Further To Fly: Black Women and the Politics of Empowerment

5. The Economic Context of Black Women's Activism

Ghetto inhabitants make up less than 10 percent of people living in poverty. By contrast, about half of the adult poor work. These people are poor not because they are unable or unwilling to work. They are poor because they work at jobs that do not pay. Poverty is a business issue then because most poor people are part of the current or future US work force. —Mary Jo Bane and David T. Ellwood, “Is American Business Working for —the Poor?” Besides the loss of political culture, black women have economic concerns that inhibit their political activism. Feminists have not paid sufficient attention to black economic decline. It should therefore be stated at the outset that the social consequences of economic issues such as the flight of capital from the inner city, the changing nature of work, and U.S. trade policy are women’s issues. Although black and brown feminists have consistently focused on issues of race and class for the most part, they have used social rather than economic frameworks to structure their analyses. Thus, feminist commentary often discusses the effects of poverty without clearly analyzing the forces that cause it. Feminist political analysis rarely connects women’s lives to economic policy debates such as global trade policy, industrial policy, the impact of technology on world economies , or the need for more resources to enhance local economic development. Feminists have taken positions on domestic policy issues such as health care, child care, welfare reform, family leave, and small-business development, but their recommendations often have limited impact on local, regional, or national economic policy. If feminists continue to retreat from strong economic advocacy, American economic policy makers will continue to assume that the United States and other capital markets around the world have the right to exploit the labor of women and children through low wages and poor working conditions. 5. The Economic Context of Black Women’s Activism 55 I The legacy of supply-side economics in a global economy is now known. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that from 1989 to 1993, the typical American household lost 7 percent of its annual income; and from 1992 to 1993, more than one million new people fell into poverty. In 1994, despite the overall growth of the U.S. economy, more than one third of American households still saw their income decline. Social economist Bennett Harrison provides a broad analysis of the problem at hand: The average post W.W. II earnings [in terms of rate of growth of earnings ] peaked in the early 1970s. [Today] wage inequality [is] growing . . . even as the economy has expanded, in contradiction to all previous evidence and to the predictions of standard theory. . . . The proportion of Americans earning poverty-level wages [has increased] among men and by some accounts among women. (1994, 192) In his essay “The Parable of the Talents,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. states the problem for black Americans: What makes all of this of particular concern is the swelling ranks of the black poor, a category that (like the black middle class) now encompasses about a third of black families. More than half of all black males between twenty-five and thirty-four are jobless or “underemployed .” (Gates and West, 1997, 24) By 1996, the Clinton administration was touting a robust economy and the dismantling of Reagan-Bush economics. Clinton claimed credit for raising the minimum wage, reducing the federal deficit, lowering unemployment, fostering a new era of job growth, and keeping inflationary pressures at bay. Indeed, Clinton economic policies were bolstered by declines in the poverty rate between 1996 and 1997. By 1997, both the number and percentage of families in poverty had declined. For example, the number of poor blacks dropped from 9.7 million in 1996 to 9.1 million in 1997. In that same year, the poverty rate for black families dropped from 26.1 percent to 23.6 percent. This was good news. In 1998, the overall black poverty rate of 26.1 percent was the lowest rate since 1959, yet the rate was significantly higher than the white, non-Hispanic rate of 8.6 percent and only slightly lower than the Hispanic rate of 27.1 percent (Dalaker and Naifeh, 1998).1 56—The Economic Context of Black Women’s Activism Despite these declines, most American households need two working family members to make ends meet, job security...