Survival mode
Nearly six decades after the civil rights act, black workers still have to hustle to get ahead
WHEN YOU TEACH ABOUT RACIAL INEQUALITY FOR A living, as I do, you have a before-and-after story. The story broadly goes that before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racial inequality was legal and normative. After the Civil Rights Act, racial inequality is illegal but normative. It is a linear story for a decidedly circular history, where advances thanks to the March on Washington in 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 in 1965 (or “affirmative action”) and the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 have been met with resistance. We move forward, then get pushed back, forward, back.
Today it is harder than it was 60 years ago to get a bead on racial inequality because, well, it looks so much like everything else. It looks like the gentrification that displaces black people, yes, but also poor people generally. It feels like low wages when most workers’ wages are stagnating. It looks like debt and tainted water and poor air quality and hustling to make ends meet when almost everyone is reckoning with financial crises, climate disaster and economic insecurity. What can be said about racial inequality in the 21st century that isn’t just the story of every American? The answer is not in the nature of the problem but in the nature of the response: everyone is hustling, but everyone cannot hustle the same.
The hustle is an idea, a discourse and a like an equal-opportunity strategy. You see it espoused by the mostly black and Latino “squeegee kids” who jump into action to clean your car window. It is also the rallying cry for many of the black people who have earned a college degree but earn less than white workers doing similar jobs. The term originated as a code for illegal activities, but according to Lester Spence, author of today we have all been turned into hustlers, trying to monetize our “human capital” for economic advancement.
