Time March 2–9, 2020INEQUALITY| ECONOMY
When you Teach abouT racial inequaliTy for a
living, as I do, you have a before-and-after story. The story
broadly goes that before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ra-
cial inequality was legal and normative. After the Civil
Rights Act, racial inequality is illegal but normative. It is
a linear story for a decidedly circular history, where ad-
vances thanks to the March on Washington in 1963 and
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Lyndon Johnson’s Execu-
tive Order 11246 in 1965 (or “affirmative action”) and the
election of President Barack Obama in 2008 have been met
with resistance. We move forward, then get pushed back,
forward, back.
Today it is harder than it was 60 years ago to get a bead
on racial inequality because, well, it looks so much like
everything else. It looks like the gentrification that dis-
places black people, yes, but also poor people generally. It
feels like low wages when most workers’ wages are stagnat-
ing. It looks like debt and tainted water and poor air quality
and hustling to make ends meet when almost everyone is
reckoning with financial crises, climate disaster and eco-
nomic insecurity. What can be said about racial inequality
in the 21st century that isn’t just the story of every Ameri-
can? The answer is not in the nature of the problem but in
the nature of the response: everyone is hustling, but every-
one cannot hustle the same.
The hustle is an idea, a discourse and a survival strat-
egy often glorified as economic opportunity. It is an ode to
a type of capitalism that cannot secure the futures of any-
one but the wealthiest. But its popularity lies in how hus-
tling can feel like an equal- opportunity strategy. You see it
espoused by the mostly black and Latino “ squeegee kids”
who jump into action to clean your car window. It is also the
rallying cry for many of the black people who have earned
a college degree but earn less than white workers doing
similar jobs. The term originated as a code for illegal activi-
ties, but according to Lester Spence, author of Knocking the
Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, today
we have all been turned into hustlers, trying to monetize
our “human capital” for economic advancement.
But black Americans have to hustle more. A white
family of four living at the poverty line has about $18,000
in wealth. A black family at that thresh-
old has negligible wealth. Everyone is
hustling, but poor black Americans are
literally hustling from zero. For middle-
class black people, the trends aren’t much
better. Again, it’s not just income but also
wealth that reproduces racial inequali-
ties, so being “middle class” when you
are black is not nearly as secure a posi-
tion as it is for other racial groups. The
black middle class takes on more debt for
education, earns less for their educational
achievements and struggles more to repay
their student loans than their white peers.
It’s a hard story to tell because the im-
ages are fuzzier than they once were. The
legal nature of racism before the 1960s
made for material pictures of inequality:
WhiTes-only signs. Red lines on neigh-
borhood maps. Sharecroppers. Today
racial inequality leaves more of an im-
pression, albeit one deeply felt by black
Americans, than it does a concrete pic-
ture of oppression and extraction. But
the story of how we hustle, how hard we
hustle and how differently we hustle adds
form to the impression. Economic injus-
tice isn’t fairer because nearly everyone is
hustling. The hustle itself is a site of ra-
cial inequality.What hustling looks like in 2020
depends on who you are. To hustle, if
you are working class, is to piece together
multiple jobs. If you are middle class or
upper class, it is discussed as “multiple
revenue streams.” But the goal is the
same: pull together a patchwork of in-
come in order to get ahead.
On an autumn day in 2018, I drove
to Durham, N.C., for a conferenceSurvival mode
NEARLY SIX DECADES AFTER THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT, BLACK WORKERS STILL HAVE TO
HUSTLE TO GET AHEAD BY TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM