““The anthropologist Elliot Liebow observed it in the men he chronicled in Tally’s Corner, his insightful 1967 book on the lives and attitudes of poor black men who hung out on a sidewalk in the nation’s capital: “Convinced of their inadequacies, not only do they not seek out those few better-paying jobs which test their resources, but they actively avoid them, gravitating in a mass to the menial, routine jobs which offer no challenge—and therefore pose no threat—to the already diminished images they have of themselves.””
