In his book The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills acknowledged that, in times of trouble and crises, there is an almost overwhelming sense of feeling trapped and a corresponding tendency to focus on individual change, responsibility and personal transformations. Mills’ development of the sociological imagination addressed the duty that sociologists had in making visible the links between personal problems and social issues. He distinguished personal troubles from public issues by drawing our attention to the difference that an issue “involves a crisis in institutional arrangements” (Mills 1959: 9). A sociological imagination requires one to focus on the way in which biography and history connect within society. Every person is both the product of society and one of its producers. Mills’ view resonates with critical scholars reframing traditional approaches to sociology to include and embrace the lived experiences of everyone, including those previously left out: people of color, the poor, LGBTQ, disabled, immigrants, and others who are not white, middle-class males. Intersectionality also asks citizens, not just sociologists, to begin with biography and history, which sociologists commonly refer to as positionality or standpoint. Understanding individuals’ relations to power structures requires acknowledging multiple identities and recognizing the saliency of these identities in various social situations; it involves examining people's lived experiences. Intersectional approaches provide some tools for developing a greater understanding of domination and oppression that is connected to social issues from many positions.
Recognizing the relation between biography and history from intersectional approaches promises to generate new knowledge that creates comprehensive understandings for social justice. Intersectional approaches for researching and developing social policy are crucial to understanding the dynamics of social issues and ensuring that proposed solutions are comprehensive. This approach is not advocating traditional universality but rather “pluri-versalism” (Grosfoguel 2012), which incorporates positions, interests and lived experiences inside and outside systems of domination. Intersectional approaches not only analyze from the center to the periphery, but strive to identify how systems interact to create and maintain privilege and oppression. Social issues explored in this chapter are the racial wealth gap and the lack of caretaking (frequently referred to as the care crisis) in the US. I conclude by analyzing the use of intersectionality in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement.
In 1962, Michael Harrington published a slim volume called The Other America which became very influential in American politics. Part of the book examined the plight of coal miners and others living in Appalachia: eastern Kentucky, western Virginia, and the state of West Virginia are out-of-the-way places even today, with a peculiarly American intersection of race, gender and social class. When New England was being settled by Puritans fleeing religious persecution in Britain, Virginia was settled by corporations seeking profit in the new lands. Planters with large acreages of tobacco and cotton needed labor. They brought enslaved Africans, but also indentured white workers. Most were petty criminals, vagrants or just “surplus population” of Scottish/Irish descent. Magistrates or judges condemned them to seven or more years of unpaid servitude for the Tidewater Virginia corporations. Some ran away, west, into the mountains. They had a strong independent streak, relived in our folklore of Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie. They engaged in subsistence agriculture and practiced evangelical types of Protestantism. However, their story changed dramatically in the early 1800s.
While the land was still almost completely isolated by high peaks and deep hollers, surveyors came to explore the area. Prospectors discovered a wealth of untouched hardwood forests and some of the richest coal veins on the continent. Landholders were approached by “city slickers” offering cash for the trees and the rights to the underground coal. Since there was no way to get the timber or haul the coal, locals signed “broad form deeds,” which guaranteed that they could keep their lands while selling the resources. The railroads penetrated the area, the mountains’ old-growth forest was logged off to build the booming cities in the North, and underground mining began on a large scale. As a cash economy replaced subsistence farming, the boys went into the mines. Eventually more workers were imported from Southern and Eastern Europe to do the brutal labor of pick-and-shovel mining in underground tunnels.
Perhaps you know the song “Sixteen tons,” with the line “Another day older and deeper in debt.” That was the way of the mine families who “owed their souls to the company store.” Miners were considered independent contractors, much like Uber drivers today. They had to buy their own tools, clothes, safety equipment, and supplies like blasting powder and fuel for the lamps on their hats. They borrowed the money for this from the mine company. They also rented their house from the company, and paid the company for electricity – when it finally arrived. They started in debt and some never escaped. Only men were allowed underground, and coal mining was the only job around, so women had to be the daughter, wife or mother of a miner if they were to survive. If the miner was killed by accident or explosion, the entire family became destitute.
Thus, the intersection of a particular extractive industry and Anglo-American female-headed households produced an isolated, rural and deeply impoverished community. Malnourished, uneducated, dirt-poor and white, these people had been hidden from American eyes in the hills and hollers of Appalachia. Perhaps due to his intelligence, or his own Scots/Irish roots, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was one of the first American politicians since Abraham Lincoln to visit the southern mountains. His administration brought in “the best and the brightest” to formulate “anti-poverty” programs, but he was murdered before most of them could be implemented. To this day, many poor people in Appalachia still have pictures of JFK hanging on the wall next to Jesus – and sometimes Mother Jones, the influential union organizer.
As Kennedy's successor, President Lyndon Johnson introduced the War on Poverty in 1964 in response to the fact that nearly one in five Americans lived in poverty: Appalachia was just one of the big swathes of deep poverty “discovered” in the early 1960s by Harrington and others. Whole sections of the nation, ranging from the Appalachians to rural New England, from Indian reservations to inner cities, were poor by any definition. The poor were white and Black, urban and rural, male and female, young and old, Native American, Mexican American and recent immigrants. Most worked steadily; they picked strawberries, mined coal, logged forests in the Pacific Northwest, and fished shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico – yet they did not have enough to eat, access to medical or dental care, or adequate educational opportunity. Antipoverty programs were intended to eliminate such destitution and end generational cycles of dependency.
Unfortunately, attempts to make poor people and communities more like white, middle-class, two-parent, and heterosexual families frequently failed. College-educated “social engineers” often ignored, or worse yet denigrated, strong local cultures ranging from “Hillbillies” to Black churches. Major initiatives were Head Start, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), TRiO (e.g., Upward Bound, Talent Search, Student Support Services), and Job Corps. At this time, the Economic Opportunity Act was passed and established the Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO). These programs worked to an extent.
Jump forward the next 50 years or so – which includes two decades of President Clinton's Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act – and the intersections of poverty have changed. While eliminating the “Safety Net” decreased money for families and shifted emphasis onto employment, an entirely new group living in poverty is recognized as the working poor. In 1959, 41.7% of the poor in the US were working in their prime working years, 18–64; in 2012, that group constituted 57% of the poor. Thanks to Social Security and Medicare, far fewer elderly persons were among the poor – about 9% in 2012, and 8% in 2015 (US Census 2015a), whereas in 1966 more than 28% of persons 65 and over were poor (DeSilver 2014). Unfortunately, childhood poverty continues to be high. In 2015, about 14.5 million children, or 19%, were poor. In other words, about one child in every five lives in poverty. The National School Lunch Program provided lunches to 30.3 million poor children in 2016 (USDA 2016). Conservatives tend to attribute this to households being headed by women; however, married couples are also among the poor. In 1973, half of the families headed by a married couple (51.4%) and 45% headed by women were poor. In 2012, over half of the households headed by women were poor and 38.9% of families with married couples were poor.
The differences among the poor continue to be highlighted by race. For instance, looking at children by race, the poverty rate for some is much higher. One in every three African American children and one of every four Latino children live in poverty, which is two times higher than the figure among white children (Lin & Harris 2010). In 1966, four in ten African Americans were poor, a figure which has dropped over the decades but remains twice the rate of Whites (DeSilver 2014). The highest rate by race in 2015 was found among Blacks (24.1%), and Latinos had the second-highest rate (21.4%). Asians had a poverty rate of 11.4% and Whites had the lowest poverty rate (9%) (US Census 2015a, 2015b). However, the differences are extended to public policy differences. States with the highest concentration of Blacks and Latinos on welfare are more likely to impose lifetime limits, family caps on benefits, and stricter sanctions for noncompliance (Lin & Harris 2010).
Traditionally, sociologists have approached issues of economic inequality as poverty – a single issue. They focused on job discrimination, poor education and wage disparities. Focusing on poverty led to numerous studies on the causes and consequences of being poor – the impact on parent–child relations, strains on marriage, lack of healthy food choices, lack of educational opportunity, and survival strategies. Sociologists have researched the lifestyle of the poor, their household arrangements, marital status, number of children, and other personal and social interactions. While the nation recognized poverty to be a social problem, the research focus tended to be on the ways the poor differed from the middle class, leading many sociologists to treat poverty as a personal defect rather than a crisis in institutional arrangements. Intersectional approaches are different. They examine the ways identities are linked to existing systems of power and produce structures of oppression and opportunity. When an intersectional approach is used, different research questions arise: Since poverty seems always to be present, what function does it serve? Does any person or social group benefit from the fact that other persons or groups are poor?
A major change in understanding poverty occurred when the emphasis shifted to wealth inequality rather than wages and employment rates. Researchers began to analyze how opportunity is structured into systems of social inequality. In the 1940s and 1950s, sociologists such as C. Wright Mills began to investigate wealth and power in America. Mills produced a trilogy: New Men of Power (1948) examined the role of labor leaders not in uniting workers but in maintaining and guarding the intersections of race, gender, job and nationality – which separated Black railroad porters from skilled white machinists, for example. In 1951, Mills published White Collar: The American Middle Classes, which was a detailed analysis of the post-war class of bureaucrats and managers with a “salesman” mentality. In The Power Elite (1956), Mills examined the connections among extremely wealthy families, the political class, and the military hierarchy, that operated together in Prep and Ivy League schools, social clubs and business relations.
In 1968, a journalist named Ferdinand Lundberg published The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today. Like Mills, Lundberg marshaled data to argue that the United States had become a plutocracy governed by political, military and economic elites – almost exclusively male and white – that were embedded in a social network of exclusive clubs, schools and corporations where social, economic and political policies were made. These authors argued that just as poverty is intersectional – in other words, generational, persistent and structured by race, class, gender, geographical location and other categories – so are wealth and power. Great wealth in families like the Rockefellers, Bushes or Trumps is concentrated by race and, to some extent, gender. Poverty is persistent but so is wealth. Today, the vast fortunes accumulated by the Gates and Walton families can never be given away – they are far too vast. The control these people have extends to the mass media, universities and politics through foundations like the Walton Family Fund and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations which, to an extraordinary extent, control public broadcasting and educational policy.
A book by Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro (1995) was one of the first to explicitly examine the overall effect of wealth, as opposed to income, in race relations. Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality revealed structural causes for racial inequality by examining the creation, expansion and preservation of assets over generations. They highlighted three historical processes that contributed to the racial legacy of wealth, revealing the racialization of state policy, the economic detour, and the sedimentation of racial inequality. They examined the intersections by which government policy established barriers to purchasing land, housing and profitable businesses, and acquiring other assets to gain wealth. Inherited wealth from past discriminatory policies continues to have profound consequences for non-Whites today.
Structural and intersectional research shifted to the wealth gap, turning sociological analyses of poverty away from an individual's lack of education or income to systems of power and the overall structure of oppression and opportunities. New work re-affirmed Mills’ notion that individual plight and social problems could not be separated. With United for a Fair Economy, Meizhu Lui et al. (2006) detailed the asset-building histories of racialized groups in their book The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide. An intersectional approach to the wealth gap problem in the US has been crucial in shifting the focus from individual poverty and behavior toward the role that the state and banking industries play in perpetuating wealth inequality. This approach illuminates the way race, class and gender inequalities are socially constructed and the link between these systems of power. The historical approach explains the significance of past policies and practices in creating current advantages and disadvantages that accumulate in one's lifetime and are passed on to future generations. The history of racialized, and sometimes gendered, laws and policies assisted white men in both accumulating wealth and placing restrictions on non-white men and women's opportunities, debunking the myth of the “self-made man.”
In the case of African Americans, state policies bequeathed enormous wealth to white slave owners through the legal practice of slavery. Wealth gained through slavery was not limited to Southern plantation owners but included northern cotton mill owners, the shipping trade and universities. Over the last decade, several universities have acknowledged their history in the slave trade, including Brown, Columbia, Harvard and the University of Virginia. Georgetown University is currently engaged in efforts to locate the descendants of 272 slaves sold by some of the most prominent Jesuit priests in 1838 to secure the future of the school. The college relied on the Jesuit plantations in Maryland that worked slaves donated by wealthy parishioners (Swarns 2016). After emancipation, Jim Crow laws limited access to opportunities for African Americans. Many states denied them the right to own land. Sharecropping and tenant farming kept Black families in debt. For decades, the Ku Klux Klan threatened Black landowners; some were forced to abandon their homes in fear for their lives. The Great Migration from the South offered opportunities, but in the North de facto residential segregation, red lining by banks, and sometimes violence restricted the Black middle class to living in the same communities as poor African Americans, again denying them the class privileges gained by white middle-class families. Black business owners suffered like everyone else in the Great Depression. However, programs under the New Deal that extended to African Americans were limited, and many programs favored Whites (Lui et al. 2006). Moreover, programs like Social Security and the minimum wage did not apply to domestic workers or farmworkers, which left out many workers of color. As noted by Oliver and Shapiro, the unequal treatment of Black GIs restricted their use of benefits to apply to the best universities and to purchase homes in the nicest communities offering access to public services. Segregation resulting from these policies and practices relegated Blacks to the poorest schools, and restricted access to public libraries, parks and other resources for acquiring cultural capital.
Federal and state policies that hindered indigenous peoples from gaining wealth began with the US appropriation of Indian assets by treaties, followed by relocation of tribes and the creation of reservations. The passing of several allotment acts, the Dawes Act (1887), the Curtis Act (1898) and the Burke Act (1906) opened lands to non-Indian settlers. Most of the land and resources previously occupied by indigenous peoples were lost through treaties. The land and resources that remain are “held in trust,” which means the federal government regulates leases of land, and determines the price of oil and gas extracted and the distribution of money earned. Other assets lost were timber, vegetation, wild game and fish. The doctrine of trust responsibility “promoted federal control of Indian assets, including land and natural resources” and a wide range of destructive cultural practices in the process of assimilation (Lui et al. 2006: 31). These practices further enhanced the loss of asset-building capacity by forcing the sale of tribal lands for cash, pressure to use western farming techniques, and removal of children from their families during the era of boarding schools. Cultural genocide replaced collective tribal property ownership with private landownership. Stripped of their assets, Native people have the highest rate of poverty and the most dilapidated housing, increasing their dependency. Presently, entrepreneurial ventures with the potential to generate tribal wealth face special federal and state taxes crippling their businesses. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act limits the wealth opportunities through gaming by specifying the use of funds. State governments have benefited greatly from state and state income taxes. As long as legal restrictions maintain American Indians as wards of state, they are vulnerable to the mismanagement of tribal wealth (Lui et al. 2006).
In the case of Latinos, the wealth gap began with the Monroe Doctrine (1824) and the Manifest Destiny doctrine's (1858) position on expansionism. Examining the two largest groups of Latinos, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, one can see the lasting legacy of colonialism and conquest – as well as established power relations of dominance and subordination. The legacy encapsulates race, class, gender, colorism and citizenship status that perpetuate the wealth gap. The intersections of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans with the United States are very distinct and different. These intersections are masked or obliterated by the census terms of “Hispanic” or “Latino.”
Puerto Rico is one of five US colonies; the island is neither state nor independent nation. Puerto Ricans can serve in the armed forces, but cannot vote. The US government offered companies tax incentives to establish businesses on the island, but that disadvantaged local land and business owners. “The Foraker Act reinforced the protection of American interests” and “officially opened [Puerto Rico] to U.S. economic domination” (Lui et al. 2006: 118). Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones Act in 1917, which granted citizenship to Puerto Ricans but not the right to trial by jury. That year, the Selective Service Act passed and conscripted Puerto Rican men into the military; more than 20,000 served in World War I. Federal government policies turned the island into a one-crop export-producing economy, further establishing Puerto Rico's dependency on US interests. This interest did not encourage entrepreneurship but reduced most of the island's population to low-wage workers. After confirmation of commonwealth status in 1952, Operation Bootstrap restructured the island economy to increase foreign investments, which extended tax-exempt status to US firms but not to those owned by Puerto Ricans. Workers recruited to the mainland were offered low-skill, low-paying industrial jobs. The name “Nuyorican” recognizes the fact that there were more Puerto Ricans in New York City than in San Juan. The loss of manufacturing in the following decades resulted in high unemployment rates and poverty. Homeownership among Puerto Ricans is extremely low in comparison to Whites and even lower if they are Black (Lui et al. 2006).
One-third of Latinos of Mexican ancestry living in the Southwest before 1848 lost their land after the Mexican–American War, even though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848–50) was supposed to protect their property rights. Under Mexican law, women had the right to inherit and own property; these rights were lost or limited under Anglo-American law. Anglo-Americans took by conquest 80 percent of Mexican land grants. Spanish and Mexican land grants provided for strips of personally owned land to live on and for farming. These lands were passed down from generation to generation, and in the arid Southwest were typically close to water sources. The land grants also established “common lands” to be used by all for grazing, to cut wood for building and heating, and as a source of everything from mushrooms to berries. The trout streams were there for all, as were pinion forests, deer and elk herds. Anglo-American law did not recognize common lands, so anyone could step in, fence the land and call it theirs. Subsistence farming became impossible without access to the commons. As the economy shifted from subsistence farming and ranching to cash, Mexicans lost more land from taxation on the land's market value, as opposed to the value of the land's yield. The dispossession of the land was furthered by threats of violence and legal trickery. Mob rule and sanctioned “gangs” like the Texas Rangers killed and lynched Mexican Americans who tried to assert their rights.
Like African Americans, Mexican Americans suffered serious financial consequences due to the exclusion of domestics and agricultural workers from the Social Security Act of 1933. Mexican immigrants were recruited to work in agriculture during World War II, a program called the Bracero Program that continued until 1964. But this program proved to be pure exploitation of cheap labor, as opposed to a path to citizenship. Many who had lived with their families and worked in the US for decades lost their property during the massive deportation in the federal program called Operation Wetback conducted in the mid-1950s. This process of importing – or looking the other way as employers imported – cheap Mexican labor, followed by round-ups and mass deportations, continues today. Mexican immigrants, like many other Latino immigrants, were unable to reap benefits from the economic boom of the 1990s.
Anti-immigrant sentiment, along with legislation like Proposition 187 in California requiring policing of citizenship status to receive social services, healthcare and education, resulted in a loss of opportunities for racialized Latinos, who became suspected of being undocumented. Denying and limiting access to education challenges children and youth, as well as future generations. Federal legislation of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 similarly placed restrictions on immigrants based on their status. Recent practices during the Obama administration deported 2.5 million undocumented people between 2009 and 2015 (Romero 2006; Armenta 2017). The current president, Donald Trump, proposes to deport millions more. Most of those deported are identified by the intersection of race, class and colorism – Mexicans or other Latino immigrants. Undocumented persons who came from Europe and overstayed tourist or student visas have little to fear.
Like indigenous populations, many Latinos do not share the economic practices of individualism – families are central to surviving poverty and creating opportunities. Non-nuclear, extended and pseudo-kin family arrangements are important in pooling resources to sponsor relatives, contributing to household expenses and wealth accumulation. Economist Barbara Robles noted that “regressive sales and payroll taxes for those earning minimum wage and setting asset eligibility requirements for the Earned Income Tax Credit and other social service programs…do not take into account Latino families’ communal asset building” (Lui et al. 2006: 162). Not considering collective strategies of wealth accumulation for families applying for mortgages or loans has negative consequences in assessing credit scores. Along with predatory lending, red-lining also limited Latinos’ ability for asset-building by purchasing a home. These banking practices also restricted Latino entrepreneurs’ opportunities for credit, while they faced the same challenges as other businesses. Microbusinesses that involve family members suffer when programs assisting community development decline or decrease. Microbusinesses were a major source of income and wealth for Latinas, regardless of whether they were first, second or third generation. The lack of pension funds, particularly among Latinas, remains a pressing issue for elderly Latinos.
The situation faced by “Asians” in the US lumps together peoples with vastly different histories. As the census term “Hispanic” obliterated differences between Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Mexicans, “Asians” made invisible the different intersections of Japanese, Chinese, Pacific Islanders and others. Obviously, their intersections with each other, and with the multicultural American peoples, were distinct. As noted in chapter 5, the Foreign Miners Tax was only one of the many Asian-only taxes legislated. State and local laws prevented Asians from purchasing lands from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. Ineligibility for citizenship had a huge financial cost. From the 1870s, imported as cheap exploitable labor, Chinese workers mined gold in California, built the Central and Union Pacific Railroads, and labored in California's agricultural industry. Frequently ghettoized in “Chinatowns” and forced to live away from Whites, few lived outside these areas. When Chinese immigration was halted, Japanese workers were recruited, later Asian Indians, and Filipinos became one of many in what popular imagination thought of as the American “Melting Pot.” Forced segregation created ethnic enclaves and many Asians turned to self-employment through small businesses. These included restaurants, markets and rooming houses. For instance, laundry work was an open market for Chinese but their accumulation of wealth was restricted through fees and the passing of statutes such as the Anti-Ironing Ordinance.
In one of the heinous acts perpetrated on people of color, after December 7, 1941, Japanese Americans were suspected of spying for Japan. The 1949 Evacuation Claims Act dealt with the settlement of claims by Japanese Americans who had lost their property and been placed in internment camps. Whole families were placed in the camps: men, women and children. Many of them were Nisei, born in the United States to first-generation or immigrant Japanese, or Issei. Regardless of citizenship status, the intersection of race, location on the West coast, and ethnicity marked them as probable traitors. The internment camps were located far from the coast. Issei, Nisei and Sansei (the third generation) lost everything. Only after the war were Japanese Americans able to begin acquiring assets again, and gained entrance into universities and colleges (Lui et al. 2006).
American wars overseas have always resulted in an influx of new refugees. At the cutting intersection of colonialism, class, race and political status, a new wave of Asian immigrants began entering the US in the early 1960s. Here again the conglomerate term “Asian” blurs intersectional differences. Some refugees fleeing Vietnam were middle-class educated professionals who may have collaborated with the American military and feared retaliation from the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, who won the war. Others fled Laos and Cambodia – sometimes from hill tribes who lived in communities scarcely different from the traditional way of living in the previous century. Working-class Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees from peasant backgrounds, like the Hmong people, experienced unimaginable culture shock when suddenly finding themselves thrust into suburban Minneapolis. They tried to hold to their traditions but experienced high rates of poverty and juvenile delinquency as the old ways of filial piety were tested. I am sure you can see how only an intersectional analysis has the possibility to untangle the wealth gap in what are called “Asian American” communities. Analysis is complicated by race, class, gender, community of origin, date and terms of immigration, religion and a trove of other identities. Asians tend to live in urban areas and have higher incomes. Their households comprise more employed persons, resulting in higher household incomes. A few Asians have accumulated enormous wealth. The most important factor is that “the distribution of income and wealth differs widely by nationality” (Lui et al. 2006: 211). That is to say the demographic “Asian Americans” includes a family of fourth-generation Japanese where the mother is a doctor, the father is a lawyer, and the children are in the Ivy Leagues. It also includes a Cambodian family who escaped the Khmer Rouge “killing fields,” with a single female head of household and children who drop out of high school to work to support the family.
Beyond intersections of race and class, as well as ethnicity and citizenship status, there is also a gender wealth gap. Gendered federal and state laws have shaped the wealth gap between men and women. For instance, married women's property rights traditionally came under common law or coverture, which gave her husband control over her property, income and ability to engage in contracts and lawsuits. Changes in legislation granting women the right to own property, write a will or control their income were passed at the state rather than federal level, beginning in Mississippi with the 1839 Married Women's Property Act. Gradually, states passed laws allowing married women to file patents, enter contracts, collect rents, receive an inheritance, open their own bank accounts and file lawsuits (Speth 2011). Only in 1974 with the federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act were all single, widowed and divorced women able to apply for credit without a man co-signing. Not until 1981, in the Supreme Court decision Kirchberg v. Feenstra, were husbands denied the right to acquire a mortgage on property owned by his wife without her consent (Baer 2007). The fight for equal pay for women continues – more than 50 years after the Equal Pay Act in 1963 was passed. When signed into law, women earned 59 cents for every dollar men earned. In 2011, the gap had been narrowed by 18 cents, leaving a 23-cent wage gap (National Women's Law Center 2013). Delayed marriage, cohabitation and divorce or having a female partner further impact wealth accumulation (Addo & Lichter 2013). Women experience steeper declines in wealth after a divorce than men (DiPrete 2001). Women also pay a “motherhood wealth penalty that stems from the motherhood wage penalty, time spent out of the labor force or working part-time, and for single mothers, the financial burden of being a custodial parent” (Chang 2010: 9). Over a lifetime, the wage gap has serious consequences in retirement, social security benefits and pensions (Neelakantan & Chang 2010). Traditionally, marriage was the chief means to financial security for women; but today there are high rates of unmarried women and single mothers – moreover, women tend to live longer than men do.
An intersectional analysis that includes race, gender and class is crucial in understanding lived experiences. Marriage disruption or being a single woman is highly correlated with significantly less wealth, particularly true for older women of color (Addo & Lichter 2013). While the gendered wealth gap in retirement is a major concern for all women (Neelakantan & Chang 2010), women of color are the most vulnerable. They are more likely to be living in poverty and living longer than men. “Often, women of color lack access to fringe benefits because of the types of jobs they have” (Chang 2010: 17). Since many fringe benefits have tax advantages, these women are further disadvantaged in asset-building. The differences are stark. Single Black women report a median wealth of $100, Latinas a median wealth of $120, while single white women report having $41,500. For instance, out of 100 single women: 57 white women own their homes, 33 Black women do, while only 28 Latinas are homeowners. Most of the wealth held by Black women and Latinas is “in the form of vehicles, which is a depreciating asset” (Chang 2010: 7). The equity in their homes for women of color is 25–50 percent less than for white women (Chang 2010).
As Oliver and Shapiro pointed out, homeownership is the most significant means for families to accumulate wealth in the US. Shapiro identified housing policies as causing “hidden injuries” by setting barriers to accumulating wealth in communities of color. In previous generations, the Federal Housing Administration implemented policies that benefited Whites and negatively affected African Americans and Latinos. Whites received enormous opportunities for wealth accumulation from the Tennessee Valley Authority, the interstate highway system, and the GI Bill; these programs in effect subsidized the suburbanization of America. Alongside legal structures and federal policy were the de facto practices of red-lining, mortgage discrimination and residential segregation. Thus, legal and “extra-legal” practices denied African Americans and Latinos the ability to obtain and hand down inheritance as white families were able to do. Beginning in the 1950s, civil rights legislation went a long way toward eliminating legal discrimination and closing loopholes in housing practices that maintained segregation. Gradually, the Black and Latino middle class gained access to purchasing homes in neighborhoods offering better public services. Thanks to the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the federal Fair Housing Act Amendments Act of 1988, housing segregation has slowly been declining for the past half-century. However, much of the progress made after the civil rights legislation eroded during the economic recession of 2008.
While the recession was difficult for many, the impact on African Americans and Latinos was devastating. The housing bubble in 2007 that triggered an economic recession hit Black and Latino middle-class homeowners harder than white homeowners: “In 2011 the foreclosure rate for African Americans was 9.8 percent, for Latinos was 11.9 percent, and for Asians was 6.6 percent, while the foreclosure rate for whites was 5.0 percent” (Weller et al. 2012). After home prices fell, 31 percent of homeowners of color were “underwater,” meaning they owed more on the mortgage than the market value of their house and they lost their home equity (Rokosa 2012). “Between 2005 and 2009, Asian Americans lost 54 percent of their wealth, compared with a 16 percent decline for whites, much of it due to loss of home equity during the housing crisis” (Hasegawa & Duong 2015: 278). The elderly population in Asian American communities was particularly vulnerable to living in poverty and being weighed down with housing debt. Overall, US families lost 28.5 percent of their wealth but the loss for Black families was 47.6 percent (McKernan et al. 2014). As the government responded to the growing crisis, white families did not experience a continued loss during 2009–11, but Black families continued to lose 13 percent more of their wealth.
This devastation came as a result of subprime and predatory lending which involves attaching discriminatory and abusive terms to loans, such as charging excessive fees and higher interest rates, and making loans knowing that borrowers are unable to pay them back. Black and Latino borrowers were disproportionately targeted for predatory subprime lending. Examining the loan practices of 14 banks, one study found that only 17.8 percent of Whites received subprime loans, whereas, 30.9 percent of Latinos and 41.5 percent of African Americans received them. The housing crisis hit women of color homeowners particularly hard because banks targeted their communities for the high-cost and high-risk subprime loans. African American women were “256 percent more likely to have a subprime mortgage than a white man with similar financial profile” (Baker 2014b: 62). Even in one of the most affluent middle-class Black communities, Prince George county in Maryland, a quarter of all mortgages in 2009 were subprime. Like other people of color, banks gave Blacks subprime even when they qualified for a prime loan (Baptiste 2014).
Thus, continuing racial discrimination in banking was integral to the housing market crisis (Burd-Sharps & Rasch 2015): “Long histories of discriminatory lending practices that denied people of color access to traditional lending services left these communities vulnerable” (ARC 2009: 32–3). Looking beyond mortgage lending, a report on “State of the dream” (United for a Fair Economy [UFE] 2015) highlighted issues related to obstructions to wealth accumulation created by banks, companies granting student loans, and predatory fringe lenders such as payday lenders, check cashers and auto-title lenders. Obtaining a payday loan may cost anywhere from 391 percent to 521 percent yearly in interest, and car-title loans are 15 to 20 times more expensive than credit cards. There are eight times as many payday lenders in African American and Latino communities, compared to predominantly white neighborhoods. From 2008 to 2012, 93 percent of all bank branches closed in zip codes with low incomes. Most of these unbanked or underbanked individuals report not being able to meet minimum balance requirements, wanting to avoid overdraft fees, mistrusting banks, and privacy concerns about revealing credit and banking information. Monolingual Spanish-speakers faced difficulty accessing suitable banking services. Many of these problems were exacerbated in rural areas, particularly the poorest counties that are described as “banking deserts.” Meanwhile, Wall Street gained over $103 billion, some of it from stripping families from equal banking services (UFE 2015), and, following the recession, poverty rates rose higher for households of color than for white households (Weller et al. 2012). The Great Recession increased the racial wealth gap and its legacy will continue for generations (Burd-Sharps & Rasch 2015).
By contextualizing racial and class identities in history and geography, the systems of power become transparent in analyzing the wealth gap. Generations of state policies assisting white wealth accumulation reveal the interconnectedness of racialized identities. Many social problems arise from the wealth gap. The inability to purchase a home in a middle-class neighborhood is a hidden cost of being poor. Educational opportunities linked to the location of your home underlie other problems related to housing segregation. In my state of Arizona, for example, former Governor Fife Symington suggested that if poor families did not like their local school, they should move to a better neighborhood, or send their children to a private “day school” that costs $10,000 dollars a year (Silverman 1994). Being the location for toxic dump sites is a common phenomenon in low-income communities of color in urban and rural areas. Traffic pollution is higher in low-income neighborhoods located under and around major city highways. Public transportation is inadequate and favors affluent neighborhoods. Workers living in predominantly white and higher-income areas have shorter commutes on public transportation than low-wage workers of color. The number of parks and recreation areas increases with the increased pricing of houses. The range of issues tied to the wealth gap includes access to fresh food at affordable prices, fair and just treatment in the criminal justice system, the healthcare crisis, and the erosion of democracy. Again to use my home state as an example, districts have been drawn to weaken the vote of Latinos and African Americans by either placing them all in one district – creating the very few Latino or African Representatives in an overwhelmingly white state legislature – or, conversely, by including a few neighborhoods of color in an overwhelmingly white district, thus making their vote impotent. Voter suppression tactics like this have ranked Arizona 39th among the states for democratic fairness (Buckwalter-Poza & Kennedy 2016). Understanding the interconnectedness of marginalized identities helps us to recognize that all Americans will gain by closing the wealth gap. Maintaining the wealth gap sets the overall US living standard below that of other western and industrialized countries.
1 Identify the ways in which public policy has opened doors for or disadvantaged your family in wealth accumulation, based on race, class and gender or citizenship status.
2 How does the wealth gap challenge the idea of Americans as self-made individuals?
United for a Fair Economy (UFE) is a program that acknowledges that the concentration of wealth and power is a threat to a democracy that is inclusive and promotes equity; wealth disparity further deepens the race divisions in the country. UFE identified the development of two economies since the mid-1970s, when CEOs and others with monetary resources invested in the stock market and made spectacular gains, while worker salaries stagnated. In 1970, CEOs earned 79 times as much as the average worker's pay; but by 2013, CEOs took home 331 times as much. Wealth is generational – in other words, passed down in the family – and the consequence is that both wealth and opportunity are inherited by some children, while the children of workers may see their inheritance actually shrink. As discussed above, if the main thing one inherits is one's parents’ house, and the value of that property decreases or is more heavily mortgaged, one's inheritance is lessened. Conversely, if one inherits a stock portfolio, the inheritance increases with the market. Protection of these growing assets is why some people in Congress wanted to abolish the “estate tax.” In 2016, for example, the first $5.5 million one wills to one's descendants is tax-free. Only the wealthiest among us will have that much to leave. Moreover, the amount is indexed for inflation and will generally increase each year (Clifford 2016).
The estate tax falls very unevenly on different races and ethnicities in our society. As discussed above, government policy since World War II has increased white wealth through programs that did not benefit all equally. Specifically, the GI Bill for higher education, and housing policy that invested in suburbia rather than “inner cities” through red-lining and exclusive developments, left many Latinos and African Americans in urban ghettos, even as Italians, Jews and Anglo Americans moved to the suburbs. A GI's investment in a suburban “ranch-style” home in the 1950s was likely to multiply many times before being passed on to the baby boom generation in the twenty-first century. “For every dollar owned by the average White family in the US, the average family of color has less than a dime” (UFE 2015: 6). Since the 1970s, the country has experienced divestment, disrepair and privatization of services in many urban and rural communities, resulting in opportunity becoming a luxury. This is at the same time that the average worker began losing ground through the lack of cost-of-living (COLA) wage increases from the 1970s, rising job insecurity and growing debt. Wages have not kept pace with the rising cost of living. The UFE reaches out to workers organizing for higher wages, fair scheduling and the right to unionize. Local leaders and groups are part of the Inclusive Economy Network advocating for fair and progressive taxes, and capacity-building to alleviate poverty. In these initiatives, the wealthy have been recruited as allies to expand opportunities and work through media, legislative and fundraising campaigns. At the center of the vision for equal opportunity and equal justice are intersections of gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality and social class. Everyone wins when sustainability and equity are the goals.
In addressing the issue of underrepresented Americans having access to banking services, UFE (2015) considers race, class, age and citizen status in both rural and urban locations. One proposal is postal banking, previously advocated by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and the US Conference of Mayors. All communities have postal services, and they are trusted institutions that adapt to fit the needs of the local area they serve. The ability for individuals to pay bills, cash checks and access small loans would provide underserved families with affordable financial services and help them to build a credit history. Post offices already have experience in providing financial services by offering electronic money transfers and prepaid gift cards: “In addition to handling money orders, transfers, and debit cards, postal window clerks have experience cashing checks, processing refunds, renting post office boxes, preparing bank depositions, and maintaining business accounts” (UFE 2015: 22).
Another proposal is to support further the development of lending circles that provide zero-interest and zero-fee loans to build credit. A successful program is the Mission Asset Fund Organization (MAF), which began in San Francisco in 2007 with a million-dollar investment from the sale of the Levi Strauss factory. Their aim was to serve the local residents who had previously relied on fringe financial services like “payday loans.” MAF offers financial training and professional development. They built on the tanda model traditionally used in the Mexican immigrant community to lend and borrow money. Filipinos refer to the model as paluwagan, and in the Caribbean, the term is susas. Providing linguistically and culturally appropriate services has benefited both Latino and Asian Pacific American communities. Participants in the MAF Lending Circle in 2013 increased their credit scores and many were able to refinance high-cost debt: “In 2014, California Governor Brown signed Senate bill 896, a law that provides exempt status from the state's lender license laws to nonprofit organizations that provide zero-interest, credit-building loans” (Quinonez 2015: 288). Their success has generated similar programs across 19 states.
A program sharing similarities is Lakota Funds, the first Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) located on an Indian reservation. The Native American Lending Study (NALS) found that “15 percent of Native communities are more than 100 miles from the nearest ATM or bank, and 86 percent of Native communities lack a single financial institution within their borders” (Meeks 2015: 273). Based on the needs of the Pine Ridge Reservation, Lakota Funds worked with Tribal colleges and schools to provide financial education, entrepreneurship and asset-building programs, and started the Lakota Federal Credit Union. The program includes working with youth and children in the “Generations of Wealth” program that matches savings for grade-school children. “South Dakota enacted a law that allows tribal identification cards to be used for opening bank accounts and cashing checks” which helps people “who do not have a state driver's license or identification card” (Meeks 2015: 275–6).
A program related to UFE is “Our Responsible Wealth,” which consists of people in the top 5 percent of income or assets fighting for tax fairness and corporate responsibility. This network of business leaders, investors and inheritors recognizes that the increasing wealth gap in the US is not in their interest or in the interest of the country. Another initiative the program has joined is changing the banking system that denies services to 93 million individuals, forcing people to rely on payday lending, check cashing, rent-to-own, and auto-title lending. These predatory lending services cost an average household an additional $3,029 per year in fees – another way of looking at it is that predatory lenders drain $103 billion from these communities. The fees represent 10 percent of household incomes. As a part of the UFE, wealthy members understand that the wealth gap maintains social and economic inequality and erodes both the quality of life in the US and the democratic process. They lobby for a progressive tax system and limits on the amount of wealth that can be passed from one generation to another.
Among UFE's educational efforts is to call attention to the myth of the “self-made man,” or the narrative of the American Dream as the “rags to riches” narrative. In most cases, the wealthy are aided and sheltered through tax and other government policies benefiting the rich. Most of the 1 percent who hold most of the wealth in the US were the recipients of the unearned privilege of being born to a rich family. The UFE conducted an analysis of the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans in the year 2011. The study revealed that:
21.25% were born with enough wealth to include them on the list;
7% inherited “in excess of $50 million or a large and prosperous company”;
11.5% inherited “a medium-sized business or wealth of more than $1 million or received substantial start-up capital”;
22% were born into “an upper-class background and inherited less than $1 million or received some start-up capital”;
35% are “from a lower- or middle-class background.”
One-tenth of 1% of Americans receives half of all net increases in capital gains. The tax laws were written so that capital gains are taxed at a lesser rate than income earned as salary. The 0.1% only pay a 15% tax on the first 60% of capital gains. Workers in the middle class, making $37,950 to $91,900, pay 25% in income tax. And those in the lowest tax bracket, making less than $10,000 a year, pay 10 percent of their income as tax (Pomerleau 2016).
As an example of inherited wealth: “Mary Janet Morse Cargill died in 2010 (when the estate tax was completely repealed) & saved her family $750 million in estate taxes.…Cargill-MacMillan family members inheriting just 1/18th of the family fortune are still inheriting enough wealth to put them on the Forbes 400” (UFE 2012: 13). The Forbes 400 is overwhelmingly white. Oprah Winfrey is the only African American on the list and 1 of the 40 women on the list. Born to an unwed teenage mother in rural Mississippi, she earned her wealth from a successful career in television, film, and publishing. Oprah is a statistical “outlier”; 87.5% of women on the Forbes 400 inherited their fortune from a deceased husband or family member. Members of “Our Responsible Wealth” recognize that wealth determined at birth rather than from achievement is a deterrent to a democratic society. Opportunities structured by systems of race, class and gender place enormous amounts of wealth in the hands of a small group of families, and threaten paths to opportunities to gain economic security.
I now turn to my second example, the structural issue of caregiving, frequently referred to as the care crisis. However, as I point out in the following section, access to care for children, the disabled, the sick and the elderly is beyond the crisis stage and is a long-term structural problem.
In South Carolina, a 46-year-old Black woman has been arrested for letting her daughter play in a nearby park while trying to earn a living.
Shanesa Taylor, a mother living in Scottsdale, Arizona, was arrested in March after leaving her children, ages six months and two years old, in the car while she went to a job interview.…Taylor, who was homeless at the time, got a job interview with Farmers Insurance to be an insurance agent, which would have paid $39,000 with the ability to earn more.…even though she had arranged for a babysitter, no one answered the door at the babysitter's on the day of the interview. So she drove to the interview and left her children in the car with windows cracked and the car fan blowing.
A single mom was arrested at the Memorial City Mall in Houston, Texas, for allegedly “abandoning” her two six-year-old children who were waiting for her 30 feet away. Laura Browder has just moved to Houston from Chicago and was called in for a last-minute interview for a job…Because she was new in town, she didn't have anyone to watch her children, she said, so she took them with her and asked them to wait in the food court. She had just accepted the job when she was arrested.
These are a few news stories drawing attention to the difficulty that single mothers encounter in finding reliable and affordable childcare. In the case of the mother in South Carolina employed at McDonald's, her daughter had been spending the days at work with her, sitting at one of the tables with her laptop. However, their home was robbed and the laptop was stolen. She had provided her daughter with a cell phone and agreed to let her go to the park nearby where about 40 other children were playing. The mothers in Scottsdale and Houston needed to obtain employment to be a position to find dependable childcare. Single mothers and mothers in situations where both partners have unstable but full-time jobs must make hard decisions to juggle finding and keeping a job while attending to the caretaking needs of their children. Their arrests highlight the irony of a society punishing mothers who try to gain and keep employment to fulfill their families’ basic economic needs. The law holds them to a parenting standard that requires resources outside their reach. The care crisis in the US is a major issue that families and individuals face in fulfilling needs for childcare, elder care, and care for disabled or ill members. While the need has always existed, social and economic changes have worsened many women's circumstances. A closer look at some of these changes addresses the causes behind the crisis in current institutional structures. These problems do not just confront the working poor; care has become so expensive in the US that many middle-class mothers who work full-time end up paying more than half their income for child or elder care.
As noted in previous chapters, more mothers, wives and daughters work full-time outside the home and are thus no longer able to provide the unpaid labor that previous generations of women did. Women make up 47% of the total US labor force and this is expected to increase to 51% by 2018; 73% of these women work full-time and 27% work part-time (Women's Bureau 2010). Four in ten households with children have mothers who are the sole or primary provider; 37% of “breadwinner moms” are married and have incomes higher than their husbands, and 63% of them are single mothers (Wang et al. 2013). However, single breadwinner moms are more likely to be living in poverty. In 2010, 31% of single working white mothers, 41% of Black working mothers, and 44.5% of Latina working mothers lived in poverty (Ajinkya 2012). Women of color experience both gender and racial wage gaps: while women in general earn 77 cents on the dollar compared to white men, Black women earn 69.5% and Latinas 60.5% compared to white male workers (Kerby 2012). Unlike previous generations, most working mothers no longer take a leave from work after they have children. Many cannot afford to be stay-at-home mothers or may find that childcare is too expensive and work does not cover the cost.
Compounding the pressure on families are longer workdays resulting from mandatory overtime, demanding careers, and long commutes to and from work. Families are less likely to rely on kin-care since many of their adult family members, including grandparents (Meyer 2014), work outside the home. Family members are living farther away from each other, which is an added challenge to having kin available for childcare or elderly care. Day care centers are not always ideal solutions since parents may not be able to afford to enroll their children, the hours available may not correspond with working schedules, or children may be too young to qualify. Studies evaluating access to and quality of childcare report mediocre to dangerous environments, which are not regulated by national health and safety standards (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD] 2006). Elementary and middle schools provide some relief for working parents but their schedules almost never correlate completely, requiring additional arrangements. Purchasing childcare and education is second to families’ mortgage or rent payments. Parents with the financial means can hire in-home care by employing a nanny. Some professionals hire live-in nannies to be available during most of the child's waking hours and sometimes even during the night.
Along with changing family roles, there are important demographic shifts. Life expectancy began increasing in the US over the last century, and, worldwide, life expectancy has increased dramatically since World War II. In 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics reported that that the average life expectancy for women in the US is 81.2 years, and for men, it is 76.4 years. Race and gender intersection in the average life expectancy is apparent by comparing white and Black men and women. For instance, in 1900 the average life expectancy for white men was 47 years, and only 33 years for Black men. For white women in 1900, the average life expectancy was 49, and Black women only had an average of 34 years. In 1950, the average for white men had increased to 67, and it was 59 for Black men. The average for white women in 1950 had increased to 72, and it was 63 years for Black women. The US has a growing elderly population who are likely to have health problems and impairments: “The erosion of paid healthcare benefits, welfare and paid assistance to the disabled has placed additional burdens on working family members, particularly those who do not have the financial means to take time off work or employ a care worker” (Romero & Perez 2015: 173). Caring for the elderly frequently falls on families first, usually daughters; many of them are employed full-time. State and federal assistance is secondary in caregiving for the elderly and remains limited. Needless to say, caring for disabled family members is difficult for working parents and partners. Without access to pay for leave, or sick pay, working adults may face losing their job or not being able to pay their bills if they stay home to be the caretaker. State assistance has proven to be inadequate and families without the financial means to afford for one adult to stay home or to be able to hire assistance piece together some day-to-day arrangement. The care crisis highlights gender, race, class, citizenship and ability status through privileges and oppression.
Unlike many countries, the US views elder- and child-care as “personal troubles” rather than as “social issues.” Consequently, the US lags behind other countries in maternity and paternity leave, affordable childcare options, work flexibility, and other benefits assisting working families. In 2014, only three countries did not offer paid maternity leave and the US was one of these countries. The other two countries are Oman and Papua New Guinea. A few states offer paid leave, but there is no federal legislation mandating it. Some US companies provide paid leave to working mothers, fewer for fathers, but they are not legally obligated to do so. Countries with less economic strength than the US offer paid leave to working parents, including Mexico, Romania, South Korea and Turkey. Several European countries have offered paid parental leave for decades (OECD 2011). The US offers only one family-friendly policy, the Family and Medical Leave Act, which offers unpaid leave only, for up to 12 weeks. When family members need caring for, working mothers and daughters are more likely than husbands or sons to take the time off to provide care. When paid parental leave is available, working mothers are more likely to use the benefit than men are. A few workplaces offer the family-friendly policies of work flexibility like telecommuting, job sharing and sabbaticals. Unfortunately, work flexibility is available to only half of employees in the US (Matos & Galinsky 2014).
Most workers have caregiving responsibilities at some point in their lives and, if they have the income to purchase care work, the solution has usually been to hire low-wage immigrant women of color. Caring for children is not priceless in our society, but rather relies on the cheapest labor available. Immigration policies and declining welfare benefits ensure professionals a ready pool of low-wage workers. Current childcare policies and programs are not inclusive for all mothers. Instead of a system, the US has a market for childcare where purchasing power presents completely different options.
Individual solutions to the care crisis that involve hiring a low-wage immigrant woman of color to care for children or an elderly parent reproduce inequality. Frequently, caretakers are mothers too, which places their children at an enormous disadvantage. Growing numbers of mothers work abroad as caretakers to earn money for their own children and family. If you sit on a bench in New York's Central Park, for instance, you will notice many Caribbean and Latina women pushing carriages and tending to the needs of white children. These day workers have their lives shaped by low wages, lack of healthcare or childcare benefits, inflexible work schedules, mandatory overtime and citizenship restrictions. As we know from several high-profile political cases, frequently employers do not even pay the mandatory social security and Medicare for the mothers they employ. This means that domestic workers may not receive benefits when they reach retirement age. In the case of the children of migrant workers employed as domestics and nannies abroad, they experience more than just the loss of a parent or parents. Having a mother working in a different city or country can lead to family instability. Frequently, gifts and remittances that mothers send home to their children become symbols of parent–child attachment, which results in the commodification of their mother's love. In globalized care work, the workers’ children remain invisible to families who purchase private care in their own country.
All working mothers face the problem of childcare and elder care later in life. As we have already seen, as a nation, we continue to address care as a personal problem rather than a public issue. Consequently, employers are unwilling to pay very much for the labor, and they are reluctant to accept their home is a site of employment in compliance with federal and state laws or the norms of modern work culture. Like so many social issues, the need for care did not become a crisis until families with more privilege experienced the consequences of living in a country with few benefits to help working parents. Addressing the gender wage gap is important in helping working parents, particularly single mothers; however, families of color and single mothers of color also need race discrimination to be eliminated. Policies only focused on the gender wage gap and not the race wage gap maintain white privilege. Immigrant policies that keep some workers vulnerable as undocumented provide cheap labor for families with financial resources. However, too often people fail to grasp the way intersections can offer public solutions.
Examining the scandals that arose in the nomination of attorney generals in the 1990s demonstrates the tendency to analyze problems from a one-dimensional perspective. “Nannygate” was the first national scandal over childcare. The term refers to scandals over the childcare arrangements of people President Clinton had nominated for attorney general. The nannygate scandals demonstrate lost opportunities to have a public discussion about the care crisis in the US. This is painfully obvious during each nannygate scandal. The public debate surrounding these events revealed not only a great deal about American social norms and values relating to gender and work, but also the disregard for these issues when race, ethnicity and citizenship are submerged under the topic of immigration.
The first nannygate occurred in 1993 when the Clinton administration attempted to nominate the first woman attorney general, Zoe Baird. Baird and her Yale law professor husband had hired an undocumented Peruvian couple to care for their household, including childcare, and had failed to pay for social security, Medicare or unemployment insurance. Although she paid back taxes and fines, she withdrew her nomination in response to the public outrage. Clinton then nominated Kimba Wood, who had hired an undocumented Trinidadian woman at a time when it was legal to do so, and she had paid taxes. However, she too eventually withdrew because the general public made no distinction between her situation and Zoe Baird's. Clinton then nominated Janet Reno, who was single and had no children. Nannygate sheds light on how feminist issues framed from the position of women in professional positions do not necessarily include the needs of the mothers who clean their homes and care for their children (Romero 2002).
Controversies arising from the nannygate scandals were missed opportunities for a national conversation over the care crisis. The absence of an intersectional approach pitted against one another groups that should have been allies. Each of the scandals involved two issues: (1) the hiring of undocumented workers; and (2) the failure to pay taxes. Public opinion clustered around two major criticisms: one emphasizing gender, and the other, class. A gender analysis proposed by Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood supporters cited a double standard operating that discriminated against women nominees. They argued that male nominees were not questioned about their childcare arrangements. Furthermore, if a woman is ever going to be nominated, she is likely to be a mother with childcare concerns. The other sentiment was class-based. Outrage against the nominees’ hiring of undocumented women crystallized around the class distinction in law breaking and the leniency of the government toward white-collar crime. Class politics characterized “nannygate” as a “Yuppie” white-collar crime and resisted attempts to sweep it under the rug. Gender politics constructed the response to the issue of white-collar crime by arguing that laws pertaining to hiring undocumented nannies were rarely enforced. Further, they argued that enforcement in this case had the effect of discriminating against women, namely working mothers. In addition, they noted that these laws were out of step with the needs of the nation (Romero 2002).
Nannygate represents the family and work dilemma presented by more women entering the labor force. An intersectional analysis of nannygate identifies existing systems of power, privileges and oppression. As a personal trouble rather than a social issue, the care dilemma relies on working families using their existing privileges to hire marginalized groups. Fathers can allocate the care of their children and elderly parents to their wives. Some working couples might take opposite shifts to cover the caregiving responsibilities, or take lower-paid positions that allow more flexibility. Working women with disposable income can hire other women at low wages who are vulnerable because of age, class, race or citizenship status. Most domestics and nannies are paid poorly, and lack benefits or sick leave. Frequently they are “on call” and expected to be available 24/7. Many of these women are themselves mothers and have to negotiate their own caregiving arrangements, such as leaving their children alone or with kin during the day or in their home country. Welfare “reform” eroded assistance and resources for poor families and increased the vulnerability of poor women of color in the labor force. Congress’ unwillingness to pass immigration reform providing pathways to citizenship maintains the vulnerability of undocumented immigrant women, ensuring that class, race and citizenship status continue to influence working conditions and ability to fulfill caregiving responsibilities. Undocumented women of color are the most vulnerable to low wages, harsh working conditions and employer theft. The use of undocumented and immigrant labor to fill the market for paid caregivers devalues women's traditional work, denies the recognition of it as “real work,” and ignores domestic workers’ rights as workers. If you think about it, it is very odd to entrust our most valuable family members – aging parents and young children – to the lowest-paid workers. If you were old, wouldn't you want the person helping you to bathe, to change your clothes, and making sure you got your medicine to be a happy, stable and secure worker, instead of just the opposite?
Drawing on the metaphor of the Rubik's cube, the intersection of gender and class captures the need for childcare that is flexible enough to accommodate working parents with long hours and changing work schedules. Working parents need affordable childcare that is reliable and of high quality. Moving the face of the cube to include colors representing gender, class and race, the needs of middle- and working-class mothers and parents of color are exposed. These needs incorporate the previous characteristics and add the requirement for racially and culturally knowledgeable caretaking services. Shifting the colors to represent the intersection of gender, class, race and citizenship status, we are pushed to consider the needs of immigrant mothers of color working as domestics and nannies who are also in need of affordable childcare. In addition, as careworkers, their needs as vulnerable workers require higher pay, benefits, sick leave, and vacations, as well as employment stability. Intersectional approaches to caregiving call for incorporating the needs of all working mothers and domestics, nannies, and caregivers for the elderly.
1 Explain why a gender or a class analysis is not sufficient in understanding the care crisis.
2 How does the care crisis affect your life? How is it different for other individuals?
There exist campaigns based on an intersectional analysis with an understanding that gender, race, class, age, citizenship status and other forms of subordination and privilege must be included in a comprehensive program to resolve the care crisis. A campaign incorporating the intersectional identities of employees and employers appears in organizing efforts by the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA). Their slogan underlines the significance of interconnectedness for all working families: “Domestic work is the work that makes all other work possible” (www.domesticworkers.org/who-we-are). The NDWA's mission statement goes on to characterize the workers as follows:
Domestic workers care for the things we value the most: our families and our homes. They care for our children, provide essential support for seniors and people with disabilities to live with dignity at home, and perform the home care work that makes all other work possible. They are skilled and caring professionals, but for many years, they have labored in the shadows, and their work has not been valued. These workers deserve respect, dignity and basic labor protections.
While race, class, gender and immigration issues shape their interest in decent work for fair wages, they have organized around three themes: community, dignity and care. Since many of their members are immigrant women of color, including undocumented women, they have two initiatives addressing immigration and trafficking. The initiative “We Belong Together” is a joint program with the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, other women's organizations, and immigrant advocacy organizations, working toward immigration reform that includes broad and clear paths to citizenship and keeping families together. As domestics are one of the largest categories of workers that are trafficked, the NDWA established the “Beyond Survival” campaign to work with communities to identify human trafficking and establish the structures to assist victims and work with survivors. They aim to protect and assist survivors of violence and trafficking. Recognizing the previous organizing and the number of Black women currently employed as domestics, NDWA has built on the work of their Atlanta-based chapter in the “We Dream in Black” initiative. This campaign works with Black communities to expand efforts to organize Black women employed as domestics, and Afro-Caribbean workers in New York City.
An NDWA campaign aimed at meeting the needs of employers who are elderly or disabled, or members of working families, is “Caring Across Generations.” This campaign promotes “Changing the Way We Care, Quality Care and Support and a Dignified Quality of Life for all Americans.” Recognizing that the elderly constitute a growing population in the US that prefers independent living, and that the current care choices are inadequate, the NDWA is working to promote a change to our “out-of-date” and “out-of-touch” approach to caring for the elderly and disabled people. Nursing homes are expensive but, without home- and community-based services, living independently is not an option for many. Family members who are also engaged in caring for children provide an estimated 80 percent of elderly care. Without state-mandated sick leave, vacations, personal time and flexible working schedules, being overburdened with caregiving impacts the family's economic and social well-being. This campaign for improving care for the elderly and disabled identifies five goals:
Rather than speaking only from the perspective of the worker and focusing on what we usually consider as workers’ issues, such as higher wages, overtime, social security, sick leave and benefits, their intersectional strategy is inclusive of both the giver and receiver of care. The “Caring Across Generations” campaign uses an intersectional analysis to identify the care crisis and proposes policies that bring together the various interests of the working parents providing caregiving, those purchasing care, and their family members receiving care.
The NDWA works closely with Hand-in-Hand, which is a national network of employers of nannies, housecleaners and home attendants, to establish working conditions that benefit the employer and worker. They began as allies to the NDWA's efforts to pass the New York State Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in 2010. This domestic employers’ association recognizes the interdependence of employers and workers in collaborative efforts to transform care in the US by changing cultural norms, public policies and labor regulations. Rather than pitting affluent or disabled communities against working-class white women and women of color providing the care, they collaborate to educate employers about fair employment relationships based on mutual respect and well-being. They launched a Code of Care that established standards for domestic employment, and provide resources to respond to employers’ needs and questions. As one nanny-employer testified at a Human Rights Tribunal for the California Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, “Having clear guidelines helps employers understand what to do. We want to provide the best working environment possible for people caring for our children.” Education and raising public awareness are important activities to gain support for programming and legislation assisting employers and workers. Bringing together domestic employers, seniors and disabled people, Hand-in-Hand is an active partner in the “Caring Across Generations” campaign. The association works with workers to organize strategies in developing legislation conceived from an intersectional perspective.
We close this chapter by taking a look at the incorporation of intersectionality in the fast-growing movement Black Lives Matter. This grassroots movement demonstrates the challenges of developing intersectional strategies for organizing and the strength in bringing coalitions together.
From its inception, the BLM Movement embraced intersectionality. Beginning an online campaign with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, the movement responded to the neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman being acquitted for fatally shooting the unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. After the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, BLM held their first protest and demonstration against police and vigilante killings of Black people. However, the initial attention overemphasized Black men as victims of police violence, and the deaths of women and transgender people of color were invisible. This was not intentional, as the founders of the movement, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, identify as Black queer women. As they engaged in public discourse and social media, clarifications appeared. The hashtag #SayHerName was a rallying point around the police shootings and killing of Black women. Soon BLM's mission statement on the website stated that BLM “affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and Black lives along the gender spectrum” (http://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory).
That BLM's decentralized network of 30 chapters across the country made an intentional shift to an intersectional approach is apparent as the movement grew. Along with links to previous Black liberation movements, the attention to local and state issues kept identities historically and geographically rooted. The founders developed a comprehensive intersectional statement about the movement, as the following quote demonstrates:
When we say Black Lives Matter, we are talking about the ways in which Black people are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity. It is an acknowledgement Black poverty and genocide is state violence. It is an acknowledgment that 1 million Black people are locked in cages in this country – one half of all people in prisons or jails – is an act of state violence. It is an acknowledgment that Black women continue to bear the burden of a relentless assault on our children and our families and that assault is an act of state violence. Black queer and trans folks bearing a unique burden in a hetero-patriarchal society that disposes of us like garbage and simultaneously fetishizes us and profits off of us is state violence; the fact that 500,000 Black people in the US are undocumented immigrants and relegated to the shadows is state violence; the fact that Black girls are used as negotiating chips during times of conflict and war is state violence; Black folks living with disabilities and different abilities bear the burden of state-sponsored Darwinian experiments that attempt to squeeze us into boxes of normality defined by White supremacy is state violence. And the fact is that the lives of Black people – not ALL people – exist within these conditions is consequence of state violence.
When Black people get free, everybody gets free.
When all Black people are included, intersectional identities are necessary to being inclusive. Race does not exist without gender, sexuality, citizenship status, abilities and age. State violence against Black people is inseparable from their other identities. By accepting and embracing the slogan #BlackLivesMatter, connections to other struggles across systems of inequality are made by affirming Black lives.
The counter-slogan #AllLivesMatter ignored the point of intersectionality in BLM's organizing and ideology. The counter-slogan perpetuated color-blind racism by depoliticizing and erasing racism from state violence against Blacks in the US: “While the claim that all human life is valuable is not ‘wrong,’ it intentionally erases the complexities of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the lives of people who suffer from systematic police brutality” (Carney 2016: 185). Similar to theorizing about gender as a universal experience, the result of #AllLivesMatter is to collapse the uniqueness of differences as experienced along the axes of structural racism and white supremacy. The counter-slogan fails to recognize situated knowledge.
BLM arose at the same time young youth of color were engaged in other struggles for racial justice. Activists protesting against police violence in Ferguson joined the predominantly fast-food workers of color protesting in New York City in the Fight for 15, which is a campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Activists fighting for labor and economic justice were already involved in BLM and the impact of the low-wage economy on Black lives was evident. Previously viewed as a white issue, the labor movement now presented African Americans an opportunity to participate in decision-making, access to resources and organizational structure. White labor activists became more aware of the racial aspect of the Fight for 15 progressives (Teuscher 2015). As the alliance developed between BLM and the fight to increase the minimum wage, the need to incorporate immigrant rights groups became evident. Latino workers would also benefit greatly from wage increases. To avoid setting one group in opposition to the other, a further coalition was necessary. Immigration issues also connected to the racial justice issue surrounding prison reform. The growing industry of detaining undocumented immigrants posed similarities as another incident of incarcerating people of color in the US.
The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) brought over 50 organizations and over 2,000 activists to Cleveland in 2015 to build coalitions with a unifying platform. Keeping their focus on ending state-sanctioned violence against Black communities, the issues raised included criminalization and incarceration of Black people; reparations for harms against Black people; investing in health, education and safety; economic justice; community control; Black political power and self-determination. Strategies for addressing these issues are inclusive of race, class, gender, sexuality, ableism and citizenship status. Returning to where we started this chapter, if we are to address these concerns as sociologists, with a sociological imagination, as Mills advocated, these issues are not personal but social issues, which need structural solutions.