I didn’t plan on publishing any new posts for a few more weeks; however, I just reread a lengthy comment I submitted to the good discussion thread for Cobb’s “The First 22 Rules,” and I thought it was good enough to share here as a blog post.
Cobb:
If you started off with two well-educated parents, grandparents who actually were around to support your two parents, and middle-class or better socioeconomic status, you probably had everything you needed to easily earn at least a middle-class life for yourself and your family. The day you were born, most of the work had already been done for you, Cobb. You were blessed with plenty of valuable privileges you didn’t have to work for. And your family had to do little more than persuade you to do your homework, so you wouldn’t mess it all up.
And, though our society enabled your similarly situated White peers to maintain their middle-class statuses more easily than it allowed you to maintain yours, you should have only had to work slightly harder than your average similarly situated White peer in order to maintain your middle-class status. So, you should not have been cut any slack. To cut a kid like you slack would have been a slap in the face to your parents, your grandparents, and the generations who busted their tails so you could be blessed enough to be born into a middle-class Black family and have a near-fair chance to live a middle-class or better U.S. life.
Life in the U.S. wasn’t and isn’t quite as fair for Black folks like you as it was and is for your similarly talented and industrious White peers, but it probably was and is fair enough for you so that you had and have little reason to complain about the circumstances you inherited. So, it would make perfect sense to tell a Black kid who inherited what you inherited that he needed to heed Sykes’s Rule #1.
But those who inherited the circumstances I inherited had to work much harder or had to be much smarter than folks like you in order to earn middle-class lives for ourselves and our families, didn’t we? You and I didn’t start off with anything close to the same resources. My starting point was far, far less fair than yours. And, recall, even yours could have been fairer than it was, because all other things remaining equal, you still had less valuable phenotypical traits than equally talented middle-class Whites, and therefore you probably inherited slightly less cultural capital, insofar as phenotypical traits contribute to cultural capital in the U.S. But unlike Black folks like you, Black folks like me weren’t just slightly disadvantaged at the start of the race, we were grossly disadvantaged compared to equally talented middle-class Whites. Folks like me were Black AND Broke in the U.S., so we had to do much more than just hit the books a little harder than the average middle-class White kid in order to earn middle-class lives for ourselves. And too many of us had it so bad that we had to be quasi-miracle-workers in order to make it to the middle-class.
Unlike middle-class Blacks, we didn’t inherit slightly less social capital and cultural capital than middle class Whites, we inherited much, much less social capital and cultural capital. Moreover, our educational resources, food quality, health care, and social psychological environments were far, far inferior. Why should any kid be forced to compete against his similarly talented middle-class peers with these types of disadvantages encumbering him? In my opinion, only a pitiless, benighted, or quasi-barbaric society, particularly one as wealthy as ours, would let that happen to its own children.
I was born in the U.S., and I am a veteran. I believe the country I fought for owed me something similar to what your family was able to give you. Instead, my country left me to my unnecessarily humble circumstances and a nasty gauntlet that should not have existed. What my nation did for and to me in the late 20th Century was more than just unfair. I would have had no problems accepting the “unfair” circumstances you had to deal with Cobb. What I had to deal with was much worse than the unfairness you dealt with; I had to deal with neglectful indifference at best or malevolent neglect at worst.
The lower down the U.S. socioeconomic scale one would go in the our 21st Century U.S., the more likely Sykes’s Rule #1 would sound absurd to a smart Black kid. At some socioeconomic point that smart Black kid is going to tell the untested, unjustifiably arrogant, and privileged messenger to take his silly butt back to the suburbs or the hills. Because, at some point, even a poor smart Black kid would be able to see that the finger should turn away from him and back at our country.
So, I could see the good sense in telling a middle-class Black boy with two parents and a few loving grandparents, living in a safe neighborhood, going to a good school, and eating healthy food, that he deserves no slack. He doesn’t deserve any slack. More than half the hard work had been done for him before the doctor spanked him on his tush and welcomed him into his supportive and well-resourced middle-class family. All he really needed to do in order to earn a middle-class lifestyle for himself was to hit the books a little harder than his average White peer. But I’d look like a benightedly pitiless and untested arrogant fool if I tried to tell a kid who inherited the circumstances I inherited that his country didn’t owe him more than what it gave him and that he should just “get used to it.”
No U.S. citizen should be told to get used to or deal with the circumstances I inherited. No smart kid should be born in our wealthy nation this century and, then, be forced to navigate the socioeconomic gauntlet I was forced to navigate. And there is no justification that would pass the straight face test for why my country forced me to have to outwork or outsmart my similarly talented middle-class peers by such a large margin just to get to the middle-class that they inherited.
The pitiless gauntlet our nation left for me exposes our barbaric cultural underbelly. And when it comes to our nation’s treatment of our 20% poorest children, we don’t have enough to be proud of. We unjustly, uneconomically, and unmeritocratically leave too many of them to their unnecessarily humble circumstances, like I was left to mine. And we wait to see which ones will be strong enough, smart enough, nurtured enough, and lucky enough to emerge from those nasty gauntlets, which ones will figure out how to climb their ways up to the middle-class. But we don’t spend enough time thinking about how much stronger our nation would probably be if we followed John Roemer’s good policy advice in his Equality of Opportunity, if we rewarded our lazy middle-class and upper-class slackers much less than we currently do, and we invested in harder-working poor kids much more.
Our nation underinvested in me and millions like me during the 20th Century. We’ll never really know what our opportunity costs were for that unjust and uneconomical error. Instead of investing wisely in our human capital during the 20th Century, we set up an unnecessarily uneconomical and unmeritocractic social system that now gives far too many lazy and average middle-class and upper-class underachievers better lifestyles than they deserve. And I believe our imprudent 20th Century investments in our human capital have helped us build a 21st Century version of the U.S. in which there are so many lazy, underachieving, underperforming middle-class and upper-class entitled slackers that publishers could be convinced a book like Sykes’s 50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School: Real-World Antidotes to Feel-Good Education should find its way to Barnes and Noble’s shelves just in time for the end-of-year holiday shopping season.