Katherine Newman is a scholar who actually writes readable books, including A Different Shade of Gray, which is a presentation of research she did on racial and class disparities of the aging experience in America. In an earlier book, No Shame in My Game, Newman explored the experiences of young, low-wage workers in Harlem. That too was a highly readable and interesting book, this one about economic inequities among poor people of color. Both books amply demonstrate that there is a group of gainfully employed urban dwellers, mostly black and Hispanic, who are poor even though they are hard workers who, for the most part, do the right things. Yet they fail to get ahead because of multiple structural and attitudinal barriers within American society.

I read A Different Shade of Gray so that I could better understand why some racial and social groups in our incredibly wealthy nation experience a sad and impoverished old age. Not surprisingly, Newman identifies an underfunded public education system as one of the major barriers that keep the urban poor from working their way out of poverty by the time they retire. But there are a number of other roadblocks that tend to push elders,particularly women, into poverty. One of these is the failure to acquire assets during their working years because low-income women often must curtail work hours, or quit work altogether, to care for ill family members or for children.

Newman describes an entire generation of elder black women who are now raising grandchildren because their own daughters fell prey to the crack epidemic in the 1980s. Having responsibilities for grandkids, as well as themselves and perhaps others in their extended families, has wiped out the modest retirement savings of these women and exposed them and their grandchildren to lives that demand they make tough choices every day, choices such as whether to buy medicine or food.

Most interesting is that the elders who Newman interviewed and tracked for her study do not place blame for their situations on anyone's shoulders but their own. While they recognize the structural barriers to the success of themselves and others in their neighborhoods, they seem to hold those values that many Americans share -- respect for hard work, commitment to their communities and a clear belief that they are responsible for their own success or failure. While perhaps admirable, this is sad because surely many of these people have invested a great deal of time and energy in their families, their work and their communities and it seems to me they deserve a better shake than they have gotten from the world. With some relatively minor changes in public policy -- changes that Newman outlines in the final chapter of A Different Shade of Gray -- many urban retirees would be able to experience a small slice of the American Dream that they did indeed work for, and do indeed deserve.

Katherine Newman is a scholar who actually writes readable books, including A Different Shade of Gray, which is a presentation of research she did on racial and class disparities of the aging experience in America. In an earlier book, No Shame in My Game, Newman explored the experiences of young, low-wage workers in Harlem. That too was a highly readable and interesting book, this one about economic inequities among poor people of color. Both books amply demonstrate that there is a group of gainfully employed urban dwellers, mostly black and Hispanic, who are poor even though they are hard workers who, for the most part, do the right things. Yet they fail to get ahead because of multiple structural and attitudinal barriers within American society.

I read A Different Shade of Gray so that I could better understand why some racial and social groups in our incredibly wealthy nation experience a sad and impoverished old age. Not surprisingly, Newman identifies an underfunded public education system as one of the major barriers that keep the urban poor from working their way out of poverty by the time they retire. But there are a number of other roadblocks that tend to push elders,particularly women, into poverty. One of these is the failure to acquire assets during their working years because low-income women often must curtail work hours, or quit work altogether, to care for ill family members or for children.

Newman describes an entire generation of elder black women who are now raising grandchildren because their own daughters fell prey to the crack epidemic in the 1980s. Having responsibilities for grandkids, as well as themselves and perhaps others in their extended families, has wiped out the modest retirement savings of these women and exposed them and their grandchildren to lives that demand they make tough choices every day, choices such as whether to buy medicine or food.

Most interesting is that the elders who Newman interviewed and tracked for her study do not place blame for their situations on anyone's shoulders but their own. While they recognize the structural barriers to the success of themselves and others in their neighborhoods, they seem to hold those values that many Americans share -- respect for hard work, commitment to their communities and a clear belief that they are responsible for their own success or failure. While perhaps admirable, this is sad because surely many of these people have invested a great deal of time and energy in their families, their work and their communities and it seems to me they deserve a better shake than they have gotten from the world. With some relatively minor changes in public policy -- changes that Newman outlines in the final chapter of A Different Shade of Gray -- many urban retirees would be able to experience a small slice of the American Dream that they did indeed work for, and do indeed deserve.