This is an interesting read, a couple of things that stood out to me:
Blacks make up less than 15 percent of the population, which means that even if all were in the low-wage economy, they would only comprise less than one-fifth of the poor.
...people in the FTE sector have social capital, including the benefits of friends and relatives who help them. “They know people who know people who can give them jobs. They have to do the work to get promoted, but they get in the door,” Temin said. Many Black people are lacking in the social capital, the connections, to get into the FTE door. “One of the things about this is that the people who have made it, the whites who have made it, don’t recognize the role of social capital in their prosperity. A fish doesn’t know it is swimming in water, [as is the case with] people who got jobs in FTE firms,” Temin explained.
For example, he noted that sociologist Nancy DiTomaso at Rutgers University interviewed whites and discovered they have an internal narrative of their success — that they had done this all by themselves. “It said two things: One, they deserve the benefits. It’s not the community that does the benefits but the individuals, and ‘I did this, so I must be special’” he said. “Second, it makes them unsympathetic to changing things for Blacks. ‘I did this for myself and they should do this all by themselves.’”
