If I Were A Poor Black Kid

President Obama gave an excellent speech last week in Kansas about inequality in America.

“This is the defining issue of our time.” He said. “This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. Because what’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement.”

He’s right. The spread between rich and poor has gotten wider over the decades. And the opportunities for the 99% have become harder to realize.

The President’s speech got me thinking. My kids are no smarter than similar kids their age from the inner city. My kids have it much easier than their counterparts from West Philadelphia. The world is not fair to those kids mainly because they had the misfortune of being born two miles away into a more difficult part of the world and with a skin color that makes realizing the opportunities that the President spoke about that much harder. This is a fact. In 2011.

I am not a poor black kid. I am a middle aged white guy who comes from a middle class white background. So life was easier for me. But that doesn’t mean that the prospects are impossible for those kids from the inner city. It doesn’t mean that there are no opportunities for them. Or that the 1% control the world and the rest of us have to fight over the scraps left behind. I don’t believe that. I believe that everyone in this country has a chance to succeed. Still. In 2011. Even a poor black kid in West Philadelphia.

It takes brains. It takes hard work. It takes a little luck. And a little help from others. It takes the ability and the know-how to use the resources that are available. Like technology. As a person who sells and has worked with technology all my life I also know this.

If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently. I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city. Even the worst have their best. And the very best students, even at the worst schools, have more opportunities. Getting good grades is the key to having more options. With good grades you can choose different, better paths. If you do poorly in school, particularly in a lousy school, you’re severely limiting the limited opportunities you have.

And I would use the technology available to me as a student. I know a few school teachers and they tell me that many inner city parents usually have or can afford cheap computers and internet service nowadays. That because (and sadly) it’s oftentimes a necessary thing to keep their kids safe at home than on the streets. And libraries and schools have computers available too. Computers can be purchased cheaply at outlets like TigerDirect and Dell’s Outlet. Professional organizations like accountants and architects often offer used computers from their members, sometimes at no cost at all.

If I was a poor black kid I’d use the free technology available to help me study. I’d become expert at Google Scholar. I’d visit study sites like SparkNotes and CliffsNotes to help me understand books. I’d watch relevant teachings on Academic Earth, TED and the Khan Academy. (I say relevant because some of these lectures may not be related to my work or too advanced for my age. But there are plenty of videos on these sites that are suitable to my studies and would help me stand out.) I would also, when possible, get my books for free at Project Gutenberg and learn how to do research at the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia to help me with my studies.

I would use homework tools like Backpack, and Diigo to help me store and share my work with other classmates. I would use Skype to study with other students who also want to do well in my school. I would take advantage of study websites like Evernote, Study Rails, Flashcard Machine, Quizlet, and free online calculators.

Is this easy? No it’s not. It’s hard. It takes a special kind of kid to succeed. And to succeed even with these tools is much harder for a black kid from West Philadelphia than a white kid from the suburbs. But it’s not impossible. The tools are there. The technology is there. And the opportunities there.

In Philadelphia, there are nationally recognized magnet schools like Central, Girls High and Masterman. These schools are free. But they are hard to get in to. You need good grades and good test scores. And there are also other good magnet and charter schools in the city. You also need good grades to get into those. In a school system that is so broken these are bright spots. Getting into one of these schools opens up a world of opportunities. More than 90% of the kids that go to Central go on to college. I would use the internet to research each one of these schools so I could find out how I could be admitted. I would find out the names of the admissions people and go to meet with them. If I was a poor black kid I would make it my goal to get into one of these schools.

Or even a private school. Most private schools I know are filled to the brim with the 1%. That’s because these schools are exclusive and expensive, costing anywhere between $20 and $50k per year. But there’s a secret about them. Most have scholarship programs. Most have boards of trustees that want to give opportunities to kids that can’t afford the tuition. Many would provide funding for not only tuition but also for transportation or even boarding. Trust me, they want to show diversity. They want to show smiling, smart kids of many different colors and races on their fundraising brochures. If I was a poor black kid I’d be using technology to research these schools on the internet, too, and making them know that I exist and that I get good grades and want to go to their school.

And once admitted to one of these schools the first person I’d introduce myself to would be the school’s guidance counselor. This is the person who will one day help me go to a college. This is the person who knows everything there is to know about financial aid, grants, minority programs and the like. This is the person who may also know of job programs and co-op learning opportunities that I could participate in. This is the person who could help me get summer employment at a law firm or a business owned by the 1% where I could meet people and show off my stuff.

If I was a poor black kid I would get technical. I would learn software. I would learn how to write code. I would seek out courses in my high school that teaches these skills or figure out where to learn more online. I would study on my own. I would make sure my writing and communication skills stay polished.

Because a poor black kid who gets good grades, has a part time job and becomes proficient with a technical skill will go to college. There is financial aid available. There are programs available. And no matter what he or she majors in that person will have opportunities. They will find jobs in a country of business owners like me who are starved for smart, skilled people. They will succeed.

President Obama was right in his speech last week. The division between rich and poor is a national problem. But the biggest challenge we face isn’t inequality. It’s ignorance. So many kids from West Philadelphia don’t even know these opportunities exist for them. Many come from single-parent families whose mom or dad (or in many cases their grand mom) is working two jobs to survive and are just (understandably) too plain tired to do anything else in the few short hours they’re home. Many have teachers who are overburdened and too stressed to find the time to help every kid that needs it. Many of these kids don’t have the brains to figure this out themselves – like my kids. Except that my kids are just lucky enough to have parents and a well-funded school system around to push them in the right direction.

Technology can help these kids. But only if the kids want to be helped. Yes, there is much inequality. But the opportunity is still there in this country for those that are smart enough to go for it.

If I were the 99% I'd try to be the 1%

GENE MARKS'S blog post on Forbes.com, ostentatiously headlined "If I Was a Poor Black Kid", didn't actually offend me as much as it did many of the plethora of bloggers who've pilloried it over the past few days. As Forbes's Kashmir Hill later posted, most of the vitriol seemed to be responding to the title. The post itself went out of its way to be polite, understanding, and non-partisan, and was mainly guilty of tone-deafness and of an unauthorised attempt by an unqualified ethnic-majority person at racial empathy with an imaginary ethnic-minority person, a gesture which is just extremely risky and basically shouldn't be ventured. (Notably, responses by Karl Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who actually know what it's like to grow up as poor black kids, were more even-tempered in their rebuttals than most.)

What mainly struck me about the post was that it was off-topic. And it was off-topic in a characteristic way. The post was supposed to be a response to Barack Obama's speech in Kansas last week about the erosion of the American middle-class dream and the growth of radical inequality in American society. Mr Marks responded with a post offering advice for a member of the economic underclass on how to become more employable: study hard, stay out of trouble, take advantage of existing educational and training opportunities, get a job. This had nothing to do with what Mr Obama was talking about. Mr Marks's advice would have been equally valuable (or worthless) if offered to a hypothetical "poor black kid" in Philadelphia 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago. What Mr Obama was talking about was an entirely different issue: assuming that poor black kid did manage to make it to median income today, he would be more economically insecure than he would have been had he performed the same feat in 1971. He would more likely be indebted and without health insurance, employer's pension or long-term job security, and he would actually be making a lower hourly wage in inflation-adjusted terms. In fact, what Mr Obama was saying had no more to do with poor black kids in Philadelphia than with working-class white kids in Philadelphia.

To some extent Mr Marks's instinct to turn a discussion about economic hardship into one about "poor black kids" is a legacy of an earlier, less unequal era in American life, the 1950s-80s, when discussions of poverty tended to focus on poor urban blacks because they were the people who were clearly on the wrong side of a major gap in prosperity. We are no longer having that discussion. It is not just poor urban blacks left out of growing prosperity these days; it's the entire bottom and middle of the income scale. Mr Obama's point, the familiar point made by everyone focusing on growing inequality in American society, is that the income curve has become vastly steeper over the past 30 years, and while the top end keeps shooting up, the bottom and middle parts of the curve are stuck and sometimes falling behind. To respond to this statistical argument with a motivational story about how to get yourself out of the lower end of the curve and try to climb that ever-steeper slope is to miss the point entirely. But it is also entirely characteristic of the conservative side of the American political spectrum to make this move.

One thing I find paradoxical is that highly numerate people, people in the engineering, business and technical fields (Mr Marks writes about the tech industry), are often most reluctant to consider social problems from a statistical point of view, and prefer to consider them as individual moral or motivational stories. We have a curve composed of 150m dots that is becoming steeper and more parabolic. Go down to Occupy Wall Street, and you'll find a lot of cultural-studies majors working for environmentalist nonprofits who support changing systemic rules to flatten the slope. Go into the financial-institution office buildings that surround them, and you'll find a lot of math majors devising computer models for risk-weighting assets who think the dots on the bottom end should try harder to get into the top end. It's weird.

If I were the middle class white guy Gene Marks

Yesterday a white guy named Gene Marks solved the Negro Problem, anew. His solution is outlined in a traffic-getting two-page blog post on Forbes.com, provocatively entitled “If I Was a Poor Black Kid.” Never mind that we’ve been debating this question for about 400 years, and that for the past 150 years, conservatives have been basically telling us the same thing that Marks does.

Never mind that it’s incredibly paternalistic to pen an open-letter to poor black people instructing them in the finer points of being good Negros. Never mind that people who actually want to help get in the trenches and volunteer their time or donate their money. Marks went there anyway. And these are the highlights of what he came up with:

It takes brains. It takes hard work. It takes a little luck. And a little help from others. It takes the ability and the know-how to use the resources that are available. Like technology.

If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible.

If I was a poor black kid I’d use the free technology available to help me study. I’d become expert at Google Scholar.

Is this easy? No it’s not. It’s hard. It takes a special kind of kid to succeed.

The division between rich and poor is a national problem. But the biggest challenge we face isn’t inequality. It’s ignorance. So many kids from West Philadelphia don’t even know these opportunities exist for them.

Technology can help these kids. But only if the kids want to be helped.

Before I begin to critique this article, let me crack my knuckles, and say first, that I love his blog post, because its simplistic analysis is the perfect target for a rebuttal.

Now, it’s obvious that hard work, intelligence, and assistance from others are necessary to succeed. I grew up in a trailer in rural Alabama and I graduated from Stanford University. I am publishing this blog post at a start-up magazine that I founded with capital that I — along with my African-American husband, a Brown University graduate — saved from our wage earnings. We work hard and our families have always worked hard too (See slavery). The problem is that Marks seems to think it’s okay to require black kids to be “special” to “succeed.” I don’t.

The economic and social policies that require black children to be “special” to succeed in America made a lot of sense to the racist lawmakers who designed them during Reconstruction. When they sat down after the Civil War to decide how freed slaves and southern whites would interact, Congress explicitly rejected proposals to level the playing field between them, refusing to provide blacks with land, reparations, or equal education. They did not want to create actual equality between blacks and whites. In fact, at the time, many Americans still believed that black people were genetically inferior and therefore incapable of achieving equality. As the Reverend Jared Waterbell, a northern liberal writing for the American Tract Society, opined in 1865, “Hence, even with strenuous efforts for their improvement, the African race must still acknowledge the superiority of the Saxon race.”

In lieu of equality, Congress opted to give black people so-called ‘equality before the law,’ and began amending federal law to give our ancestors the same rights on-paper as whites. We all know what happened next. For the first 100 years, the U.S. government didn’t actually enforce the laws at all, giving rise to the Civil Rights Movement. But even more important than their failure to enforce those laws is this: those lawmakers knew full-well that equal rights would never create equality between blacks and whites, and for most of them, that was precisely the appeal of the policy. Even Thaddeus Stevens, then the most powerful and vocal proponent of black rights in the House of Representatives, assured his fellow Congressmen that equal opportunity for blacks wouldn’t jeopardize white status. “Any who are afraid of the rivalry of the black man in office or in business, have nothing to fear” and should know that “there is no danger that his white neighbors will prefer his African rivals to himself.”

The architects of equality before the law, or equality of opportunity, knew that it would only allow a few special black people to succeed, and shrugged their shoulders about the rest. As the Reverend Horace James, the former Superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, said in 1865, “Give the colored man equality, not of social condition, but equality before the law, and if he proves himself the superior of the Anglo Saxon, who can hinder it? If he falls below him, who can help it?” (Side note: lynch mobs were the south’s response to the question who can hinder successful black people.)

An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong

One of the best parts about being an educator's son is getting to hear all the crazy things your parent has to deal with courtesy of the "bad kids." I was a relatively mild-mannered student, thanks in large part to the fact that my mother, a teacher turned school administrator, had raised me to be. Even when she wasn't verbally doling out conduct lessons, I saw how an interaction with a mean or violent student would leave her frazzled at the end of a long day, and I knew I never wanted to inflict the same kind of torment on anyone else's mom or dad. Nevertheless, a gut instinct of youthful rebellion underpinned by hip-hop and Propagandhi always led me to inquire about the wild kids at my mom's schools, the ones who didn't just listen to punk, but who acted it as well.

It was in pursuit of one of these vicarious thrills that I asked my mom why she was so upset one day when I was about 12 years old. "Just something from today with a student," she said. I pestered her for more details, and she told me the story. A kid at her school—a primarily low-income, high-minority middle school serving sixth- through eighth-graders—was acting out. His outbursts were not normal, especially considering how young he was: He was rude, aggressive, destructive, foulmouthed, so angry. I remember my mom saying she was amazed at how much rage could fit into such a tiny body.

At first, the student's teachers tried putting him in timeout. When that didn't work, they escalated to trips to the principal's office. When those didn't work, he got detention after school. And when that didn't work either, they started sending him home. But when he'd return from a couple of days at home and immediately start tearing his classrooms apart, the suspensions grew to a week, two weeks.

Still nothing worked, and one day things got scary enough that my mom, accompanied by a police officer, felt it necessary to escort the student home to speak with his parents. When they got to his apartment about a mile away from the school, the weeks of mystery surrounding the boys' behavior were replaced with instant clarity. His mother, his only guardian, answered the door ashamedly, and out scurried a man, her most recent john.

After some talking and crying, the truth surfaced: The reason the "problem student" behaved so badly is because he knew that if his tantrums were chronic, he'd be sent home. And that was a good thing, because when he was home, his mother couldn't work as a prostitute. He couldn't tell any of his teachers this, of course, because then he'd run the risk of child welfare services taking him away from his mother, and he needed to be there to protect her. The boy never hated school, he just loved his mom more. This is how you get so much rage into such a tiny body.

I think about that little boy every time I read someone like Gene Marks, the Forbes writer behind "If I Was a Poor Black Kid," complain that minority children just aren't working hard enough. "If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible," writes Marks, a self-described middle-class white accountant. "I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently. I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city. Even the worst have their best."

You find this sort of thing a lot among the white, moneyed, conservative set: "If only blacks and Latinos would work harder, they'd be fine." I don't think Marks and people who think like that are malicious, but I'd love to ask them how best to focus on your studies when all you can think about is the very real possibility that your mother is being assaulted in the bedroom where you're supposed to find sanctuary at night. How best to prioritize learning to read rigorously over scheming to get home and be the man of the house in the stead of the father who left? How best to find joy in school with so much hate and bitterness poisoning the rest of your life?

There's a lot wrong with "If I Was a Poor Black Kid," not the least of which is the grammar in the title. But the biggest issue with the piece and everything like it is that it assumes being poor and black are the only two things on poor black kids' plates. Content to generalize based on simplistic depictions of black poverty from TV and film, Marks believes that the only thing low-income minorities have to overcome is terrible teachers and a lack of technological knowledge; the rest of their problems stem from outright laziness. "If I was a poor black kid," writes Marks, "I’d become expert at Google Scholar." I'm not sure a more tone-deaf sentence has ever appeared in Forbes. To Marks, poor children exist in a vacuum where their only problem is poverty. In real life, poverty is a cloud that darkens every facet of a child's life, from his academic career to how he sleeps at night knowing his home is a brothel.

There are a huge number of resources available for Marks to read and watch to better understand the plight of poor minorities, and many of them can be found online. Alas, it seems that even he, a wealthy white professional, has yet to master Google Scholar.

We had a lot of fun with this on Twitter last night:

The President's speech got me thinking. My kids are no smarter than similar kids their age from the inner city. My kids have it much easier than their counterparts from West Philadelphia. The world is not fair to those kids mainly because they had the misfortune of being born two miles away into a more difficult part of the world and with a skin color that makes realizing the opportunities that the President spoke about that much harder. This is a fact. In 2011. I am not a poor black kid.

I am a middle aged white guy who comes from a middle class white background. So life was easier for me. But that doesn't mean that the prospects are impossible for those kids from the inner city. It doesn't mean that there are no opportunities for them. Or that the 1% control the world and the rest of us have to fight over the scraps left behind. I don't believe that. I believe that everyone in this country has a chance to succeed. Still. In 2011. Even a poor black kid in West Philadelphia. It takes brains. It takes hard work. It takes a little luck. And a little help from others. It takes the ability and the know-how to use the resources that are available. Like technology. As a person who sells and has worked with technology all my life I also know this.

If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently. I wouldn't care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city. Even the worst have their best. And the very best students, even at the worst schools, have more opportunities. Getting good grades is the key to having more options. With good grades you can choose different, better paths. If you do poorly in school, particularly in a lousy school, you're severely limiting the limited opportunities you have.

When I read this piece I was immediately called back, as I so often am, to my days at Howard and the courses I took looking at slavery. Whenever we discussed the back-breaking conditions, the labor, the sale of family members etc., there was always someone who asserted, roughly, "I couldn't been no slave. They'd a had to kill me!" I occasionally see a similar response here where someone will assert, with less ego, "Why didn't the slaves rebel?" More commonly you get people presiding from on high insisting that if they had lived in the antebellum South, they would have freed all of their slaves.

What all these responses have in common is a kind benevolent, and admittedly unintentional, self-aggrandizement. These are not bad people (much as I am sure Mr. Marks isn't a bad person), but they are people speaking from a gut feeling, a kind of revulsion at a situation which offends our modern morals. In the case of the observer of slavery, it is the chaining and marketing of human flesh. In the case of Mr. Marks, it's the astonishingly high levels of black poverty.

It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings -- to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, if we were slave masters our keen morality would have made us Bobby Carter, that were we poor and black our sense of Protestant industry would be a mighty power sending gang leaders, gang members, hunger, depression and sickle cell into flight. We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct.

Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We'd die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that's ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, but on the whole, mediocre.

That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook--but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.


Some weeks ago I met a student who was specializing in economy and theater. She said that what she loved about both fields was that she had to presume a kind of rationality in studying her actors. She had to surrender herself--her sense of what she would like to think she would do--and think more of what she might actually do given all the perils of the character's environs. It would not be enough to consider slavery, for instance, when claiming "If I was a slave I'd rebel." One would have to consider, for instance, family left behind to bear the wrath of those one would seek to rebel against. In other words, one would have to assume that for the vast majority of slaves rebellion made no sense. And then instead of declaration ("I would do..."), one would be forced into a question ("Why wouldn't I?").

This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country. I do not mean a soft, flattering, hand-holding empathy. I mean a muscular empathy rooted in curiosity. If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this--You are not extraordinary. It's all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it's much more interesting to assume that you wouldn't and then ask "Why?"

This is not an impossible task. But often we find that we have something invested in not asking "Why?" The fact that we -- and I mean all of us, black and white -- are, in our bones, no better than slave masters is chilling. The upshot of all my black nationalist study was terrifying -- give us the guns and boats and we would do the same thing. There is nothing particularly noble about black skin. And to our present business it is equally chilling to understand that the obstacles facing poor black kids can't be surmounted by an advice column.

Let us not be hypothetical here. I am somewhat acquainted with a poor black kid from West Philly, and have been privileged to grapple with some of the details of his life. When he was six he came home from school and found his entire life out on the sidewalk. Eviction. He says he saw some of his stuff and immediately reversed direction out of utter humiliation. He spent the next couple of weeks living on a truck with his father, his aunt and brother. Everyday they'd search the trash for scrap to take to the yard for money. His father abused everyone in the family. He last saw his father alive when he was 9. At 17, convinced he would die if he stayed in Philly,he dropped out of high school and lied his way into a war.

You will forgive me if I've written in these pages of my father with a kind of awe. It is not merely the fact of being my father, but having acquainted myself with his childhood conditions, I shudder to think of what might have become of me.

The answers are out there. But they will not improve your self-esteem.