Marks' capitalist manifesto for 'poor black kids'
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Steve Martin's brilliant 1979 comedy "The Jerk" opens with a riff everyone who has ever seen the film can recite by heart.
"I am not a bum. I'm a jerk," said the defiant, if impoverished protagonist Navin R. Johnson, played with an idiot's lack of guile by Mr. Martin. Gesturing to the homeless men passed out around him, he continues, "It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child."
The film flashes back to the previous year. Navin, a full-grown white man, dances unself-consciously on the front porch of his family's shack. He's surrounded by his siblings and his adopted parents. The conceit is that Navin either doesn't know or doesn't understand that he's a white man living with a family of black sharecroppers in rural Mississippi. His lack of rhythm also embarrasses the family, especially his father.
On his birthday, Navin's mother tells him that he isn't one of her natural-born children. Navin is inconsolable at first when he hears what should already be obvious to him. "You mean, I'm going to stay this color?"
Suddenly liberated from his fate as a sharecropper, Navin ventures into the world to claim the fortune he assumes awaits him. He instinctively knows that the country is far more accommodating to a white man with little or no education than it is to the son of black sharecroppers.
Although clearly a dullard, Navin understands that being white imparts a certain amount of privilege. He leaves home and stumbles upon entrepreneurial opportunities without even trying. He instinctively knows what to do to realize the American Dream, even if he ends up losing it temporarily.
When " If I Were a Poor Black Kid " -- a column by Forbes.com tech-writer Gene Marks -- went viral last week, "The Jerk" came to mind for all sorts of reasons.
"I am not a poor black kid," Mr. Marks announces five paragraphs in. "I am a middle-aged white guy who comes from a middle-class white background. So life is easier for me. But that doesn't mean that the prospects are impossible for those kids from the inner city. ... I believe that everyone in this country has a chance to succeed ... even a poor black kid in West Philadelphia."
I am former poor black kid from West Philly. Mr. Mark had my attention.
"It takes brains. It takes hard work. It takes a little luck. And a little help from others. It takes the ability and the know-how to use the resources that are available. Like technology. As a person who sells and has worked with technology all my life I also know this."
Mr. Marks' advice to black kids from West Philly is to get the best grades possible even while attending lousy schools. If they work hard enough, they'll be admitted into nationally recognized high schools like Central, Masterman and Girls High. If Philly's best schools can't accommodate the demand, then private schools will.
Mr. Marks wants every black kid to master Google Scholar and sites like SparkNotes, CliffNotes, Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg and Academic Earth. If black kids from West Philly lean on Backpack, Skype, Flashcard Machine and Quizlet as slavishly as suburban kids, they'll be competing with them for seats in the Ivy League. Yeah, I'm sure that's a scenario that lots of parents would welcome.
He then advises poor black kids from West Philly to learn software because technology is the great leveller. Mr. Marks says kids are stuck in poverty because they don't take advantage of these opportunities.
While many of his ideas sound reasonable, Mr. Marks displays less self-awareness than Steve Martin's character in "The Jerk."
Missing is any reference to critical thinking or those disciplines that would make for less than obedient workers or corporate widgets. Mr. Marks gets through the whole column without acknowledging obvious structural impediments like a community's tax base. Race and class have a lot to do with access to quality education. Individual hustle is great, but what's needed is educational reform that recognizes historic patterns still in place.
More than anything, Mr. Marks' patronizing, but well-meaning column displays the noblesse oblige that comes from not having been born a poor black child in the first place.
First Published December 20, 2011 12:00 am
