Shame in My Game --

¶ … Shame in my game -- the Shame of America, the Struggles of the Working Poor, as portrayed in Katherine Newman's anthropological study The title of the book No Shame in My Game sounds like a cocky boast made by an urban teenager during a casual game of pick-up basketball. But over the course of the text, this tone is reflected not simply in the bragging and verbal jousting that typically occurs during urban leisure time or the friendly jests and mockery that occur at school.

Rather, thus humor is just one of the many coping mechanisms employed by the working poor to psychologically cope with their environmental stresses and the challenges posed by their daily working lives. The lives portrayed in the book are not games, but reality -- a reality where sports are just one of the more pleasurable and effective forms of relief from the daily grind of flipping burgers and dogging crime ridden streets. Perhaps the most profoundly moving coping mechanism, rather than wit, is pride.

One fast-food restaurant employee is just as proud as any high-wage executive or highly paid star as he says, "it's my job...I will walk tall with my Burger Barn uniform on. (Newman, 99) The Harvard anthropologist Katherine S. Newman embarked upon a study of 300 inner-city workers and job seekers for two years in Harlem, to challenge common stereotyped ideas about America's inner cities.

The debate over welfare has dominated so much of the media landscape, one might be tempted to think that everyone living in impoverished urban areas is either on drugs, selling drugs, on welfare, and thus completely unmotivated to better urban life circumstances. But the poor in No Shame in My Game are working hard, but for little remuneration, either in money, benefits, or social esteem and recognition.

These workers work for the minimum wage, face a lack of childcare and health care, and are always worried about losing their job, given the increasingly desperate shortage of even such low-paying jobs. or, some work two jobs just to pay the bills. Furthermore, Newman's demographic and field research demonstrates that America's largest group of impoverished citizens is not the unemployed, but the working poor, who receive little political attention or credit for their struggles.

Both traditional liberals and conservatives will find a great deal to take issue with in Newman's book. Liberals who defend the current welfare system may be angry at Newman's assertion that this overlooked segment of the working poor population unambiguously states that it finds dignity in earning a paycheck rather than a welfare check, and is relieved and that even low-paying jobs give order to desperate lives in desperate circumstances.

Conservatives may be angry however, when Newman shows that hard work is not enough to pull one's self up by one's bootstraps and survive. Instead, Newman believes that some government intervention is necessary, such as extending more Earned Income Tax Credits to the working poor, as well as instituting new training programs in public schools. If these programs teach skills, they might be able funnel more high-paying work private.