Newt Gingrich is known for putting his foot in his mouth, so it’s no surprise he’s come out on the side of child labor and criticizing poor children as a lot who have “no habits of working.”
In an interview with ABC News’ Jake Tapper, who questioned the candidate on some Republicans who have concerns about him, Gingrich defended his comments about “stupid” child labor laws and also gave his two cents on how to instill middle-class, mainstream American values into the minds of what he believes to be society’s bottom dwellers.
“Look,” Gingrich said, “at a time when you have up to 43% black teenage unemployment, you have entire communities that are devastated, you have neighborhoods where nobody has worked and nobody has any habit of work, I’d be delighted to — that’s why I want to challenge Obama to 7 three hour debates — I’d be delighted to have a conversation about our current approach to children.
“Young children who are poor ought to learn how to go to work,” he continued. “What I’ve said is, for example, it would be great if inner city schools and poor neighborhood schools actually hired the children to do things. Some of the things they could do is work in the library, work in the front office. Some of them frankly, could be janitorial.
Gingrich notes that “the first counter-attack is ‘Do you realize how hard janitorial work is and do you realize how dangerous it is?’ So I come back and say, OK, what if they cleaned out the bathrooms and what if they mopped the floors? What if in the summer they repainted the school? What if in that process they were actually learning to work, learning to earn money, they had money on their own, they didn’t have to become a pimp or a prostitute or a drug dealer, they had money on their own? They had the dignity of work, and learned how to be around adults who actually wanted to mentor them and help them?
“Now that’s not a casual comment,” Gingrich said. “It actually grows out of a lot of thinking over many years of trying to figure out who do we break out people trapped in poverty who have no habits of work.”
I said to him, “Democrats could very easily take that comment and say ‘Newt Gingrich wants inner city kids to become janitors at age 10.’”
“Right,” Gingrich said, “and the correct answer is that’s a lie. Newt Gingrich wants inner city kids to learn how to have a job at which they earn some money as the first step in the rung in the ladder up.”
Gingrich continued, “this all started when people on the Left laughed about and derided what they call hamburger flipping jobs. I did an entire thing in one of my courses on the number of people whose first job was at McDonald’s who are now very successful multi-millionaires. And my point is, any work that gets you in the habit of working beats no work.”
As an aside, Gingrich did give his assessment on how out of touch President Barack Obama is with the black community. I wonder how many conversations he’s had with black folks to get the pulse of black America…
Anyway, Gingrich’s comments aren’t surprising, as they are a reflection of how mainstream, hardworking Americans feel about the poor, particularly poor people of color.
(New Black Woman breaks it down)
