Hustling to Survive: Black in America
The Black unemployment rate has been double the white unemployment rate steadily for the past 60 years. During Regan's recession, that number hit 22%, and it was coinciding with the introduction of crack to urban areas.
22%. It's almost impossible for white people to imagine, given how much they freaked out for a rate of less than 10% a few years ago. Imagine if this happened:
"During the aftermath of the Great Recession, the annual unemployment rate peaked at 15.9 percent for blacks in 2010 and 2011.
The highest annual unemployment rate for whites since the onset of the Great Recession was 8.0 percent, still less than the pre-recession annual unemployment rate (8.3 percent) for blacks."
Remember that the employment rate only counts those who are actively looking for work, not those who have given up.
It's safe to say that Black people in this country do not have it easy looking for work, based on many of white America's assumptions, and even when they do get work, they may often find themselves kept from advancing in a corporate hierarchy that privileges white works, as Coca-Cola was (not once but twice) found guilty of. Remember this the next time you hear about Black Americans hustling, often accompanied by the phrase "do what you gotta do to survive."
Turning away from income (which is made by wages and salaries), and looking instead at wealth (net worth of assets minus debt), and white people's wealth in 2011 was 18% greater than Black people's wealth, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and wealth is what people draw upon in cases of emergencies, for college savings, for starting a business, buying a home, and retiring.
People are sometimes faced with impossible choices, choices that make it hard to judge them by the same standards you might use to judge most people's actions. Consider America's celebrated founders, who left their farms and businesses to join the Continental Congress.
Hustling for Freedom: America's Founders
"These were real people with real problems. As the Revolution dragged on, many of its leading figures faced not only physical danger but financial ruin. They looked for ways to make ends meet even if they had to cut ethical corners.
For example, one of the couples most widely revered for their contributions to the Revolution, John and Abigail Adams, resorted to a black-market scheme to raise enough money to avoid losing their home and property in Massachusetts.
Many of Abigail Adams’s famous letters to her husband, as he served the revolutionary cause in Philadelphia and Europe, amounted to requisitions of supplies that could be sent back to Boston, along with his official correspondence, via the fastest and safest means of American transportation.
Abigail Adams then marked up the prices on the precious goods and sold them through a relative, Cotton Tufts Jr., so her involvement – and that of her husband – would not be revealed and provoke a possible scandal. [See Woody Holton’s Abigail Adams.]
In retrospect, none of this should reflect badly on John and Abigail Adams, who sacrificed greatly for the revolutionary cause. They were simply doing what they had to do to make it through dangerous and difficult times."
Hustling for Opportunity: ...Then We'll Go Legit
In the 1980s, Freeway Rick Ross built a drug empire in Los Angeles, becoming a millionaire by age 22. He was sentenced to life in prison for this role, until when in prison he learned to read and discovered he was sentenced inaccurately. He was released in 2009. He has this to say:
"We gotta be honest. The drug business funded Hip Hop. Most guys didn’t have money to buy $1,000 turntables or mixing boards, so Hip Hop was funded by drugs. Even if you look at the way the cycle moved from state to state, it was usually the states that had just got a hold of cocaine and were booming in the drug business. The game kind of gelled out of those areas, so when you look at it, it was vital.
Nobody else was going to give us a loan. Nobody was going to give a young Eazy-E a loan to go out and do records, rent a studio or any of the stuff he had to do. Nobody was gonna loan him that money to pay someone to introduce him to Jerry Heller. So he had to get his money by any means that he could. By any means necessary."
And yet we judge the drug game harder than anything. When Jay-Z admitted to dealing crack, the comments section had people acting disgusted because of how many lives he must have ruined through drugs but did not take responsibility for. Aside from acting like they can read his conscience and assuming he has none, these people are ignoring how the lives of Blacks in New York City were already ruined and there was little else where people could turn to feed their families. Rappers 2 Chainz, Biggie, and Young Jeezy all describe the impossible scenarios they were placed in to feed their children by turning to dealing drugs.
America's Founding Drug Dealers
This moral outrage becomes suspicious given the fact that "every year tobacco kills more Americans than did World War II — more than AIDS, cocaine, heroin, alcohol, vehicular accidents, homicide and suicide combined."
The almost 7,000 deaths annually caused by crack is nothing to take lightly. However, in comparison, the 480,000 deaths annually caused by alcohol and the 26,654 annual alcohol deaths (not even counting fetal alcohol syndrome, or alcohol-fueled traffic accidents or homicides) represent even more of a moral outrage. Add prescription painkiller deaths (overdoses only) to the mix, and you realize the top three deadliest types of drug dealers in America are legit.
George Washington himself got into the drug game for profit reasons: "At 65, he was looking for different, easier revenue streams than being a farmer."
Washington actually wrote to at least one friend of his who was a rum distiller and asked his opinion, and he said, “If he knows what he’s doing, there’s gonna be a market for it.” So he hired him.
He ended up running "one of the biggest whiskey distilleries in the country at that time—a major commercial venture. Most [of the competitors] were small scale with a few stills that produced a few hundred gallons a year. By 1799, the last year Washington was alive, his distillery produced almost 11,000 gallons of spirit." It is safe to say that, like Freeway Rick Ross, George Washington was a drug kingpin.
Granted, there was some moral outrage directed, posthumously, toward this. When a historical society looked to recreate Washington's distillery operation, they reported in an interview that "we got a couple phone calls that people [were angry that] we were associating Washington with alcohol. As we told them, we’re not making this up. It’s historical fact."
Double-Standards for Poor Communities of Color
Do a couple phone calls compare to the couple of comments section's disparaging remarks on Jay-Z's drug days? Let's see if they are on the same level:
The moral outrage at young Black people dealing drugs to finance either their family's basic needs or a record and/or business, such as a label, so that they can go legit is accompanied by:
racial disparities in crack vs. cocaine sentence,
and the all-around harsher sentencing Black people get for non-violent drug offenses as opposed to white offenders.
The media partakes in this racist institutional system as well.
But white people who hustle on the side have privilege on their side:
The New York times reported in 2012 that an employee of Lehman Brothers went along with a drug smuggling cartel. She was only busted a long time after starting her operation, when she tried to cash in. The lack of supervision of this employee was criminal considering how far she got. However, "law enforcement officials were also bitterly divided about whether to indict Lehman Brothers along with its employee. In the end, after Lehman was given the opportunity to explain its conduct, prosecutors accepted the Wall Street firm's claim that it may have been lax, perhaps, but not criminal."
The following year, the U.S. Justice Department decided to be lenient toward "executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit – but they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses."
Hmm...Interesting.
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