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Unit 4 Social Institutions
Chapter 13
Enrichment Reading No Shame in My Game
by Katherine S. Newman
Katherine Newman has created a rich portrait of minimum-wage workers employed in four fast-food restaurants in central Harlem. These are the “working poor”—they hold jobs and pay taxes, but they do not earn enough money to buy the basic necessities of life. In the passage below, Newman argues that the working poor share the same basic values as the rest of American society. The shame referred to in the reading lies in society’s view that employment in fast-food jobs is somehow degrading.
Swallowing ridicule would be a hardship for almost anyone in this culture, but it is particularly hard on minority youth in
the inner city. They have already logged four or five years’ worth of interracial and cross-class friction by the time they get behind a [Burger Barn] cash register. More likely than not, they have also learned from peers that self-respecting people don’t allow themselves to be “dissed” without striking back. Yet this is precisely what they must do if they are going to survive in the workplace.
This is one of the main reasons why these [fast-food] jobs carry such a powerful stigma in American popular culture: they fly in the face of a national attraction to autonomy, independence, and the individual’s “right” to respond in kind when dignity is threatened. In ghetto communi- ties, this stigma is even more powerful because— ironically—it is in these enclaves that this mainstream value of independence is most vigor- ously elaborated and embellished. Film charac- ters, rap stars, and local idols base their claim to notoriety on standing above the crowd, going their own way, being free of the ties that bind or- dinary mortals. There are white parallels, to be sure, but this is a powerful genre of icons in the black community, not because it is a discon-
nected subculture but because it is an intensified version of a perfectly recognizable American middle-class and working-class fixation.
It is therefore noteworthy that thousands upon thousands of minority teens, young adults, and even middle-aged adults line up for jobs that will subject them, at least potentially, to a kind of character assassination. They do so not because they start the job-seeking process with a different set of values, one that can withstand society’s contempt for fast-food workers. They take these jobs because in so many inner-city communities, there is nothing better in the offing. In general, they have already tried to get better jobs and have failed, landing at the door of Burger Barn as a last resort. . . .
The stigma also stems from the low social sta- tus of the people who hold these jobs: minorities, teenagers, immigrants who often speak halting English, those with little education, and (increas- ingly in affluent communities afflicted with labor shortages) the elderly. To the extent that the pres- tige of a job refracts the social characteristic of its average incumbents, fast-food jobs are hobbled by the perception that people with better choices would never purposely opt for a “McJob.” . . . There is no quicker way to indicate that a person is barely deserving of notice than to point out he