Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy by LaShawn Harris (review)

Street peddlers, sex workers, fencers, supernatural consultants, and numbers runners come together in LaShawn Harris's study of black women in New York City's informal economy. Harris shows how black women's participation in the underground economy allowed them to disrupt ideas of decorum and respectability. The specificity of New York's urban setting allowed women to pursue and create new opportunities for themselves in addition to but also beyond domestic work. Harris's study therefore moves the discourse on working-class black women beyond the sphere of domestic labor and the need for financial uplift, by investigating the myriad reasons why black women participated in unlawful work. The quest for pleasure, a break from the monotony of unskilled wage labor and the possibility to chart a new, freer social life drew urbandwelling black women to the illegal labor market. Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners presents a clear-eyed view of the opportunities and dangers that characterized black women's presence in New York City's underbelly.