Where did this “side-hustle” thing come from? I have to document it before it’s gone
And, thoughts on the true melting pot in America
PART ONE
TV ads for an entrepreneurial online gig say, “This is a great side-hustle.”
The term has been around for a hundred years in the black community. In recent decades, it’s lain dormant. But now, it’s on the move.
Becky, a perky white girl in the suburbs, whose main hustle is living at home on Daddy’s dime while attending college on a loan she’ll never repay, needs to finance her (stepped-on) coke habit and her entrance into the exciting world of heroin skin-popping, situated in the bad side of town.
Her friend, cheerleader Jolie, suggests she sell her old dresses, shoes, jewelry, and associated crap through the new hot platform, FAT CITY GIRL.
“It’ll be a great side hustle,” claim the FAT CITY people.
That’s an egregious lie, but Becky likes the sound of the term. “Yeah, dig it, I’ve got a side hustle. And I don’t have to hook for a nasty pimp. It’s win-win.”
In a few years, Becky will marry the son of a friend of her father, a grad student working on his main hustle, anthropology, in a graduate studies program at North Braindead University.
Then she’ll be able to look back fondly on her side hustle and her flirtation with drugs and her suppressed fantasy of working as an independent whore at up-scale watering holes in NYC hotels.
“Side hustle” will have departed from the white communities—the companies that promoted it having long since gone broke. The words will walk back into exclusively black neighborhoods, where they originated, when in the 1920s, the simpler “hustle” was a synonym for “job.”
Meaning: nobody with any sense wants to work at a low level, but bread needs to be put on the table, so…find a hustle.
These days, a Black Lives Matter exec, who sees his funding evaporate, because “the White Man has floated bullshit propaganda” about BLM ripping off very large chunks of cash, might assist a group of underserved black youths in the art of flash-mob jewelry store robberies—couching such invasions as revolutionary expressions of Marxism.
The BLMer, in exchange for his educational work in “framing context,” might possibly acquire watches, rings, and necklaces from the youths’ reparational liberations of merchandise.
In which case, he would have found a new side hustle.
Years from now, Becky’s husband, a full professor of anthropology, will do a retrospective analysis of “Theft and Ancillary Strategies among Groups of Disaffected Teens Seeking Upward Mobility in the Racist Structural Lattice…”