Last week, during an appearance on Bill Bennett’s “Morning in America” show, Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan said:
“[W]e want people to reach their potential and so the dignity of work is very valuable and important and we have to re-emphasize work and reform our welfare programs, like we did in 1996,” Ryan told Bennett. “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 is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
His comments were troubling to say the least. But to understand why, allow me to provide some context to what lead up to hearing his comment. On Thursday night, I watched a docuseries on CNN called Chicagoland, and in this episode they were talking about how school closures in at-risk inner-city neighbourhoods directly affected the children. In the southside of Chicago, where every other block represents gang turf, going to a new school meant that kids from rival blocks would now be locker mates which would only increase the violence. Little girls in the first grade were lamenting how scary it is to walk home from school, not just because of the real possibility of catching a stray bullet, but because they are directly targeted and assaulted by older gangs. Let me repeat – little girls in GRADE ONE were scared because they frequently get JUMPED just walking home from school.
After that episode was over, I caught up on previous episodes of Shark Tank, a show where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a select panel of businesspersons who’ve made millions and billions of dollars through their own ventures, in the hopes that one or two of “the sharks” will want to invest money into their idea. This particular show was the children’s episode, which featured young people between the ages of 11-17. A freckle-faced, blonde hair boy led the show off by presenting a fresh-fruit, water bottle. Tearing into his idea, the sharks asked him how much money had he invested into the concept, to which he replied, “my parents have loaned me about $300,000.” Instantly, my head started to spin at the idea that this 12 year old boy received north of a quarter-million dollars to pursue a venture that ultimately had never returned a sizeable profit and was deemed “uninvestable” by a group of experienced and successful businessmen and women. And it was after watching those two programs back-to-back that I heard Paul Ryan’s quote on the “laziness” of the poor.
Cue the rage.
The problem with people who think like Paul Ryan is the fact that they believe results are the best qualifier of effort. They believe that it takes a set amount of “hard work” to achieve anything in life, therefore making it fair to say that Barack Obama worked equally as hard as George W. Bush to become president of the United States – because they BOTH became president (even though one had to work his way up in a single-parent home while battling racism, and the other had a father who was formerly president of the United States). But the problem with that logic is that it ignores the vast disparity of access between the privileged and the disadvantaged.
Photo: Manute Bol (7’7″), Spud Webb9 (5’7″)
For example, a dunk in a basketball game equals two points. Therefore it’s fair to say that the RESULT of dunking the ball through the net is all equal – but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s EFFORT to dunk is the same. To say that 5’7″ Spud Webb’s dunks are equal to 7’7″ Yao Ming’s dunks is to ignore Yao’s inherent privilege (hell, he can touch the rim with both feet flat on the floor!). The reason it’s dangerous to not recognize the difference between where each player is starting from, is because you can easily start to demonize ALL 5’7 men as being LAZY for not being able to dunk. And we all know Spud Webb is NOT representative of the average – he’s an example of an extreme exception.
If Paul Ryan thinks men in inner-city neighbourhoods are not even “thinking” of working, then he is completely out of touch with what has become the majority of the people in his own country. The number of people dealing with unemployment and economic insecurity even WITH jobs is staggering. America is a country where 60 percent of able-bodied adult food-stamp recipients are employed. And before you go demonizing fast food workers, please understand that even 33% of bank tellers are desperate for public assistance. Nearly half of America is living paycheck to paycheck. And the one thing that all of these people have in common with unemployed Black men and women in the projects is that they hate their surroundings and believe they can pull themselves out of this tailspin – if they are given the chance to. But that’s where most American politicians want to end the debate – the point where THEIR policies (or lack thereof) are correctly blamed for the conditions of the unemployed and working poor.
But ultimately, I would like to end this bullshit ideology that living in the projects is easy. That brothers are on the corner only using welfare checks to buy Jordans and women hit the salon when their public assistance comes so they look good at the club later. That is the image that the Paul Ryan’s of the world want people to believe of all inner-city folks, because it helps canonize him and his ilk as hard-workers who understand the value of a dollar. But when you realize that most people in the projects are suffering through horrendous living conditions with no real opportunity to make it out, you need to ask yourself if the rich really know the power of a dollar more than a woman who has to make short paychecks stretch for weeks to feed and clothe her children?
So why does Paul Ryan believe that Black folks in the ghetto are lazy? Well, it’s because of anti-intellectual articles written by the National Review that posit facts facts about the conditions of the poor and conflate them to nothing more than the lack of desire that poor folks have. He believes that Black folks have a “culture problem” and he’s right about that – we have the serious problem of dealing with a culture of systemic racism and poverty-shaming.
LAB
Lincoln Anthony Blades blogs daily on his site ThisIsYourConscience.com, he’s an author of the book “You’re Not A Victim, You’re A Volunteer” and a weekly contributor for UPTOWN Magazine. He can be reached via Twitter @lincolnablades and on Facebook at This Is Your Conscience.