Black America’s hidden tax: Why this feminist of color is going on strike
Black America’s hidden tax: Why this feminist of color is going on strike
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In 1920 or thereabouts, famed Washington, D.C., educator Nannie Helen Burroughs helped to found the National Association of Wage Earners as both an advocacy group and a training resource for working class black women. Addressing employment inequality and wage inequality for newly freed black women entering the workforce after Emancipation, and later for black women from the South who had migrated North, was a hallmark of black women’s organizing in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. At the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, Fannie Barrier Williams, a socialite, club woman and budding political theorist told the crowd, “in the item of employment, colored women bear a distressing burden of mean and unreasonable discrimination.” Still, she told them, “we believe this country is large enough and the opportunities for all kinds of success are great enough to afford our women a fair chance to earn a respectable living.” In 1925, Gertrude Elise McDougald, an organizer and teacher in New York City, helped to found the Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers, in order to encourage African-American solidarity with labor and discourage strike-breaking as the pathway to work.
It also bears noting that Fannie Barrier Williams gave her 1893 speech to an audience of white women. It was she urging them to become black women’s allies in the quest for fair employment practices and a living wage. So I am left wanting to ask Patricia Arquette where all the white women who’ve been fighting for every other group of marginalized people are, because some of the most prominent black women organizers in history spent a fair amount of time trying to compel these women to be in solidarity. Notwithstanding the utter absurdity of her claim, her remarks demonstrate a point I made in an earlier column: “white women’s feminisms still center around equality…Black women’s feminisms demand justice.”
Earning the same paycheck as one’s male counterpart is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to addressing wage inequality. For there are also issues of access, fair treatment and evaluation, and opportunities for promotion, alongside receiving fair and equal pay. There is also the matter of whether earning equal wages translates into wealth. As a 2010 study illustrated, black women have $100 and Latinas have $120 of median net wealth for every $41,500 that white women have. So even though Latina women and black women earn between 54 percent and 64 percent, respectively, on every dollar a white man makes, somehow we manage to save even less of that money or turn it into wealth.
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If among feminists, black women are always asked to do the uncompensated labor of educating white women about how they have effed up, is this also not a form of wage inequality? Are these not also the wages of race at play? Some of my academic colleagues of color call this “the black or people of color tax” — the extra, and often unacknowledged labor, time and resources we give to institutions, that our white colleagues don’t have to do and for which we are uncompensated, in order to help struggling students of color navigate our institutions and insure diversity at the levels of faculty and administration.
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http://www.salon.com/2015/02/25/black_americas_hidden_tax_why_this_feminist_of_color_is_going_on_strike/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
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