And Sarah Kendzior, anthropologist and columnist for Al Jazeera, is into it. Just beyond. Over the moon.

Here is another story about life on minimum wage so that you have a fresh example to cite the next time you encounter a human who claims that inequality in America is actually overblown rhetoric and that it’s not actually that bad out there and that people should just work harder. (“‘I try to live within my means, but sometimes you just can’t,’ said Dupont, 25. The Houston resident works 30 to 40 hours a week taking customer service calls, earning between $7.25 and $8 an hour. That came to about $15,000 last year.”)

“The middle class is barely distinguishable from the poor.” This video has been going viral over the last couple of days, but since it’s relevant to our interests, we’ve decided to post it here (thanks Elise, for bugging us about it). And good morning!

The marathon is a waste of resources and a big “fuck you” to those hit hardest. Cancel the marathon.

— Julie Klausner (@julieklausner) November 2, 2012

NYC Mayor Bloomberg has announced that the New York City Marathon will still happen on Sunday, which is pretty gross! The Atlantic has a good roundup of the arguments against it, and Heidi N. Moore has a great column saying why it’s a horrible idea (“Local politicians there is appalled at the idea of a marathon—’a marathon is a parade,’ the borough president told one newspaper—winding its way through the scenes of waterfront devastation.”)

It’s unpleasant to knock on a door that was paid for by oil money when you’re waving the banner of an environmental campaign. Houston recycles 2.6% of its waste—the worst rate in the country—and during my summer as a canvasser, the good people of Space “Purple Drank” City stonewalled me left and right.

“You know who really creates the trash problem, it’s the Mexicans!” said one chestnut-haired fortysomething in the door of her fake-stucco mansion. She handed me an icy glass of sweet tea, her 63-degree AC whooshing past us into the swamp of the summer night. “It’s just, they weren’t raised to take good care of things.”

“That is an opinion,” I said. “Do you recycle?”

She laughed gleefully. Her clavicle was leather over bone. “Oh, honey! Didn’t anyone ever tell you that our Lord Jesus is gonna come back before any of this is even a problem?”

I am a person who likes difficult situations, and at the time—pre-Peace Corps—I thought that working for a good cause was the immediate equivalent of doing good. So I was compelled by the strange, intrusive act of canvassing. It appealed to me, trying to win over the ex-Enron conservatives and memorize all their bookshelves and, of course, make a buck. 

That was another big hook. Canvassing was potentially lucrative: Half of the funds we raised went right into our pockets, making the job’s moneymaking possibilities as decent as the larger business model was wasteful. I knew that I would never donate to an organization with such an enormous overhead. But would I work for one? At the time, absolutely. I tamped down any lingering discomfort with the reminder that I needed to work somehow. Better this than bartending or a temp cubicle, I thought; better to get to know your city while you still have the energy to do such a thing.

So I knocked on 25 doors an hour for 5 hours a day, riding the carousel of Houston demographics, people infuriating and surprising and beautiful to the last. One Dominican teenage girl gave me a pot brownie and rubbed peppermint oil on the inside of my wrists. A couple from Syria, confined to wheelchairs in a modest bungalow, handed over a check for $500, two passionate letters about recycling, and their grandson’s phone number. (I’ll admit: I felt both mercenary and ecstatic as I walked away from that house, knowing I’d made $250 in about fifteen minutes.) Once I sat on a silk couch consoling a weeping libertarian millionaire whose mother had just died, and then—once his eyes cleared enough to see my clipboard—got swiftly ejected with a few quarters and a lecture on how environmental regulation undermines big business and the American middle class.

We were all supposed to raise a $160 minimum of donations each day, but of course this didn’t always happen. There were plenty of days full of F-bomb showers from stay-at-home dads, commands to get on my knees and accept Jesus, terrible animosity that just clung to me like a smell. And that summer, it was 100 degrees at noon: Spike Lee weather, the type of heat that makes bad vibes snowball into no money, a late-night lecture heavily flavored with cult speech, and cheer-up tacos after your shift.

To make quota and stay employed, I applied some tricks to the trade, mostly things I’d learned while waitressing. I made more money when I wore cowboy boots and repeated people’s names. I deferred to women, flirted with men. I was terrific with old people. “I love terriers!” I chirped, as a gaggle of puntable Furbies pressed their red rockets to my ankles.

And on good days, I liked that my paycheck reflected just how much community had been organized. The letters and the grass-roots cash piled up. HP, a Houston stronghold, amended its corporate policy and stopped exporting electronic waste to developing countries. We got a piece of recycling legislation passed unanimously through the Senate and overwhelmingly in the House, and then we cursed the name of Governor Good-Hair when he (Rick Perry) vetoed it.

It was a shock to me to find out that household income didn’t influence donations at all. Unless we were in one of the two Houston neighborhoods where people are both liberal and rich, we got the same from the house that cost five million as from the house that rented for $500 a month. Of course there’s complexity in this, but the unevenness was bare and obvious. (I didn’t know yet that it is a rule in America that the less money you have, the larger percentage you give away.) Last year, I was back in Houston for a little bit, teaching poetry in a shabby, flourishing community with an average discretionary income of $26,149. Families in that neighborhood, the Third Ward, give 11% of their money away to charity. In the leafy, formal neighborhood where I myself went to school, discretionary income averages $426,792, and families donate 5%.

With canvassing, I reached my limit when a seven-year-old named Fernando emptied his entire piggy bank into an envelope. As his family looked on proudly, in the house where two bedrooms slept eight, the kid drew me a picture of a sickly Earth studded with degrading consumer electronics. His mom gave me a Solo cup of horchata and I left, dazed and sorry underneath the glowing, polluted Houston sky. I walked to a bodega ATM, pulled out $10 and added it to the envelope so I could pretend that I wasn’t taking half of Fernando’s small wealth. That night, I quit. And even as I drove home free, I had a sick suspicion that that summer wouldn’t be the last time I’d reduce a person to dollars in the name of a good cause.

Because idealism, in isolation, doesn’t do anything; it’s just a noble circle-jerk. And there’s no way around the fact that the 5% from my neighborhood millionaires adds up to $32,000 more than the hard-given 11% from the Third Ward parents whose kids wrote poems about how they aspired to be rich—the kind of rich where you own your own shoe store. It’s my old all-white community, the people who go hunting with senators and show up twinkling at galas, who really get things through the Texas House. A thousand kiddy planet drawings, a bucket of change: it’s laughable. It means almost nothing.

And in the end I kept that drawing of Fernando’s feverish Earth. It was a good drawing. Too good to be up on the walls of the nonprofit’s office, absorbing the scent of incense, his sincerity reduced to motivational schmaltz for our own private cycle of blustery human effort: the swarm of new canvassers striding in, striding out, hoping to make enough of a difference that they’d have rent by Tuesday, would eat like a king.

We never bothered to have a serious conversation. Badinage in passing was our specialty, with the result that I never learned from Broyard who were his friends or his enemies, did not know where or when he had been born and raised, knew nothing about his economic status in childhood or as an adult, knew nothing of his politics or his favorite sports teams or if he had any interest in sports at all. I did not even know where he was presently living on that day when I offered to buy him an expensive pair of shoes.

I enjoyed this open letter Philip Roth wrote to Wikipedia to correct a mistake on the Wikipedia entry on his novel, The Human Stain, which erroneously stated that the book was allegedly based on writer Anatole Broyard (it was based on Melvin Tumin, a sociology professor at Princeton who uttered an unfortunate sentence during roll call one day—the Wiki entry is now corrected because of this published letter, of course).

Roth explains how much he actually knew about Broyard, which wasn’t very much (pre-Internet days means he couldn’t Google-stalk Broyard), and I was struck by the above line that he “knew nothing about his economic status in childhood or as an adult.” How many people have you come across in your life and learned their “economic status?” I realized that I actually don’t know the economic statuses, past or present, of a lot people whom I consider friends. I don’t know if they grew up wealthy or poor or middle-class, but can only vaguely guess by piecing together conversations we’ve had. Maybe I’m extrapolating it incorrectly, but it seems to me that if Roth and Broyard had went beyond witty repartee in passing conversations, economic status would have been something that they would have discussed—and what an interesting conversation that would have been.

‪Cord Jefferson (formerly of GOOD, now West coast editor for Gawker) writes powerfully and accessibly about a lot of things, but especially, and uniquely, about race. We spoke over Gchat a few weeks ago about how he does money, and we also talked about race, wealth, and class, in Cord’s life and in America.

Logan Sachon: I’m wondering what you think of the “firstworldproblems” twitter hashtag.

‪Cord Jefferson: That one’s strange, because on the one hand, it’s nice to see people acknowledging that they have it much better than others, and being grateful for that. But, like, if you know that you sound like some rich person whining about bullshit—which is what that hashtag represents—then why do it? It seems like a copout to me. A way of alleviating guilt for having a lot of stuff that’s become a punchline.

‪LS‬: I was always uncomfortable with it but wasn’t sure why, and then I saw the iterations of it that were saying the same things, but had changed it to “whitepeopleproblems.” And I realized that it was this same stupid dichotomy: WE are like this, and THEY are like that. Not all white people are rich, not all rich people are white, and not all Americans live in the first world.

‪CMJ‬: Absolutely. If we want to get into the problematic racial dynamics of things like that, I’d point directly at “Stuff White People Like,” which I actually think was kind of funny. I thought that that site (and the resulting book) were spot on in their descriptions of what peopled like and why they like it. But I took issue with the idea that upper middle class, educated white people are vastly different from, say, upper middle class, educated blacks or Latinos. White people don’t love craft brews and Premier League soccer—wealthier Americans do, and it doesn’t matter their race.

‪LS‬: Oh but don’t you know “they don’t count”? (I’m scared to push enter here because I want it to be very clear this is sarcasm.) (TALKING ABOUT RACE AND CLASS.)

‪CMJ‬: Hahahahahaah. I get the sarcasm. And I agree. The tricky interplay of race and class in America is a supremely sick and twisted thing. 

‪LS‬: So I grew up in Virginia, in Norfolk, arguably the South depending on who you’re talking to, and it wasn’t until college that I really, really understood that the middle class and upper middle class black families I knew were not outliers. And I think a lot of that was just like, the place I grew up, where income and race do overlap in a pretty substantial way, but that assumption didn’t happen in a vacuum.

‪CMJ‬: Well, it’s interesting, because in some ways, they are outliers. For instance, studies show that wealthy minorities tend to live in poorer neighborhoods than equally wealthy or even poorer whites. They don’t leave their minority neighborhoods when they get money, which is fascinating and certainly influences wealthy black families’ cultural realities. Some highlights from those studies:

• “Separate translates to unequal even for the most successful black and Hispanic minorities,” says sociologist John Logan, director of US2010 Project at Brown University, which studies trends in American society.

• “Blacks are segregated and even affluent blacks are pretty segregated,” he said.

• “African Americans who really succeeded live in neighborhoods where people around them have not succeeded to the same extent.”

That said, a whole lot of middle to upper class black families, as you said, are not outliers.

‪LS‬: I’m trying and failing right now to look up what percent of upper middle class Americans are people of color.

‪CMJ‬: It is a very small amount. I mean, have you ever seen the stats on white wealth vs. black wealth?

‪LS‬: I guess that’s what I’m looking for.

‪CMJ‬: It’s shocking. Median wealth for white households is $113,000. Blacks, less than $6,000.

‪LS‬: With wealth being defined as “assets minus debts.” And that is median, so it’s not like Mitt Romney is screwing up the data. Wow.

‪CMJ‬: It’s very sad. And the thing about wealth is that it’s so hereditary. Jackasses like to say, “Everyone has the same opportunities to get rich.” And that is barely true. When you’re raised in a house in which your parents have investments and retirement plans and financial planners and the like, you are just so much better prepared to accumulate wealth than someone who doesn’t even have a savings account. And the opportunities only build after that.

For instance, I went to a nice college where I made good friends with a lot of people who are now very professionally successful. And this year I just hopped in on a round of funding for my friend’s company. There are things like that that just happen in certain parts of the world and not others, and they totally skew this idea that everyone has the same chance to get rich.

LS: And yet, almost everyone you’d ask would describe themselves as the “middle class.”

CMJ: Asking if you were raised with money is a hard question to answer, because when you’re a kid you don’t have a real understanding of financial realities. I know we traveled a lot when I was younger and we lived overseas for several years. And then, when we moved back to Tucson, Arizona, we were members of a country club where my mom would play tennis and where I would play racquetball. My parents were also very educated. But, as I said, I lived in Tucson, which doesn’t have a high cost of living at all. If I had been raised in New York City, I’m sure we wouldn’t have had the same kinds of luxuries we had in Arizona.

One funny things is that even though I never ever felt rich, I think I had these kinds of mannerisms about me that caused people in Tucson to think my family was very wealthy. I distinctly remember kids throughout my school days asking how my parents got so rich or calling me a rich kid. But I wasn’t rich, my dad and mom just made me talk to them about books all the time.

I also used to be obsessed with having cool clothes and expensive sneakers, which I think was partially due to an obsession with hip-hop culture.

‪LS: Go on. ‬

CMJ: I’ve got a lot of conflicted feelings about hip-hop and wealth, which I kinda wrote about in that “Watch the Throne” piece for Gawker.

‪LS: YES. That’s the one. That was wonderful. Pullquote: ”If you’re wondering what Jay and West have done, exactly, to deserve the title of neo-black power icons, the answer appears to be both straightforward and confusing: They’ve gotten rich. Today’s black power, today’s black revolution, seems to be indistinguishable from, say, Donald Trump’s power, the power that comes from being able to possess a lot of stuff.”

‪CMJ‬: Thanks. I mean, there was definitely a time in my life when I really wanted to have expensive shoes and wear Phat Farm and Fubu and Polo hats and Coogi sweaters and Timberland boots because all my favorite rappers were doing that. And it was fucked up. I was certainly very materialistic as a teenager. I’m hesitant to blame that all on rap music, because I don’t think it was all due to rap music.

But looking at all the things these guys had certainly didn’t make me feel better about myself. It definitely made me feel unfulfilled, like I wouldn’t be really cool until I had a blinged out watch and a car that costs as much as four years of college. That’s not rap’s fault, and it’s not the responsibility of artists to make people feel good about themselves, but it certainly had an impact on me that wasn’t ideal. That said, I think I got a lot more out of hip-hop than it took from me.

‪LS‬: As far as materialism in culture, your hip hop is my, um, everything, but let’s just go with Sex and the City is someone else’s extreme sports mags or whatever. Hip hop gets so much heat for it’s rags-to-mega riches storylines, but I don’t know that there’s any segment of American kids who aren’t exposed to stuff-lust early on.

‪CMJ‬: Oh, absolutely. It’s remarkable, and it’s so fucking toxic. Because at that age you are just so unsure of yourself and desperate for some movement to call your own. And so putting Tiffany’s bracelets and Nikes in front of high school kids works like a charm.

Well, did every girl who wanted to be like Charlotte and Samantha at your high school have those Tiffany’s heart necklaces or whatever? Practically EVERY girl at my high school had those. It was madness. And I’m spending like $70 on a bright orange Phat Farm hoodie. I cringe at that thought.

‪LS‬: I came to New York with my family when I was in high school and while I was here, my little project was that I got fancy shopping bags from Tiffany and Neiman and all the stores I’d heard of on TV or whatever that I wasn’t too scared to go into … and then I hung them on my wall when I got home. Like ART. Cringe cringe cringe.

‪CMJ‬: Oh, man, I feel that. That’s rough. I still love rap music. Especially the stuff I listened to when I was younger. But nowadays I have a harder time listening to the stuff that’s just all about how rich a person is and how many cars they have and how they’ll only fly in private jets. That’s so grotesque to me, and it makes me really sad to think that somewhere there’s a poor black kid who thinks his life is worth less than Jay-Z’s because he’ll never own a Maybach.

There’s this Clipse song called “Door Man,” and in the chorus they say over and over, “You ain’t got money like this.” And I have such a hard time understanding why you’d want to listen to someone say that to you. And this goes back to the tricky thing about race and class. Because if a white banker walked through Manhattan shouting, “You ain’t got money like this!” people would be rightfully horrified. If a rapper does it, people will scream along to the line the club. It’s all so complex and messy.

‪LS‬: What if a black banker walked through Manhattan shouting that?

‪CMJ‬: Interesting question! I have no idea. As I wrote in that “Watch the Throne” piece: Jay-Z says he believes getting wealthy in a racist society is a revolutionary act, a belief others seemed to agree with in the comments section. If you believe that, maybe you’d give the black banker a pass. I’d probably still think he was an asshole.

‪LS‬: I just tried to look up statistics for black bankers in America. The first hit was a link to a banking forum with this question: “Although I have not been in banking that long (4 months), I have yet to see a black banker … Is it a lack of brain power or a lack of opportunity” Which is just … unreal. “Lack of brain power” alskdjfklasjdfjaksdfkajsdkfd

‪CMJ‬: Yeah, I mean, I’d expect that. That’s the thing to keep in mind about being black and rich in America: No matter how rich you get, you’re still going to be a nigger to some people. In these upper echelons of society, there’s not a lot of color there, and the beliefs that are in those pockets are just as abhorrent as you’d find at any Klan rally in Alabama.

‪LS‬: (I’ve been reading through this thread but I just had to close the tab because I was feeling sick. People are racist and terrible.)

‪CMJ‬: One time in college, I went home with a friend to this tony suburb in Connecticut. Full of the sort of gentried WASPs you’d expect. And it was fine and his family was very nice and all that. Then, the next week, he told me that his parents remarked to him how nice and kind I was. There were a few of us staying at his place, but they wanted to point out that it was me who was really nice. And I knew what that was all about.

‪LS‬: This is hard. It’s gross that they said that, I totally see that and feel that way now … but I can understand, and I’m sure—and cringe to think—that I have made similar comments in my life. You were probably the first black person in their house, which broke this stereotype they had in their head. But it’s sad that they—we—had those stereotypes to break in the first place.

‪CMJ‬: Oh, totally, I understand that a lot. My maternal grandfather was an outright racist who refused to ever meet me, and I don’t begrudge him that. He was raised in a different time, and it sucks that we never spoke, but I feel sad for him, not angry. I just suppose that a chip that’s easy to get on your shoulder if you’re a person of color moving about in these wealthy worlds is that sometimes you just want to be at a place and enjoy yourself.

You don’t want to be an ambassador. You want to be a house guest or a bar patron just like any white person. Y’know?

My father, when I was growing up, told me this a lot: “If you want to make it in America, which has a lot of racism in it, you’re going to have to do two for every white person’s one. That’s not fair, but that’s life.” And that’s something that’s stuck with me throughout my life and career. Playing the black ambassador is part of that. You’re not just a party guest like everyone else; you’re the BLACK party guest. That’s just how it is.

‪LS‬: Are there places where you haven’t felt that?

‪CMJ‬: Brazil. There is certainly racism in Brazil that entire books have been written about, but it felt less pronounced there than other places.

And I want to make it very clear that I feel like racism has held me back very little in the United States. My mother is white. I’m very light-skinned, which makes a big difference in a society as colorist as America. But Brazil was the first place I’ve been in the world where lots and lots of people look like me.

‪LS‬: Is it something you noticed immediately, in the moment, or thought back on later—oh, this is why it felt so comfortable.

‪CMJ‬: No, I thought about it the whole time. But, once again, this goes back to the tricky discussion about race and class. Because oftentimes when I travel I feel less self-conscious about my color than in America. In France, for instance, people have a huge problem with African and Arab immigrants. But Black Americans, in my experience, they love. And in Saudi Arabia, where my father lives, I once went into a suit shop with my dad and the tailor immediately came to help me and ignored my dad. When I told him that the man I was with was my father, he was shocked. He’d come to help me because he thought that I was American and that my dad was African, because my dad’s much darker.

‪LS‬: When shit like that happens, what you do?

‪CMJ‬: It depends. If I think reacting to the situation will have any impact, I’ll say something to the person. But in the case of the tailor, the guy was Pakistani and spoke very poor English. I’m not going to stand there and yell at him in words he’ll barely understand. Same goes for 85-year-old American racists.

If some octogenarian racist were to ever call me a nigger or something, is it really likely that standing there engaging them is going to change their mind about anything? I’ve got way too many beautiful people and things in my life to waste time fighting with assholes in public. I used to do that a lot, but then I went to anger management. Now I’m pretty zen about it. I’ll think about what someone said that I found irritating and then maybe I’ll write about it. Or maybe I’ll go on a motorcycle trip with my friends and forgot that person ever existed.

 Cord Jefferson is on Twitter and Tumblr. 

Really, we’re fighting because she raised me to never ever forget I was on parole, which means no black hoodies in wrong neighborhoods, no jogging at night, hands in plain sight at all times in public, no intimate relationships with white women, never driving over the speed limit or doing those rolling stops at stop signs, always speaking the king’s English in the presence of white folks, never being outperformed in school or in public by white students and most importantly, always remembering that no matter what, white folks will do anything to get you.

Mama’s antidote to being born a black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom; it’s to insist on excellence at all times. Mama takes it personal when she realizes that I realize she is wrong. There ain’t no antidote to life, I tell her. How free can you be if you really accept that white folks are the traffic cops of your life? Mama tells me that she is not talking about freedom. She says that she is talking about survival.

—It is imperative that you read this.

“If you’re really rich, you can buy your doctors,” she says. “Mike Ovitz famously bought a couple of cardiac surgeons.”

“You don’t have anything like that, do you?” I say.

“No, of course not,” says Ellen.

Thank God, I think. Becoming aware of what’s just out of your reach can be disconcerting. It’s comforting to know that having my own doctors would be massively out of my reach.

“But I know a guy who knows a guy,” says Ellen. “I’m at a level where I don’t have to suffer. I’ve been sick. I had cancer. If you have money, you call the guy who knows the guy who’s the head of the department. The truth is, rich people with cancer versus everyone else with cancer? Longer life! And I didn’t think about bills at all! I have a bill? I throw it in the box. And that box goes to my business manager. This is a key item if you have money. You don’t look at the bills. When I got money, I vowed, ‘Never again will I suffer the small stuff.’ To me paying a bill is the small stuff. ‘I don’t care how the fuck it happens; someone pay that fucking thing!’ It’s a good feeling.”

GQ correspondent Jon Ronson interviewed five people from different income levels, ranging from a dishwasher living off $200 a week to a billionaire living off $625,000 a week, and the vignettes he provides of these people’s lives are fascinating. The dishwasher living off $200 a week in Miami, and the couple living off $900 a week in Des Moines live similar lives in that they both leave their homes to go only to work or church because they can’t afford to do much else (though the couple can afford to live in a nicer and safer neighborhood). The wealthy people in Ronson’s story mostly worry about being considered “an enemy of the state,” or receiving letters from people they know begging for money. To Ronson’s credit, he also puts himself into the story by revealing that he earns $250,000 a year (he’s a successful author), but worries about paying his taxes and bills like everyone else. Well, relatively.

Demographer Joel Kotkin does a bang-up job of scaring me in this piece for the Daily Beast. The most uplifting facts:

• In Spain as in Greece, nearly half of the adults under 25 don’t work.

• Ireland, which in recent decades actually attracted new migrants, is exporting a thousand people a week.

• Spaniards are having fewer children now than they did during the brutal civil war of the late 1930s.

• According to Brookings, America spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children.

• Here’s a tribute to futility: today a majority of unemployed Americans age 25 and older attended college, something never before seen.

• Roughly one in five American adults 25 to 34 now live with their parents—almost double the percentage from 30 years ago.

How dire. But he ends on a high note, kind of:

The developed world’s youth shouldn’t expect much help from an older generation that has preserved its generous arrangements at the cost of increasingly stark prospects for its own progeny. Instead the emerging generation needs to push its own new agenda for economic growth and expanded opportunity.

Basically: If you want a job, you better make that job.