No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City

The Working Poor in Harlem: Newman's Portrait

The book by Katherine S. Newman, an anthropologist, shows that many of the portraits painted of the inner city by journalists and social scientists are at best incomplete and at worst flat wrong. Many accounts of the inner city tend to focus on the unemployed, the homeless, and the gang members who never had a father as a role model. Those things are indeed part of the depressing reality of the ghetto. For Newman, however, she sees the vitality in a place like Harlem. Even though people going to work are not making much money, they have the Burger Barn as their destination and their place of economic survival.

They are people like Rosa, Ianna, Jamal, Carmen, and Kyesha, who all work hard and loyally contribute to the lives of their families. They try to improve their lives even though they are trapped in a minefield of loud city noise, drug dealers, violence, and sickness. They want to do better, and the routine of going to work helps them feel better about themselves. The work they do is really a social activity, Newman writes — it provides them with relationships, a sense of morality, a purpose, and a real sense of humanity through their labors and their interactions.

Newman did a thorough job of studying these working poor. As an anthropologist, she tracked the movements and attitudes of people working long hours for minimum wage. She found that of those who applied for jobs at Burger Barn, seventy-three percent were still out of work a year after they had first been turned down. But of those who were rejected, sixty-five percent were living in homes supported by people earning a living. They were not on welfare, as the stereotype would have many believe.

Newman speaks to the class struggle in America: "Personal responsibility is not supposed to be a ticket to separation," she writes. "It is an instrument of moral and social inclusion, the chief weapon in the fight to overcome unfairness." The working poor have pride, Newman insists, and they "do not want to sit on some ghetto sideline; they want to be in the middle of the action."

The author also points out that there are informal social networks that young people are part of in cities like Harlem. Finding a job and using it as a secure employment record is very important to the future of many young people in the inner city. A résumé is a résumé, even if all it contains is a few jobs flipping hamburgers.

When facing the racial prejudice that many Black and Latino young people encounter, being passed over by indifferent employers, and dealing with municipal cutbacks in services, these workers have to be strong. Newman's book makes the alert reader realize that, but for the grace of God, there go I. The young people at the Burger Barns of the world must struggle against all the hardships society hands them, and they are constantly confronted with the burden of their family's past and the stigma of being perceived as lower class.

But No Shame in My Game is not entirely about the depressing struggles of low-paying jobs. Newman also highlights enlightened corporate initiatives such as the National Apprenticeship Program. This is not a government token social program designed to win votes for a congressman. It is set up by McDonald's, Walgreen Drugs, Hyatt, and others, and it provides help for young people to improve their performance in school. They earn summer jobs because they show promise; they gain dignity by leaving the isolation that being broke, out of work, and without prospects had forced upon them.

The theme that keeps returning throughout No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City is that the middle class misses the point of poverty and what it means to be a young person in the inner city trying to survive and become somebody. The image that these young people only want gold chains and expensive sneakers is "misleading," Newman writes. She challenges "moral exhortations" about sex outside of marriage and regrets that "public perceptions" about jobs in fast-food restaurants are entirely wrong. She is discouraged that African-Americans are subjected to a "powerful discourse of condemnation" as they try to maintain their dignity and stay afloat.

Poverty Beyond the Inner City

The working poor are no longer limited to the inner city, according to an article in The Nation (Dreier, 2004). Dreier writes, "Poverty has moved to the suburbs." He cites the fact that 13.8 million poor Americans are living in the suburbs, compared with an estimated 14.6 million living in "central cities." Those poor who reside in the suburbs make up 38.5% of America's poor people; about 40.6% live in the inner city, Dreier explains.

Census Bureau data that Dreier uses shows that the number of people living in poverty — many of whom are working but earning only minimum wages — jumped from 11.3% of all Americans in 2000 to 12.5% in 2003. In 2003 alone, an estimated 1.3 million people "fell below the poverty line." As a point of historical comparison, in 1970 only 20.5% of America's poor resided in suburbs; by 2000 that figure had increased to 35.9%.

Dreier notes that in the suburbs there has been an "explosion of low-paying jobs in the service economy." The suburban poor are "working poor" in part because most suburbs lack adequate public transportation, making it harder to get to work. "Few of the suburban poor have health insurance," and there are fewer doctors and health clinics in suburbs that accept Medicaid patients. Dreier concludes by asserting that "stereotypes about the 'inner-city poor' and the 'suburban middle class' no longer reflect how we live."

Works Cited

Armour, Stephanie. "Minimum Wage Increase Kicks In Today." USA Today. 24 July 2007.

Brentin, Mock. "The Greatest Challenges to African-Americans in 2008." Essence 38.8 (2007).

Dreier, Peter. "Poverty in the Suburbs." The Nation. 20 September 2004.

Goodman, Peter S. "From Welfare Shift in '96, a Reminder for Clinton." The New York Times. 11 April 2008.

Jones, David R. "The Urban Agenda." New York Amsterdam News 98.1 (2006): p. 5.

Newman, Katherine S. No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City. New York: Alfred A. Knopf and the Russell Sage Foundation, 1999.