It seems like everyone has a hustle nowadays. Driving for Uber is a hustle. Starting a “gr8nola” company is a hustle. Picking up a side gig (or three) is a hustle. As the novel coronavirus pandemic grips the world, putting the economy in crisis and confining most people to their homes, personal finance pundits insist that now is the time to get a side hustle.
Hustle is just one of many buzzwords in a culture obsessed with optimizing, grinding, and life-hacking. Why TGIF when you can #ThankGodItsMonday? Why work for the man when you can be your own #girlboss? Hustle culture says it’s fashionable to work yourself to death—or at least look like you are. And with the economy in shambles and the unemployment rate skyrocketing, there’s an added pressure to generate any and all supplemental income.
In the past few years, hustle has been co-opted to describe an empowering, even lucrative project that someone—often a white person with means—takes on outside of their “day job.” There’s Lingua Franca, a clothing company that sells sweaters with EVERYDAY I’M HUSTLIN or ORIGINAL GANGSTA embroidered on them for hundreds of dollars. And there’s WeWork, the workspace-sharing corporation that emblazons “Hustle Harder” on its office walls. Those companies started as “side-hustles.” But for more than a century before that, hustle has been tied up in both stereotypes and realities of what it means to work as a black person.
So let’s go back in time. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hustle comes from the Dutch word “husselen,” meaning “to shake or toss.” Over time, the word expanded, meaning “to hurry” and “to obtain by begging.”
By the late 19th and early 20th century, hustle started being used to mean “gumption” or “hard work.” A 1914 job ad from The Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper, said delivering the paper was an “easy task” for “any wide-awake boy with a little hustle in him.” A year later, the paper profiled Little Arthur White, a 12-year-old “newsy” who was “encouraged to hustle and work in early age.”
Around the same time, hustle also referred to illegal activities — sex work, stealing and common scams. An 1894 article from The Los Angeles Times recounted how a young woman was sex trafficked and “told that she must ‘hustle’ for herself.” A 1935 article from The Baltimore Afro-American said that by promising a nonexistent scholarship, “the [University of Maryland] president was admitting that he was giving the applicant a ‘hustle.'”
In other publications, hustle—or a lack thereof—was invoked to make an association between blackness and laziness. “The average colored man does not know how to hustle,” Timothy Thomas Fortune wrote for The Southwestern Christian Advocate, a Methodist African American newspaper, in 1888. Fortune, a black economist himself, argued that black men enjoy “exceptional opportunities,” like public libraries and free night schools, but were too “ignorant” to take advantage of them. In short, he concluded, “colored men have themselves oftenest to blame.” (For what? He doesn’t say.)
This idea—that black people struggle due to their own failures, rather than systemic oppression — was widespread. As the U.S. underwent rapid economic growth during the Gilded Age, black Americans had to hustle against the forces of redlining, school segregation, employment discrimination and white supremacist violence.
But despite the many obstacles to black opportunity, the idea of being someone who hustles has held a lot of appeal to many black communities. The myth of being able to hustle to overcome challenging circumstances “fits the common desires we all have for some degree of control over our circumstances,” Lester K. Spence writes in his book, Knocking The Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. It didn’t mean black people were buying into the racist idea that they weren’t working hard enough—but that some held onto hope that by “working twice as hard” they might be able to get by, or even in some cases get ahead.
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Source: NPR
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