Brother, Can You Spare Me A Job?

26 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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"Brother Can You Spare a Dime" (1932), Al Jolson, Booker T. Washington, Corporate Responsibility, Gender Discrimination, General Foods, Hard Work Mythology, My Brother's Keeper, My Brother's Keeper Initiative, Operation Opportunity, Paternalism, Philanthropy, Poverty, President Barack Obama, Race, Racial Paternalism, White House

Screenshot from "Brother, Can You Spare Me a Dime" video/song (song originally recorded in 1932), July 26, 2014. (http://youtube.com).

Screenshot from “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” video/song (song originally recorded in 1932), July 26, 2014. (http://youtube.com).

In the past five months, there’s been much debate and derision over the White House’s My Brother’s Keeper Task Force and Initiative. Most of it has centered around the exclusion of girls and young women of color from the initiative, as if the problems affecting Black and Latino males aren’t the same ones affecting Black and Latino females. Poverty, a resource-poor education, lack of entry-level jobs leading to careers, woeful access to higher education, lack of access to public services. These effects may lead to different responses from boys/young men of color and girls/young women of color, but the problems that effect vulnerable populations of color are no respecter of gender.

There’s other problems with the initiative, even if President Barack Obama and the White House were to ensure the inclusion of Black and Latino females in the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative tomorrow. It’s an extremely racially paternalistic initiative. On the face of things, it’s not much different from the work Booker T. Washington did a century ago via the William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt administrations and with money from White philanthropists such as Henry Huttleston Rogers (Standard Oil), Julius Rosenwald (Sears), and George Eastman (Kodak).

Sure, in the case of Washington, The Rosenwald Fund built a few thousand schools, and the philanthropists contributed money to Washington that would build an endowment for Tuskegee. Still, that money came with strings attached. Most of the schools built weren’t high schools, were geared toward what we would call low-level vocational education today, and certainly weren’t part of any agenda to end Jim Crow. For all the good Washington was able to do through these robber-baron era philanthropists — especially in reducing Black illiteracy — it took Black migration out of the South to lead to lasting changes around notions of racial progress and the idea of segregation as the norm for a representative democracy.

As for My Brother’s Keeper, I am reminded of a passage from my Boy @ The Window about my very first full-time “office” job in the summer of ’87, in between my graduation from Mount Vernon High School and my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh. It’s about my working for General Foods (now Kraft Foods) in Tarrytown, New York as part of their Operation Opportunity program.

John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers (originally published in 1984), July 26, 2014. (http://goodreads.com).

Beyond the $1,022 the program saved on my behalf — which would go toward room, board and two textbooks for my second semester at Pitt — there really wasn’t much about this program that was opportunity-inducing. Operation Opportunity seemed like it was a checkmark that General Foods could put in its “doing good” column. It provided an opportunity to observe others and do menial tasks without actually promising anything that would help me even a year later, as I went through the summer of ’88 unemployed, and the first week of my sophomore year at Pitt homeless. Not to mention, I picked up a terrible cold in the heat of a 98-degree-July day while spending two hours in a meat-locker-of-a-trailer doing measurements on Jell-O pudding pops!

Now I have no idea what the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation or Magic Johnson Enterprises intends to do to be keepers of brothers, or brothas, for that matter. But all too frequently, these efforts turn into one-time experiments or corporate-responsibly checkmarks. As my friend and colleague Catherine Lugg has said more than once over the years (albeit, on education research, not specifically on this), social change and diversity efforts are far more than just “bringing a pet to class.” The idea that we need to learn how to work hard is yet another myth that this initiative will perpetuate, whether it’s a success or a failure.

It’s not hard to figure that poor children and young adults of color need more access to public health services, more resources in their formal education, more and better quality food to eat, and more nurturing. Whether any of these kids or young adults — male or female — can obtain these resources without racial paternalism, experimentation or other strings attached, I for one remain extremely skeptical.

When Work Really Is Too Much

27 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Bigotry, Burnout, CIS, Computer and Information Systems, Hard Work, Hard Work Mythology, Jay Wickliff, Long Hours, Pitt, Presidential Classroom, Racism, Sexual Harassment, Sleep Deprivation, Workplace Harassment

From “How to Do More Work in Less Time” article, Forbes Magazine, February 28, 2012. (Deborah L. Jacobs/http://forbes.com).

I’ve been working for a paycheck in some capacity since September ’84, when me and my brother Darren began working with our father Jimme down in Upper West/East Side and Midtown Manhattan. Back then, we cleaned the floors of corporate offices, the carpets of condos and co-ops, and endured Jimme’s alcoholic ups and downs. There was one lesson, though, that stuck with me in the year or so that we worked for our father, one that extended the lesson we observed from our Mom before we fell into welfare in April ’83. That we wouldn’t get far without hard work or without having work, and that if we wanted to avoid the work of a low-paying, back-breaking job like buffing and waxing floors, we also needed to work smart, to use our brains and our muscles

Since then, the longest I’ve been without a job has been ten months, between August ’86 and June ’87. I worked all the way through undergrad at Pitt and was a grad assistant and teaching assistant throughout grad school (with the exception of my time as a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow in ’95-’96, and even then, I worked on two of Joe Trotter’s research projects). I’ve faced periods of unemployment and longer periods where I’ve cobbled together part-time and full-time work, as well as held stable full-time work in the nonprofit and higher education worlds.

Working long hours, January 23, 2014. (Mark Holder/http://www.findersandsellers.com).

In all that time, I’ve only held two jobs where I’d been overwhelmed with work. Not the actual act of performing the duties of these jobs, mind you. The number of hours in which I had to show up for work was what eventually made these jobs overwhelming. My first time experiencing full-time work outside of a summer job was in the middle of my Winter/Spring ’89 semester. I worked for Pitt’s Computer and Information Systems’ (CIS) computer labs back then. I had requested more hours, and had gone from twelve to twenty to thirty-six between the beginning of January and the second-half of February, covering for folks who had moved on to real full-time work after graduating.

This was a seven-week period in which I averaged 36 hours per week while taking sixteen credits — five classes — and all while facing sexual harassment from my co-worker Pam, harassment tacitly sanctioned by our boss and her friend Cindy. Despite it all and my $4.15/hour salary, I focused on the work, the need for extra cash, and my friends, and came out the other side, and hoped to avoid a situation like that again.

I stumbled my way into a worse situation in my first full-time work after earning my doctorate, with the now out-of-business Presidential Classroom. My official title was Director of Curriculum, but that was my main job for only nine months out of the year. Because Presidential Classroom had dedicated itself to edu-tainment with a full-time staff of only a dozen, this meant that all full-time staff were also part of what we called Program. Fifteen weeks during the winter, early spring and summer, one group of 300-400 high school juniors and seniors from across the country (and Puerto Rico and outside the US/commonwealth) after another would spend a week in DC learning about “how government and politics work on Capitol Hill.” Or, as our brochures would say, “Not your typical week in Washington.”

One version of Presidential Classroom logo, January 27, 2014. (http://congressionalaward.org).

I worked on-site at the Georgetown University Conference Center (where Marriott had a hotel, primarily for families visiting their hospitalized loved ones at Georgetown University Hospital) for seven of those weeks. I supervised interns, so-called faculty (some of whom were government employees who seemed more interested in chasing skirts than in sharing their experiences) and worked with other staff while watching over these groups of students roaming all over DC and Northern Virginia week after week.

One week in February ’00, I counted up, and found that I’d worked 120 hours in all. This included a 21-hour-day, in which I’d caught a boy in a girls’ hotel room, and then proceeded to contact his parents and expel him from the program. Between that and the bigoted staff I worked with — including my boss, the ED, who once told the joke that “slavery was a hoax” — I knew that putting in 100+ hours per week and sleeping in lumpy beds for $35,000 a year wasn’t worth it. By the last week of June ’00, I was severely sleep-deprived and ready to run my co-workers through with a long spear.

The lesson here was that we all need work, and we all need to work hard in order to guarantee success. But working hard also requires hard thinking and decision-making. It required me to say “No” to things that I had said “Yes” to when I was younger and more desperate for any job. What’s the damnable misery of it, though, is knowing that there are millions of people stuck in jobs that require so much more of them than they should be willing to give.

No job should require the kind of hours I put in combined with harassment and bigotry unless the salary is in the six-figure range, and even then, it’s not worth it. It won’t be worth the loss of self-esteem, the sleep deprivation, the sudden weight gain, the irritability and the temptation to turn to forms of self-medication. It wasn’t worth it for me in ’89 or in ’00, as I’m sure it isn’t for those of you in jobs like this now.