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April 19, 2006

Cynthia Tucker

...comes face-to-face with what I've posted on and railed about, time and time again. She was honest enough to write a column on it.

The black men I know best are all hard-working, accomplished professionals. They include my brother, a physician, and my buddies -- lawyers, college professors, political consultants, journalists. I live in an insular world of middle-class affluence, rarely stumbling into the troubled universe of marginalized underachievers.

...I was to find men willing to help him paint, lift, scrape, fill, dig. The pay was hardly exorbitant -- $6 an hour. But it seemed reasonable for unskilled labor. So I looked among unemployed high school classmates, members of my mother's church and men standing on nearby street corners.

The experience brought me face-to-face with every unappealing behavior that I'd heard attributed to idle black men but dismissed as stereotype.....


Education. EDUCATION. A reverence for EDUCATION MUST become a driving force in the lower class black community. No more handwringing and moaning about lousy schools. You can still learn to read and write and add numbers in a lousy school ~ the difference is the community that makes the most of what it's got at hand. PARENTS who WANT their children to be better, who will NOT accept an illiterate child, who will protect and bolster their child's thirst for knowledge from the hip-hop gansta losers who would shame them from BEING someone. Shame them from their EDUCATION, from their ticket OUT of the cruel little world they inhabit, where such ne'er do wells and malcontents are the big dogs. And where everyone's a victim.

Posted by tree hugging sister at April 19, 2006 11:21 AM

Comments

"One man worked a couple of days and never came back. One young man worked 30 minutes before he deserted. Others promised to come to work but never did."

Not to be Mr. Contrarian, but the anecdotal evidence here is very weak. Maybe the people they had to work for weren't pleasant? One case hardly makes a trend.

And $6 an hour is extremely low. Burger flippers make almost that much, or sometimes more. If you want to hire someone to sweat and work with vigorous energy like in the construction industry, you'd probably need to pay more to an American citizen to do the job.

I've not heard of many jobs going for less than $8 an hour lately, and unskilled labor often goes for much higher.

Posted by: Mike Rentner at April 19, 2006 12:19 PM

Oh, come on, Mike! And flipping burgers is a real JOB. This was just "we could use some help for a day, do you need some money?" Like what you pay the fellows at the mission when they help unload your moving van, or the kid who runs a weed whacker for a couple hours. The point is they HAD NO job, HAD NO money and would prefer to do nothing.

Good grief, Charlie Brown.

Posted by: tree hugging sister at April 19, 2006 12:25 PM

Well, you get what you pay for. If you pay low wages, you have to go to people who have proven unreliability and poor performance history.

So, why is she surprised when selecting from this pool that she gets poor reliability and poor performance?

She admits that many blacks are high performers, so I'm not sure what her point is.

If people really wanted to work, they would have done something besides these jobs, there are plenty of them out there.

I'm just being contrary again. I understand her point, and I won't say I disagree with the point, but I think her evidence as presented is weak.

Posted by: Mike Rentner at April 19, 2006 12:34 PM

(ARGH. You drive me nuts. One columnist writes about HER experience only, attitudes she used to dismiss and you want a flippin' think tank/institute study to prove that she couldn't get anyone to do something for six bucks an hour.)

Posted by: tree hugging sister at April 19, 2006 01:07 PM

sheepish grin.

sorry.

Posted by: Mike Rentner at April 19, 2006 02:05 PM

grin? i thought you didn't grin?

you hitting the botox again?

Posted by: Mr. Bingley at April 19, 2006 02:08 PM

(For 6 bucks an hour, I can do a study of the matter. But I'll have to ask for cash in advance, and I set my own production schedule....)

Posted by: The_Real_JeffS at April 19, 2006 03:51 PM

And $6 an hour cash is not bad.

Posted by: Crusader at April 19, 2006 05:29 PM