Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work

Introduction

From 1860 to 1960, Black women’s work and the experience of discrimination in seeking and keeping work was doggedly constant.The common phrase “you are what you do” was particularly true during this 100-year period when there was near-perfect matching of devalued jobs to devalued workers. Not only did Blacks and Whites, men and women, hold very different jobs, but the divide between the types of jobs they held was stark—clean or dirty, steady or inconsistent, skilled or unskilled. In this rigidly divided occupational landscape, the hierarchical dynamics of race and gender intersected to significantly limit labor opportunities for Black women. Black women were restricted to devalued and dying occupations— farm labor, domestic service, and jobs on the industrial fringe—that other groups fled at the first opportunity. But Black women could not leave. During wartime or labor shortages they briefly gained access to more desirable opportunities, but they were repeatedly forced to reenter devalued occupations once these periods ended. It was not until the dual sources of their oppression, race and gender, were attacked by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that Black women were able to participate on more equitable footing in the American labor market. Prior to this, the opportunity structure was closed and upward mobility was routinely denied. Why does this matter? Why should we care? After all, progress has been made, discrimination is illegal, and Black women have increasingly gained access to more desirable occupational opportunities.The danger is that our failure to recognize the severity of the discrimination experienced by Black women historically leads to mistaken conclusions about the fate of Black women today. Contemporary discussions of the 1 Introduction O p p o r t u n i t y D e n i e d 2 persistence of Black women in poverty, for instance, take place in the absence of any discussion of the historical context that the majority of Black women were restricted to poverty-level jobs until relatively recently. Despite the harsh realities of low-wage work—inherent instability and the limited opportunities for advancement over time—and the inability to make ends meet, many Black women today, as in the past, remain committed to the ideal of self-sufficiency in America.1 It is not Black women’s refusal to work but the lack of jobs that pay them a living wage that prevents them from rising above poverty. In the contemporary era when meritocracy is valued (although rarely achieved) and group-based privilege is looked down upon, a historical assessment of privilege and disadvantage in the American labor market as it relates to race and gender is a worthwhile endeavor. It illuminates how maintaining privilege for some necessitated the subordination of others. The privilege of White men necessitated the subordination of Black men and White women. Black men and White women advanced only because Black women were left behind to anchor the bottom. The uneven distribution of Black women across occupations remains an untold story. Scholars have tended to see the discrimination and labor restrictions that affected Black women as part of the larger experience of discrimination against all groups (with the notable exception of White men). The discrimination Black women experienced , however, was markedly different, even from that Black men and White women experienced. Although they shared Blackness with Black men and womanhood with White women, the possession of both Blackness and womanhood made the labor market a much more hostile environment for Black women than for either of these other groups. In the pre–Civil Rights Act occupational structure of the United States in which racial and gender discrimination was the norm, when Black men or White women took one step forward, Black women took two steps back. Intersectional theory provides a lens through which we can understand the joint influence of race and gender on Black women’s work.A singular focus on race or gender as the cause for the observed inequality among women or Blacks is insufficient since it fails to take into account intersecting systems of power and resultant oppressions. Introduction 3 A focus on racism and sexism is integral to understanding the past, present, and future position of Black women in America because the American opportunity structure does not exist in a vacuum. It is imbued with the biases and false perceptions prevalent within society at large, and the pervasiveness...