The Double Burden of the Black Hustle

While many are familiar with Chicago’s South side, few outside the city know that some of the lowest income communities in the city are on the West side. Twenty years ago, I worked at a large West side nonprofit called Bethel New Life. While I was there, the all-Black staff team taught me new things about an essential part of Black culture in America: hustle.

Working hard and doing whatever it takes to care for your family is at the core of our culture. It has to be when Black individuals are routinely paid less, regardless of education or position. As I’ve learned more of my own family history, I’ve learned it’s part of how my family and so many other Black families have survived and in some cases, thrived. However, often instead of being celebrated, Black hustle is inadvertently penalized in our nation’s social safety net.

At the time, my department at Bethel New Life was based in a ramshackle building by a large, beautiful park in a predominantly Black neighborhood on the West side. The building had sagging stairs, tiny bathrooms, and old everything. While the neighborhood fit the stereotypical narrative of Black neighborhoods, the people I met were smart, hard-working, and committed to creating a better world. Most of my life has been spent in all-white spaces, and I have never seen anyone work as hard as every one of my Black coworkers to help their community and feed their families. On our team of 15 or so, all were long-time neighborhood residents and each one worked two or three jobs to make ends meet.

The hustle has a storied history and multiple definitions. In early usage, in Black community it meant hard work and gumption, but was also often used by others to refer to illegal or shady activities. Malcolm X wrote that everyone in his Harlem community had to have a hustle just to survive. For the women and men I worked with, the hustle was much simpler and totally above board — just a side job or two to pay the bills, feed the family, and support elderly parents. Some did hair on the side, others tried to sell Mary Kay, and a few made huge spaghetti and fish dinners, selling them to friends and family on the weekend.

Historically, the hustle became a necessary part of Black life, and in return Black culture, as throughout much of our history many types of legal work or even buying property were either illegal or physically and violently prevented. As Mehrsa Baradaran writes in The Color of Money, following the end of slavery “black codes,” "prohibited Blacks from property ownership, trade, testifying in courts, and voting. Blacks could not engage in commercial trade other than what they were conscripted to do.” More recently, government programs and investments have systematically kept out people of color who were earning below poverty wages, while giving free benefits to primarily white Americans (the GI Bill, federal homeownership policies, mortgage tax deductions, and corporate bailouts). Without access to these wealth-building supports, Black Americans have had to work extra hard just for a scrap of the American Dream.

Unfortunately, the hustle is still an essential part of Black life because Blacks are still stuck in lower paying jobs or paid less for the same jobs. In Chicago, Black people still struggle to gain entrance to well-paid union jobs. Black Americans are overrepresented in lower-paid service jobs with fewer benefits and work irregular hours in retail jobs. While earning a degree does increase lifetime income, in some of the highest paid fields Black Americans are still paid less than whites with the same degrees and others are never able to get a job in their field of study.

In Garfield Park on the West side, each person I worked with was doing their best to do right by their families and their communities. Nationally, 20 percent of Black Americans report doing online gig work compared to 12 percent of white Americans, not including Black Americans earning money through an informal side hustle. But, sometimes unintentionally, our government policies have ways of punishing Black people for working hard.

• People who must cobble together gig work to earn enough to live on are normally not able to collect unemployment in most states, although the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program temporarily made benefits available to independent contractors. Unemployment insurance also has baked in biases that can incorrectly flag people of color for investigation. Learn more in a report from my colleagues at New America’s New Practice Lab.
• Reporting income on tax returns for side jobs can lead to audits or fraud investigations. Braiding hair or caring for the children of family members is an example of work that has traditionally been done in Black homes for generations. However, reporting income from these types of work can be flagged for fraud by state revenue departments leading these individuals to be unfairly targeted, causing some to avoid filing taxes and lose thousands of dollars from the Earned Income Tax Credit and other tax credits.
• For some support programs, benefit cliffs mean that someone earning just a little more each week can suddenly be ineligible for food stamps or child care assistance. However, people may still not earn enough to cover expenses. This can lead people to avoid reporting informal part-time work from side hustles or avoid taking small promotions.

Without access to these wealth-building supports, Black Americans have had to work extra hard just for a scrap of the American Dream.

Government systems can either help or hinder reducing the racial and ethnic wealth gap. Here’s a few ways to support hustle:

• Modernize and expand unemployment and other benefits programs to support part-time and gig workers. (see New America’s playbook for ideas)
• The IRS and government benefits agencies can review fraud definitions and practices with a diverse group of participants to specifically identify cultural biases.
• Focus precious IRS tax-auditing resources on people with higher incomes, instead of going after low-income people who may have made a small error or bring in very small amounts of money from informal work.
• Unemployment, tax, and human services agencies can conduct user research with diverse constituents to see if government programs are inadvertently penalizing people working more than one job or working while getting additional education.
• Benefits programs like SNAP, child care assistance, and TANF should address benefits cliffs and create safe harbor provisions for people earning small amounts of money from informal work.

Some of the kindest, most hard-working people I’ve known worked with me at Bethel New Life. Unfortunately, given biases embedded into our systems they might have had to go through frightening and expensive tax audits despite earning very low salaries to serve the community. Hard working people barely making ends meet should be supported by our government, not punished.

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