No Shame in My Game by Katherine S. Newman

Introduction

Katherine Newman's No Shame in My Game is firmly rooted in the interdisciplinary "urban poverty" literature. Yet Newman also effectively pushes the boundaries of that literature--and the subject(s) of its interest-into important new territory. No Shame in My Game is a study of the conditions, struggles, and strategies of the working poor, specifically black and Hispanic fast-food workers in Harlem, New York. This focus on workers who earn wages that do not lift them above poverty is what distinguishes Newman's study, since much urban poverty research, as well as the accompanying policy debates, is on the jobless, the unskilled, the socially isolated, the "nonmainstream," and the welfare recipient. While the book presents engaging descriptive narratives on the lives of Harlem's working poor, No Shame in My Game is much more timid in its policy recommendations.

Despite the fact that Newman never settles on a hard definition of the working poor, pulling from contested definitions of working (e.g., part-time versus full-time) and poor (e.g., official federal poverty level versus, say, 155 percent of the poverty level), the demographic data she presents on working poverty are nonetheless compelling. Of the fifteen million poor children in the United States in 1994, one-third (or five million of them) had at least one parent who worked all year. Cutting the data a different way, Newman reports that seven percent of families in which at least one family member worked were poor in 1996. As might be expected, these rates increase for young people, women, and minorities, and they compound for people who fall into more than one of these categories. These numbers give only the canvas on which Newman paints an array of ethnographic portraits of Harlem's fast food workers "whose earnings are so meager that despite their best efforts, they cannot afford decent housing, diets, health care, or child care" (Newman, p. 40).

Facts and Findings

Newman works to dispel the stereotype that everyone who lives in Harlem does not want to work and is either on public assistance, selling drugs or both. Newman shows that while people who resist work and drug dealers do exist, including members of the workers' families, there are plenty of working people in Harlem who share the same mainstream views and values, with regard to work, as the middle class. The workers Newman interviews in her study desire either higher education or the opportunity to acquire more skills through training so that they can earn higher wages in order to get themselves into a better neighborhood, support their families and live more comfortably. Moreover, most of the workers resent their family members if they do not work and instead rely solely on public assistance (Morris, 22).

Newman introduces statistics that show that the largest group of poor in the United States is the working poor who lack access to public assistance, healthcare and food stamps. Many of the workers she interviews reside with family members or relatives who receive government benefits, but the workers themselves, ...