Making it

I almost forgot one of the Black History month topics.

It cam from reading Ain't No Making It: Leveled Aspirations in a Low-Income Neighborhood by Jay MacLeod.

MacLeod was working with youths as a student, and found an idea for his thesis in looking at two different groups of boys. He dubbed them the Brothers and the Hallway Hangers. One group was focusing on academic achievement and the other leaned toward more criminal activity. His initial work came out in 1987, but reconnecting with the grown boys later led to some additional understanding in 1995.

I personally leaned toward academic achievement, so I tended to favor the Brothers and root for them. It turned out that they didn't end up having much better job success than the Hallway Hangers.

One interesting thing to me is that the Hallway Hangers gained more from the group solidarity. They had a sense of community and belonging. It helped them because they knew that the odds were against them being able to get good-paying jobs and create better lives. That belief may have motivated some anti-social tendencies, but nonetheless, knowing that they did not have much they still had each other. Perhaps they felt some sense of accomplishment in knowing that it was rigged all along (thus being smarter than those chumps who kept studying).

The easy tendency is to call that a victim mentality and excoriate it; buckling down and working hard will fix everything. Pull up your pants!

The Brothers did that. They bought into the system and tried to work according to the rules of the system, but without significant improvements in their lives. I know hard work is supposed to be its own reward, but when there aren't any other rewards, eventually that is bound to raise questions. The Brothers were feeling much less positive eight years later.

Learned helplessness is one thing, but a deluded belief in the possibility of accomplishment is much worse. It's not that no one ever makes it - with the right combination of luck and circumstances it can happen - but more people are set up for failure and told that it's them.

The Brothers had a harder crash, but the Hallway Hangers weren't happy with the situation either. They just dealt differently. It saved them some grief, but only what it was possible to save.

Setting young kids up like that is rotten. Barring a better system you should at least be honest with them. No one wants to admit anything that ugly - especially if they are benefiting from it - because once you admit it you have to change it.

I want the change. I want a better world than this. 

First you have to be honest about it. That's why we're going to talk about the press.