There are so many passages that I’ve highlighted as I finished the book that point to really uncomfortable statements made by Ehrenreich. I think comments like the following one point to her incapability to really grasp the full meaning of the work that she is doing. As we have found with the comment she made about prisoners of war, she likes to go straight for the gutter.

On page 100 she states:

“True, I don’t look so good by the end of the day and probably smell like eau de toilet and sweat, but it’s the brilliant green-and-yellow uniform that gives me away, like prison clothes on a fugitive. Maybe, it occurs to me, I’m getting a tiny glimpse of what it would be like to be black.”

Obviously I get her meaning, but the way she categorizes a group of people is poorly founded. For one she assumes that all black people must either feel like prisoners where ever they go or that many black people are indeed prisoners. Either way you look at it, it is wrong. Especially given her position, even in the low wage community as a white woman, she is not experiencing the worst of the worst which many black and latino/a populations are exposed to. So no, she is definitely not getting “a tiny glimpse of what it would be like to be black.”