[drags]

I think it's interesting that we're 44 comments in and nobody has commented on how race fits into this.

She sees herself as someone working her way up into a freelance writing career. Her customers, her bosses and her family view her as the kind of person unlikely to do anything more than what her parents and grandparents did: bounce around through low-wage, low-prestige jobs like Instacart their entire working life.

When everyone around you assumes you won't make it higher, it's hard not to wonder if they're right. And society assumes African-Americans are much less likely to achieve career success. [1]

[1] See http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html for instance: "Race, the authors add, also affects the reward to having a better resume. Whites with higher quality resumes received 30 percent more callbacks than whites with lower quality resumes. But the positive impact of a better resume for those with African-American names was much smaller."

[pjlegato]

Nobody has commented on how race fits into this because race is entirely irrelevant to the theme of the article.

Her skin color is not relevant to her picking kale for a living. She's picking kale because she got two college degrees in non-marketable subjects, not because she's black.

Not every topic contains a hidden narrative of latent racist oppression just waiting for an overeducated postmodernist to come along and deconstruct it, even if it does involve people of a visibly different ethnic background than their employer.

[drags]

Race is the theme of the article:

"Our national history is rife with examples of black Americans facing exclusion from labor movements, as well as general workforce discrimination. It’s not hard to see how the effects of these policies have trickled down. I see my family’s work history, rendered briefly here, as a particular kind of ingenuity necessary for black Americans."

[pjlegato]

It's not at all, though she seems to think it is. It's about how indignant she is that she got two college degrees and still can't get a middle class job.

The headline is: "Two College Degrees Later, I Was Still Picking Kale For Rich People."

That happened because she studied creative writing, a largely non-marketable subject. Her being black is not relevant. If she had studied chemical engineering or dentistry or any of a large number of other in-demand subjects instead of creative writing, she'd easily have obtained a middle class job despite being black.