One Black Woman’s Open Letter to President Obama and Mitt Romney

During this presidential election cycle, I waited with bated breath to hear the candidates speak to me; to speak to issues of concern to me as a Black woman. I watched each debate waiting in anticipation and after each debate I found myself with a growing sense of frustration. My frustration resulted from my feelings of marginalization which seemingly intensified as the election cycle progressed. My marginalization was not the result of the simplistic notion of winners of the debates. Instead, I felt increasingly marginalized because I (Black women) was not discussed. We were invisible. I was rendered invisible because not once did either of you address, in a substantive and critical manner, any of the issue discussed below. Left out of the conversation were issues of: food insecurity, HIV/AIDS, the raced-gendered impact of the wage gap, or the ever-growing incarceration of Black and Brown women.

On the night before this so-called critical election, as the networks run a steady stream of election polls designed to predict the results, I’m still waiting. I’m waiting for one of you, in your “closing” statements, to address me. I’m waiting for one of you to tell me why I should vote for either one of you. The side-show of the media aside, this is indeed a critical election. I argue that this is a critical election but often not for the same reasons the media tells me it is. It seems that once again politics has rendered me invisible. So I pen this letter to both of you. 

As you work to attract the “woman” vote, I remind you that there is no homogeneous woman. Not all women occupy the same social location. The intersection of race, class, sexuality and gender results in different experiences for women. As Black women have long pointed out, we are not simply marginalized as a result of our race or gender. Instead, we are marginalized as a result of the intersection of multiple intersecting socially constructed identities. 

Given this, there are a few issues that I would encourage you both to consider. These include: 

Poverty: Black women are increasingly poor. When you speak of the middle-class or tax-cuts for the wealthy you are failing to address this growing epidemic among Black women. “The poverty rate for Hispanic and black women rose even more than the poverty rate for women generally – for Hispanic women to 25.0 percent in 2010 from 23.8 percent in 2009 and for black women to 25.6 percent in 2010 from 24.6 percent in2009."

Child poverty Not only must we address the poverty rate of Black women, but we must also pay attention to child poverty. As stated in Color Lines, “More than one in three black kids—a full 36 percent of black youth—live in poverty and 31 percent of Latino kids lives in poverty. In 2009, … 16 states reported poverty rates for black children that were upwards of 40 percent. And in five states, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama, more than 40 percent of Latino kids there lived in poverty. However, no state has a white children’s poverty rate that’s over 23 percent.”

Unemployment: In the most recently released unemployment rates, it was reported that the unemployment rate among Black women “fell from 12.6% to 12.4%.”  Unemployment for Black women remains above the national average. As we discuss the economic recovery, we have to ask, what has been the Black woman’s experience?

Food insecurity: “Overall, 15.4 percent of women experienced household food insecurity in 2008; this varies, however, by race and ethnicity. Non-Hispanic Asian/Pacific Islander and non-Hispanic White women were least likely to be food insecure (10.3 and 11.1 percent, respectively), compared to more than one-quarter of Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black, and non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaska Native women. Non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaska Native and non-Hispanic Black women were also more likely to have very low food security (13.4 and 10.2 percent, respectively).” Simply put, Black women, and by default, their families, are hungry. There is a relationship between their experiences with hunger, unemployment and poverty. Some of these details get lost when we speak of women as a group.  

Wage Gap: When you speak of the wage gap and pay equity for women, as a result of treating women as a monolithic group, you lose sight of the fact that not all women share the same experience. One’s experience with employment discrimination, measured via wages, depends on his/her social location. Consider that “Black women, in comparison to White women have median weekly earnings of $595 and $703 respectively. Latina women’s median weekly earnings is $518.” When we speak of the gender wage gap, it is imperative that we discuss how this is raced. Additionally, wage discrimination is not the only form of discrimination women confront in the paid labor force. So please, don’t simplify the issue of employment discrimination by treating women in a monolithic manner or by failing to consider the wide spectrum of discrimination women, based on class, sexuality and race, face. 

Incarceration: “In 2010, black women were incarcerated at nearly 3 times the rate of white women (133 versus 47 per 100,000). Hispanic women were incarcerated at 1.6 times the rate of white women (77 versus 47 per 100,000).” A number of factors contribute to the ever expanding rate of incarcerated Black women. For example, the often construction of Black women as “bad Black mothers” and the other negative stereotypes of Black women rooted in images such as Jezebel and Sapphire result in the implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, held belief that Black women are inherently corrupt and immoral. Thus, the protections afforded to other women are often denied to Black women.

 

In thinking of the Black women and incarceration we also have to ask, what is the impact of Black women’s incarceration on the Black family? While not categorized in terms of the gender of the incarcerated parent, the data shows that “1 in 15 black children, 1 in 42 Latino children, and 1 in 111 white children had a parent in prison in 2007. Black children are 7.5 times more likely and Hispanic children are 2.6 times more likely than are white children to have a parent in prison.” How will either of you address such collateral damage?

As we prepare to elect the president of the United States, I pause and think of the nature of representation. What does political representation, from a Black feminist perspective, mean? Representation is not simply a benefit of those who can contribute, financially, to your campaign. As elections become more and more expensive and as we spend millions of dollars in key states and among key demographics, we need to ponder who is left out. 

During the 2008 Presidential election, for the first time in U.S history Black women, among all voters, “had the highest voter turnout rate.” Additionally, Black women’s voter participation “increased 5.1 percentage points, from 63.7% in 2004 to 68.8% in 2008” (Lopez and Taylor 2009). Yet, this history of Black women’s participation in presidential politics remains virtually unseen.  Black women have been politically engaged. We are participating. However, this participation has not necessarily resulted in representation.

Black women have been, historically and systematically, politically neglected and misused. Via institutional and social practices and processes, we have been rendered invisible. Black women’s experiences remain unchallenged, in part, because women are constructed as a homogeneous group. Policy discourses, when not treating women in a monolithic manner, are apt to use negative systems of representing Black womanhood and center her often as the source of all that ails the Black community. Consequently, we are seen but never really seen—we are the invisible voting bloc. 

As a result of this invisibility, political, social and economic structures and processes lack the willingness to pay attention to the needs of Black women. The passive neglect, omission and misuse of Black women in the political and social spheres have long been challenged by Black women activists. They have waged various campaigns designed to bring recognition to their plight—a plight that is indeed different from that of other women and Black men. This letter is my small contribution to the longstanding Black woman’s fight for recognition. 

As a Black woman I am not looking for symbolic representation. Instead, I am concerned with how either one of you will explicitly address the problems faced by Black women, some of which I detail above. Will you represent me?

More than stay-at-home vs. working-mothers: How the White woman conversation on motherhood ignores the realities of Black women

Breaking News: 

Angelina Jo Lee and Brad Pitt, after years of co-habitating and parenting 6 children out-of-wedlock, recently announced their engagement. 

Breaking News: 

 According to Hilary Rosen, 

“What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues, and when I listen to my wife, that's what I am hearing.  Guess what?  His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we worry - and why we worry about their future.  I think, yes, it's about these positions and, yes, I think there will be a war of words about the positions.”

What do these two stories have to do with the so-called “mommy wars”? A whole lot. Both stories speak to privilege—class, racial and heterosexual privilege. 

I’m not particularly interested in the personal lives of Lee and Pitt, but the response to their behaviors and chiefly how the media seems to be going gaga over their presumed nuptials stands in contrast to lesser known, relatively poorer and particularly women of color who have children out-of-wedlock. Furthermore, how this couple is treated even stands in contrast to how married, relatively well known, couples are treated. The first group of women are often treated as suspect, as criminal and in need to monitoring. In the case of the second group of women, in particular Michelle Obama, Fox News constructed her as a “baby momma”—a term typically fraught with negative connotation Black motherhood is often shrouded in a meta-narrative of negativity regardless of family formation, regardless of whether mothers are in the paid labor force or not. 

Rosen’s assertion and the response also speak to a form of privileging of mothers—in terms of class and also race. Many took Rosen’s comments as contributing to and fanning the continual debate of who works harder—mothers who not only mother but work outside of the home or those who choose mothering as their primary responsibility. In other words, it’s the debate about who is a better mother, which is measured in terms of who spends the most hours on the job and what constitutes a job. I’ll leave others to have this conversation. My concern is centered on how this conversation seems to (conveniently) leave out some women. 

Left out of these conversations are women for whom parenting is made that much more difficult as a result of low wages, poverty and the impact of existing laws. While I recognize that these are issues confronted by women regardless of color/ethnicity, I focus on Black women. 

Mothering Black Women

“Black women were about half as likely as White women to be a stay-at-home mother,…married black women have always been employed outside of the home in large numbers, even following World War II, when many of their white counterparts had withdrawn from the labor force.” (Census)

Like so many have eloquently said—Black women often don’t have the choice between staying-at-home or entering the labor force. Several in the blogosphere and on Twitter have focused on issues of pay inequality as a factor in limiting the choices of mothering Black women. As such, I won’t belabor this point. Instead I want to focus on how other policies—and not just labor laws—influence Black women’s functioning as mothers. 

For many women, economic struggle, compounded by race and policies that have racialized outcomes, is their daily reality. 

Consider the following:

Black and Latina women face particularly high rates of poverty. Over a quarter of black women and nearly a quarter of Latina women are poor. Black and Latina women are at least twice as likely as white women to be living in poverty.

In addition,

“The number of women incarcerated for drug-related crimes increased by 433 percent between 1986 and 1991. But for African-American women it rose an astounding 828 percent, while the increase for white women was 241 percent, and for Latina women a 328 percent increase.”

Finally,

“New research is showing that eviction is a particular burden on low-income black women, often single mothers, who have an easier time renting apartments than their male counterparts, but are vulnerable to losing them because their wages or public benefits have not kept up with the cost of housing. And evictions, in turn, can easily throw families into cascades of turmoil and debt.” 

Back to the uproar caused by Rosen. I don’t think that Rosen was really discussing which mother has it easier/harder. This seems to belittle her larger point around privilege—economic privilege and I add white economic privilege. So yes, I agree with Rosen. The Romneys have never dealt with “economic issues”. They have not struggled with paying rent versus paying the light bill. They, like most families, probably faced their own struggles, but more than likely they were not economic struggles. However, this is not my primary concern.

What I’m arguing is that many Black women don’t have the choice to stay-at-home—if they even have a home. The choice seems to be taken away from them either as a result of poverty, incarceration, their own or their partners’, or some combination. These issues cannot only be addressed via pay equity—yes this is a start. Pay equity, when not grounded in the realities of existing racial hierarchies, does little to change the fact that in many urban and rural communities, there is little to no access to jobs as a result of economic development policies. Furthermore, these women often have limited access to health care and education. These are all factors that impact the resources we have available to us and how we mother. A debate centered solely on pay equity or which mom works harder does little to address the fact that for many Black women, structural violence is a daily factor in their lives.

Interestingly most of the initial (mainstream) responses to Rosen’s comments seem to ignore these issues. Instead, they seem focused on having a debate that women of color feminists/womanists have long criticized traditional feminists of having. The construction of womanhood and motherhood, underlying the discussion of Rosen’s comments, relies on a hierarchy based on race and class. Black feminists and womanists have long argued that Black women have never been privileged as mothers. Instead, they have been thought of as dangerous, unfit (primarily because of the poverty they experience and their race) and to be controlled. Dorothy Roberts in Killing the Black Body eloquently speaks of the denigration of Black women’s bodies and as a consequence their performance of motherhood.

As a result of the often degeneration of Black women, regardless of class, policies are often designed not to encourage (poor—in terms of income and perceived moral failings) Black women to stay-at-home, but to join the paid labor force. Where they can undergo a different type of monitoring and have limited access to “corrupting” their offspring (as believed by some). They are forced to find a job with little thought given to accessible and affordable child care, access to health care and whether or not the job pays a livable wage, among other issues. Policies seem less concern about addressing the growing incarceration of Black women and the increasing impact of foreclosures and evictions among this group of women.

So Rosen, maybe you shouldn’t have been so quick to apologize to Ann Romney. Stick to your guns. Force a discussion on privilege. However, I encourage you to consider how race intersects with class to render some more privilege than others. Then maybe we can bring Black women into this conversation in a way that treats them with dignity and respect.