Williams, Bill Cosby, and John Ridley take hold in black communities during this particular period in time? But for me it is a very deep practical question. Because without a language that acknowledges the deep structural causes of these issues, we're never going to be in the position to change those circumstances.
Hi Lester,
Thanks for the thoughtful response, but I don't think I was arguing that we should teach all our brothers to love themselves. I was saying we should consistently remind each other that self-esteem is built through practical purpose and not the other way round. We tell our brothers to love themselves by telling them to show up to work on time, to deal with customers and co-workers courteously, and to keep working despite the fact that they aren't moving up as quickly as they'd like. In this way they'll increase self-esteem through the generation of IRA accounts, savings accounts, and the long slow process of cleaning up one's credit (which I'm still struggling with).
I guess I'm a little skeptical of the larger group/national changes because, frankly, the black middle class and intellectual class has seemed (generally) pretty willing to cut out on the working-class and poor black populations once they've attained either partner or tenure depending on their field of study. I just don't know if I have faith in those who pull themselves up to leave the door open for those after them (to some degree I think Ridley and Cosby and so on are doing exactly this, shutting the trapdoor they wiggled through because now they feel as if they're inherently better than those below them). So, with this rather dispiriting (though I admit not scientifically proven) thesis in mind I think that teaching some individual real world lessons about things like how to fill out a job application are an ENORMOUS help. Helping one person at a time may only cause incremental change, but the amount of time it takes to change things like federal policy or national outlook makes such change seem manageable and distinctly preferable.
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