When The 'Hustle' Isn't Enough

When The 'Hustle' Isn't Enough Enlarge this image Dani Pendergast for NPR Dani Pendergast for NPR It seems like everyone has a hustle nowadays. Sponsor Message In the past few years, hustle has been co-opted to describe an empowering, even lucrative project that someone—often a white person with means—takes on outside of their "day job." "The average colored man does not know how to hustle," Timothy Thomas Fortune wrote for The Southwestern Christian Advocate, a Methodist African American newspaper, in 1888. This framing of hustle would "explicitly exalt the daily rise-and-grind mentality black men.need to possess in order to survive and thrive," Spence notes in his book. Ace Hood in his 2011 song "Hustle Hard" says he's "out here tryna get it, each and every way" because "Mama need a house, baby need some shoes."