When I want to feel my hearbeat accelerate, I read Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She’s got that knack for raising my blood pressure. In a related aside, one of my daddy’s hobbies is shooting her angry e-mails to which she rarely answers.
Today while going through a few papers, I wound up on this column about lazy, shiftless black men. Try this one on.

After a contractor walked off the job, I was assigned the task of helping my mother find laborers to help complete her new house in my hometown, Monroeville, Ala., a small place with a declining textiles industry. The assignment led me into an alternative universe of black men without jobs or prospects or enthusiasm for hard labor.
My younger sister, an architect, appointed her Mexican-born father-in-law, an experienced carpenter (and American citizen), the new general contractor. I was to find men willing to help him paint, lift, scrape, fill, dig. The pay was hardly exorbitant — $6 an hour. But it seemed reasonable for unskilled labor. So I looked among unemployed high school classmates, members of my mother’s church and men standing on nearby street corners.
The experience brought me face to face with every unappealing behavior that I’d heard attributed to idle black men but dismissed as stereotype. One man worked a couple of days and never came back. One young man worked 30 minutes before he deserted. Others promised to come to work but never did.

Really, Cynthia? You mean to tell me that people aren’t amped up about doing backbreaking labor for less than I made working at The Gap seven years ago? You don’t say?
I have no idea what the going rate for that sort of work is, but I know I’ve got a quite a few friends that perform unskilled labor. They make more than six bones an hour, and a few of those folks do so without a high school diploma.
But that, friends, was her anecdotal evidence that there are more lazy black men than ever. Is that really the best she could come up with?
She later intimates that her mother wouldn’t pay more for the labor because she couldn’t afford to pay more. That sounds to me like she couldn’t afford to have a home built. But that’s just me.
I just want to know how in the world this was enough to use as an example of the ineptitude of black men. Is there anyone here down to do that stuff for six bucks an hour? Am I just being sensitive here?
Here are questions I wanna ask.
1. Isn’t it a bit simple to chastise these “idle” men rather than considering why they’re idle? Economists account for labor market disillusionment and actually see it as rational behavior. I’d be more curious why these cats she discusses are disillusioned rather than automatically doggin’ ’em for being disillusioned.
2. Would anyone think to write such a thing about any other group? Got a secret for you…there’s a lot of white men sitting on their asses, too.