Young woman serving Barbara Ehrenreich at Wendy's: not a girl, not yet a non-final appellate court judge

According to Crescat ringleader Will Baude, "Copy-editing is much like working in a non-final appellate court (or at least how I imagine it to be)."

Looking back on my own admittedly brief career, I can find similar parallels. Shelving books at the Reg, for example, was in fact remarkably similar to being a Japanese emperor.

I suppose there is something to be gained by imagining that one's tedious jobs (or tedious moments in one's otherwise fascinating jobs) resemble more complex and challenging ones. This would come as news to Barbara Ehrenreich, whose much-lauded book, Nickel and Dimed, is an account of one academic's experiment posing as a worker (i.e. working) at various low-paid jobs across America. While ostensibly an examination of whether it's possible to survive getting paid minimum wage, the book is also a discussion of how unpleasant it is for someone used to one way of life to adjust to another. She doesn't like getting fast food and working, well, tedious jobs, and is confused about why the "real" workers aren't more, well, worked up. She never quite separates what is a strong and much-needed point about the difficulties of this nation's working poor from her own personal distaste for situations unlike her own. I got the sense from Nickel and Dimed that Ehrenreich wouldn't be a huge fan of any tedious job, even one that paid, say, $50,000 a year.

In her recent New York Times op-ed, "The New Cosby Kids," Ehrenreich botches yet another reasonable argument-that poor young blacks shouldn't be the nation's scapegoats.

Ehrenreich guarantees everyone from well-meaning liberals (and conservatives) to P.C. warriors will be sympathetic readers by choosing an argument with which few would feel comfortable disagreeing: that poor young blacks have it tough in America. Who is Ehrenreich going to find who will outright deny that? Sure, not everyone would agree with how she’d try to fix things, but she’s set up her op-ed as a fight between the people who acknowledge that poor young blacks tend to have difficult lives in this country and those who refuse to admit it.

When writing as if each sentence ought to end in an exclamation point, it’s difficult to make assertions that don’t occasionally conflict with one another. Ehrenreich uses, to back up her point, the fact that “only a minority of [welfare moms] were African-American.” She then asks, “what about the fact that a black baby has a 40 percent chance of being born into poverty?” Now, either she’s blaming Americans for wrongly assuming that many blacks are poor, or she’s trying to emphasize that blackness does correlate with poverty.

Racially-charged rhetoric, however, is the way Ehrenreich decides to take her piece, for better or worse. “It's time to start picking on a more up-to-date pariah group for the 21st century, and I'd like to nominate the elderly whites.” Ehrenreich feels the need to maintain the racial polarization of her op-ed throughout. Rather than picking on young blacks, we must pick on old whites. “The law-abiding old whites," she adds, oh so humorously, "are no prize either.” While Ehrenreich is being facetious, she could have done it in a way that didn’t keep reemphasizing black versus white, again and again. The comments Ehrenreich makes about the nation’s elderly—that often they require insulin and become bald—apply just as much to blacks as to whites.

Ehrenreich acknowledges, at the end of her article, that she is fact implicating “the elderly rich.” Are we to believe that, just “Arab” and “Muslim” can be used interchangeably, so can “elderly whites” and “elderly rich”? Are all overlapping categories to be collapsed for simplicity’s sake at the Times?

Drawing distinctions between the oppressors and the oppressed is not always so simple, but for Ehrenreich, dividing the country into poor, young, and black and rich, old, and white is as good a way as any of doing so. Seems she was served at Wendy’s (was this part of her Nickel and Dimed experiment requiring to eat fast food?) by a tired-looking black girl. As in Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich assumes that any job or life situation she herself wouldn’t want must be an objectively miserable existence. And plenty of people nationwide look—and are—tired, but Ehrenreich chooses not to notice the tired fashion models, investment bankers, and, ahem, professors and picks up on only the sleepiness of fast-food workers.

Rather than question her use of the world “girl” to refer to a young black women she encountered at Wendy’s (don’t want to mess too much with her liberal cred, tempting as that may be; but seriously, if Trent Lott called a young black man serving him at McDonalds a "boy" things might not go over so well), let’s say the person was in fact high-school age. Let’s say, crazy as this may sound, that this was her after-school job. “Contrary to the stereotype” (to borrow a stereotype-demolishing phrase from Ehrenreich’s own op-ed) some black teenagers really are high-school students. The young woman’s identity may not entirely be that of “fast-food worker” and she may well be moving on to things that Ehrenreich would approve of. She’s still just a girl, not yet a woman—how does Ehrenreich know that this Wendy’s job is it for her for life?

Then again, working at Wendy's is a lot like working in a non-final appellate court. Or so they tell me.