Abstract
In this presidential address, I use the metaphor of “reclaiming my time” as a framework that highlights the ways black women are playing an essential role transforming workplaces, media, and politics in the current moment. I consider how black feminist thought provides a useful starting point for assessing these efforts, and I examine how black women’s leadership offers a blueprint for how other groups also can restructure social institutions in an era of increasing polarization and inequality.
During a 2017 Congressional hearing, Congresswoman Maxine Waters attempted to question Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about the administration’s financial ties to Russia. As Mnuchin avoided direct answers and clear responses, opting instead for evasions and inconsistencies, Waters coolly announced that she was “reclaiming [her] time.” As Mnuchin continued to interrupt, Waters explained that this Congressional parlance indicated that she did not have to allow the Secretary to continue avoiding her questions and instead would reserve the remaining minutes to pursue other points. The video of the exchange quickly went viral, and “reclaiming my time” became a catchphrase indicating a refusal to waste time, energy, or attention on nonsense.
This phrasing is an appropriate metaphor for what black women have been doing consistently for decades, but with more visibility as of late. To be clear, as black women have historically struggled against tremendous odds, the need to “reclaim their time” is nothing new. Black women’s activism can be framed as a long-term project of “reclaiming their time”: challenging social institutions and marshaling their efforts in order to create more equitable communities, families, and coalitions. Used today, this language highlights the work that black women have been doing to address various forms of social stratification in the United States, and the implications of this work as the nation continues becoming increasingly fractured and divided along economic, cultural, and political fault lines.
In this presidential address, I illustrate several key ways that black women’s efforts, activism, and labor pose powerful challenges to contemporary social stratification. Building on Patricia Hill Collins’s (2000, 2004) groundbreaking work, I discuss how, in the new-economy, post-Obama, global era, black women are taking essential steps to change several social institutions. I assess how these changes are a response to growing social stratification and consider what sorts of supports are necessary for continuing these efforts. Finally, I contend that in this current era of increasing polarization, widening inequality, and assaults on democracy, following black women’s leadership and vision for how to change institutions and broader society is an important first step.
Black Feminist Thought Then and Now
Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, several visionary black feminists took stock of academic paradigms in various disciplines and noted some glaring shortcomings. Specifically, most academic fields offered few or no ways to assess and understand black women’s work, family lives, relationships, or activism. In some instances, black women were simply absent, such as in feminist research that advocated paid labor as a solution to women’s disempowerment (Friedan 1963). In other cases, research that did acknowledge black women’s existence decried their family structures as pathological, unable to fit into societal norms, and ultimately in need of social policy that could “fix” their perceived flaws (Moynihan 1965).
In both contexts, academic work in these areas suffered from the fact that researchers either excluded black women completely, viewed them as deviant, and/or justified the social conditions that shaped their lives. Researchers often failed to consider the ways that black women suffered from unique forms of both racial and gendered disadvantage, and the implications this had for their legal standing in cases of racial discrimination, opportunities in the work force, and how they were impacted by public policy (Collins 2000; Crenshaw 1989). In advancing black feminist thought, scholars like Patricia Hill Collins, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others asserted that centering black women’s experiences was necessary for understanding the ways various social, economic, political, and legal institutions shaped their lives.
If this seems self-evident today, it is only due to the fact that these black women thinkers’ visionary insights, persistence, and impact on successive generations of academics were far-reaching. Among academics, this theoretical approach has provided a framework for assessing topics as varied as work-family policies (Dow 2019), policing (Texiera 2002), and cultural imagery (Stephens and Phillips 2006). After decades of scholarship, “intersectionality” now has become relatively recognizable, with outlets no less mainstream than the Washington Post and New York Magazine engaging with the term, its origins, and its implications.
As one who originally developed this concept, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (2000, 2004) focused on the ways that intersecting factors affected black women in several different arenas. In her pathbreaking book Black Feminist Thought, Collins (2000) argued that centering black women’s voices and considering intersections of race, gender, class, and other categories provided a more precise sociological understanding of work, family, collective action, media representation, and other social institutions. Black women’s accounts of their neighborhoods, communities, and love relationships, for example, offered a forceful critique of capitalism, systemic racism, and patriarchy. Collins (2000, 2004) focused on how an intersectional approach illuminated black women’s work, activism, and struggles for self-definition in ways that were often missed by mainstream scholarship.
Though scholars today recognize that intersectional approaches have had a profound impact on various fields of study, it is also important to consider major social, economic, and cultural changes that have occurred since scholars such as Crenshaw (1989), Collins (2000, 2004), and Dill (1988) first began drawing attention to these issues. For instance, Crenshaw (1989) noted that black women form a specific legal class that is affected by discrimination in ways that may be dissimilar to white women and black men. But in the decades since her work was published, legal arguments have turned much more toward emphasizing an individualist, neoconservative approach to the law (W. Moore 2007; Omi and Winant 2014). Collins (2000, 2004) contended that black women face extensive discrimination in paid labor markets, and this remains true (Browne and Misra 2003). However, the rise of a service economy, weakened collective bargaining, and the shrinking social safety net mean that the “working-class” today is even more distanced from the mechanisms that have historically produced economic and social mobility. Not coincidentally, today’s working class is also predominantly composed of people of color, many of them women, despite the way in which this group is often conceptualized as forgotten white men who are adrift as a result of the declining manufacturing industry. Finally, while Collins (2000, 2004) acknowledged the ways sexuality intersects with gender, race, and class to create specific forms of oppression for LGBTQIA members of the black community, recent advances, developments, and discussions around gender and sexual identity (and minorities in these communities) mean that even categorizing “black women” necessitates attention to transgender and femme folx who may be otherwise overlooked.
These economic, social, and cultural changes are part of a process by which the United States is home to an increasingly stratified, unequal, polarized population. In this address, I consider how black women today continue their longstanding work of fighting back against mechanisms of social stratification. I discuss the implications of Collins’s (2000) theorizing in a new economy characterized by record levels of income inequality, a fractious political sphere, and the growth of new media. I argue that one consequence of these economic, structural, and cultural changes is that black women are “reclaiming their time” in ways that provide a blueprint for addressing many of the forms of stratification that persist in U.S. society today. Finally, I assess what additional structural and social changes need to occur in order to follow black women’s lead in working to reduce various types of social stratification in a society that is only growing more unequal.
Changes in Work, Politics, and Media
Changing Work
Black women always have had a precarious position in the labor market. Slavery saw their labor stolen and exploited, as racism became fundamentally inherent to the capitalist structure in the Americas. As Angela Davis (1984) noted, this had a particularly racial and gendered component, as even black women’s reproduction was subjected to the capitalist machine. Black women during this time could be (and were) raped with impunity, and the dictum that “slaves follow the status of the mother” meant that their very ability to bear children was commodified and exploited by white slave owners.
In the post-slavery era, black women continued to do low wage work—sharecropping, domestic service—as race and gender restricted them to the “bottom class” of the labor market (Branch 2011). Southern states like Georgia relied on incarcerated black women’s prison labor to build highways, railroads, and other infrastructure projects, thus shifting the economy from a plantation to an industrial-based one (LeFlouria 2016). In urban areas that were rapidly becoming more populated during and after the Great Migration (think Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia), black women were overrepresented as domestic labor (Wilkerson 2010). In both regions, their work tended to offer low pay, few labor protections, and little status. They also were deliberately excluded from government policies such as the Social Security Act that sought to create a strong middle class (Katznelson 2006).
It was not until the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement that some of the institutionalized barriers to education and employment began to lower, allowing black women access to jobs from which they previously had been effectively blocked. With the end of legal segregation, black women have been able to access higher education and occupations that offer more influence and power. While they now technically have access, they remain underrepresented in these positions, facing enormous barriers including but not limited to sexual harassment, difficulty accessing mentors, and broad presumptions of incompetence (Bell and Nkomo 2003; Jones and Shorter Gooden 2000; Williams 2015). And many of the same issues around black women’s work and labor persist—largely as a result of the “war on drugs,” black women are the fastest growing demographic consumed by the prison industrial complex, where their bodies and their labor continue to be exploited (Ritchie 2012).
However, black women are “reclaiming their time” by making efforts to change systemic racial and gendered processes that render workplaces and organizations particularly unwelcoming spaces. Interestingly, this is true particularly among black women in professional, high-status occupations. In a recent study of black workers in the health care industry, I found that black women working as doctors were particularly attuned to the ways gender and racial discrimination were salient factors that impeded their occupational mobility and opportunities for success (Wingfield 2019). They noted that racial barriers were frequently institutionalized in ways that artificially depreciated the numbers of black workers who entered the medical profession. Yet they also were quite attuned to the gender dynamics in the medical field that create additional difficulties for women across a variety of racial backgrounds.
For black women physicians, these observations spurred them to attempt to change the organizations in which they worked. They were particularly motivated to try to implement solutions to offset what they saw as systemic racial and gendered biases that disproportionately affected women in medicine. One doctor in my study, Emily,
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described her efforts to mentor and guide young women of color in the field, a decision prompted by the ways she believed she suffered from a lack of mentorship early in her career: The problem is that when you get past your first two years of medical school, everything is completely subjective. And so, in terms of you getting into the best residency or the best fellowship, it’s largely based on your ability to have good social interactions with people. So if you’re marginalized from the very beginning, you’re kind of screwed. So I’m always trying to do what I can to be there for young students who contact me because you don’t want them to have the experience you had.
As Emily states here, mentoring and close relationships with higher-status colleagues are a critical route to establishing more equity in the medical profession. Yet, from her standpoint, too many black women doctors lack these relationships, resources, and social capital they provide.
Jenna, a doctor in her forties and a partner in a private practice, intentionally advocated for women of color when it came to hiring. Discussing a Latina doctor who applied for a position with her practice, she enthused, “I was so excited about her. . . . I [thought she] looked really good. She met all the criteria we wanted and she was even bilingual!” Although her efforts were not always successful, she attempted to use her position of influence to create more equitable representation in her practice.
Other data bear out this argument that black women are active participants in efforts to change work in important ways. The “Fight for Fifteen,” an initiative that began in New York City to raise the minimum wage to $15, includes many black women in its efforts to address the wide gap between wages and living conditions in many major metropolitan areas. This is perhaps unsurprising, as black women tend to be overrepresented in low-wage service work. And yet, black women’s engagement in this movement is more than just personal. Their visible efforts to advocate for increased wages that match current costs of living indicate that black women are working tirelessly to improve the conditions they encounter for all low-wage workers, regardless of race or gender. This is particularly true in a neoliberal economy, where workers have few supports and are strongly discouraged from collective action.
Changing Politics
Perhaps the most striking evidence of how black women are “reclaiming their time” is visible in the political sphere. When it comes to electoral politics and voting participation, black women long have had particularly high rates of involvement, even in the face of institutionalized barriers such as voter ID laws, shortened voting times, and concerted efforts to reduce the number of polling places in predominantly black communities. Black women are unlikely to support candidates who campaign on principles of “free markets,” deregulation, cracking down on immigrants, or being “tough on crime.” Instead, black women voters tend to coalesce behind candidates that address issues such as gun violence, mass incarceration, economic inequality, and the lack of affordable health and/or child care.
In 2017, black women’s voting power decisively shifted the outcome of a close election. Republican Roy Moore narrowly lost his bid for an Alabama Senate seat after multiple allegations of sexually assaulting minors. Yet these accusations did not turn the tide of most white voters in the state. Instead, especially high turnout from black women voters delivered the win to his opponent, making Doug Jones the first Democrat elected to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate in nearly three decades. The following year, their turnout and votes also ensured that the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey remained in Democratic hands, and they overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates in Georgia and Florida (Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum, respectively), who narrowly lost in races that heavily favored Republican candidates.
As of the 2018 midterm elections, black women also achieved several “firsts.” Letitia James became the first black woman elected Attorney General of New York, while a record number of more than 20 black women were elected to represent their respective constituencies in the House of Representatives. Many, like Lucy McBath of Georgia and Lauren Underwood in Illinois, ran in predominantly white districts while openly acknowledging racial and other types of injustice. In fact, McBath’s son Jordan Davis was murdered in 2012 by a white man who shot into a car full of teenagers after they refused his demand to turn down their music. These women’s candidacies—and successful victories—are indicative of black women’s determination to use elected office as a platform for addressing issues of interest and concern to them, and of their use of civic engagement rather than the cynical political strategies of voter suppression or gerrymandering.
Collins (2000, 2004) wrote about the ways that black women’s collective action often has gone unnoticed or is blatantly disregarded by many scholars. In some cases, this is because their efforts operate outside the bounds of what sociologists considered “real” activism. In the 1960s, black women’s leadership and activism all too frequently was overlooked in favor of men who were considered the dynamic, charismatic figureheads of various movements. Consequently, men like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson, Medgar Evers, and Kwame Toure (formerly Stokely Carmichael) are well-known figures from that period. Less so are women like JoAnn Robinson, Diane Nash, Ella Baker, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, and Fannie Lou Hamer, all of whom put in critical effort, time, and in some cases, literally their own blood, sweat, and tears fighting for political change.
Today, the advent of social media means that black women who are critical figures for social change have somewhat more visibility than their predecessors of the 1960s and 1970s. And while some of the issues these women are seeking to change remain disturbingly similar to those of previous generations (e.g., police brutality, racial equity), these women have, to some degree, been able to utilize platforms like Twitter and Facebook to gain well-deserved recognition for their work, and also to shine a broader spotlight on the social problems they are fighting. The #BlackLivesMatter movement was founded by three black queer women—Alicia Garza, Opal Tometti, and Patrisse Cullors. Tarana Burke, who first coined #MeToo (hashtag and phrase) to draw attention to the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault, uses her platform to critique the social structures that enable, protect, and shield powerful figures from consequences. And it is worth noting that despite Burke’s introduction of the hashtag in 2006, it did not become internationally known or used until over a decade later when a white woman actor/activist used it on Twitter. As always, black women continue to do the work. They are only just beginning to be recognized for it.
Changing Media
Black women’s efforts at self-definition also are resulting in a changed media landscape. For years, black women have been subjected to crude, near-parodic representations of themselves in media. Controlling images of black women as mammies, matriarchs, jezebels, and welfare mothers gave way to depictions of bad black mothers, black ladies, modern mammies, and educated black bitches (Collins 2000, 2004). These representations all have some commonalities, namely, a reliance on narratives of black women as insufficiently able to adhere to racially specific gendered and sexual norms and deserving of public and social policies designed to punish them for these perceived aberrations.
How are black women “reclaiming their time” when it comes to media representation? The rise of social media and the proliferation of various types of content (e.g., YouTube channels, blogs) have allowed groups who have generally been excluded from traditional entertainment avenues to bypass gatekeeping measures. For some black women creatives, that means that there are now new ways and additional platforms through which they can “reclaim their time” by depicting alternate representations of black women. Further, the commercial success of their film and television projects (e.g., Girlfriends, The Game) demonstrates that there is a viable audience for media content by and about black women.
As a result, black women now hold a more visible role as creators and stars of entertainment media than they have in perhaps any other time period. Issa Rae’s HBO series Insecure features a group of black women of varying skin tones, body types, and hair textures, offering a variety of visual representations of black women. The show also wrestles with questions of social class, gender and racial workplace discrimination, and sexual identity in black communities. Laverne Cox’s role as Sophia Burset on the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black led to her Emmy nomination, history-making covers on Time and Cosmopolitan magazine, and the opportunity to become the first transgender person to play a transgender series regular on network television (CBS’s Doubt). In 2018, Ava Duvernay became the first black woman to lead a 100-million-dollar film production with her adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time. With the 2018 premiere of the television show Pose, a series about five transwomen in the 1980s New York ballroom scene, Janet Mock became the first trans woman of color to write for a television series. And of course, Shonda Rhimes’s success as a showrunner for the series Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder allowed her to feature black women in leading roles and to introduce more diversity in representations of women of color in this medium. Rhimes’s shows were all noteworthy in part because they showcased black women in powerful, influential positions—chief of surgery, consultant and “fixer,” law professor.
In creating these media, Cox, Rae, Mock, Duvernay, and Rhimes rebut the types of controlling images that long have characterized black women in entertainment media. Grey’s Anatomy’s depictions of Chief of Surgery Dr. Miranda Bailey’s personal life challenge the “modern mammy” image of middle-class black women who happily eschew commitments to family or loved ones in order to devote their lives to predominantly white workplaces. Laverne Cox’s portrayal of Sophia sympathetically highlights some of the challenges black trans women can face, especially when the show exposes tensions with her family, other inmates, and the economic factors that led to her incarceration. On Insecure, Molly’s flaws, insecurities, and struggles with her personal and professional relationships run counter to the controlling image of the “educated black bitch” who is cutthroat and intent on dominating black men, as well as the “black lady” whose gentility, refinement, and inexhaustible patience obscure racialized and gendered stresses. And Duvernay’s vision of Meg Murray, the science and math–loving protagonist of A Wrinkle in Time, forcefully rejects common images of hypersexualized, aggressive young black girls in need of policing and extreme forms of social control.
By “reclaiming their time” in this way, black women artists are re-envisioning and critically interpreting the ways that race, gender, class, sexuality, age, and other factors shape representations of black women and girls. But in an era where media has global reach, this action takes on heightened importance. When black women are in charge of creating media representations that provide a more diverse, broad depiction of themselves, these depictions challenge the tacit assumptions present in controlling images that justify black women’s treatment in various social institutions. And given the global reach of American entertainment media, these representations have the potential to reach markets around the world.
When it comes to media representations, work, and politics, black women are indeed “reclaiming their time.” Their actions in these and other social institutions are a significant, powerful blow to entrenched systems of social stratification. Black women’s civic participation has had profound consequences for American democracy, their work within organizations helps create more accessibility for people of color, and their mass media images are a powerful critique of exploitative representations of black women. Black women today continue along a path they have walked for centuries—pushing for a more equitable society where they can engage in self-definition that opposes racist, sexist depictions of black femininity; where they can work in organizations that are hospitable and welcoming rather than dehumanizing; and where they are represented by people who look like them, share their experiences, and will advocate for and support policies that enhance their well-being.
Where to Go from Here?
While there is much to laud about black women’s efforts in these and other fronts, it is important not to be too sanguine. “Reclaiming their time” occurs in the face of overwhelming odds, and as a result, many black women still deal with the effects of systemic gendered racism and its manifestations in workplaces, families, schools, and public life. These structural challenges help explain rising rates of incarceration, horrific rates of violence toward transwomen, maternal mortality, and HIV/AIDS among black women. These problems persist despite black women’s herculean efforts. To quote from the acclaimed television show The Wire, “Game the same—just got more fierce.”
Black women are leading the way when it comes to participatory democracy, reshaping institutions to be more receptive to the multiracial demographics of twenty-first century America, and creating entertainment media that rejects the stereotypes and tropes that justify their subordination. Despite their leadership, however, the fact remains that other groups have been slow to follow. When it comes to political participation, differences between black and white women remain particularly stark. For instance, in the 2016 presidential election, 53 percent of white women who voted cast ballots for Republican Donald Trump in spite of his lengthy record of publicly insulting women’s looks, multiple accusations of sexual assault, and support for policies that would increase economic burdens for most women. Only 6 percent of black women supported this.
Though many pundits and reporters expressed surprise at this data, this outcome is quite consistent with decades of research documenting racial differences in voting patterns. White women generally vote for Republican candidates, even when those candidates support policies that are detrimental to women’s equal participation in society. Even (or especially) when those candidates support initiatives that are harmful to women of color, poor women, and/or women who are not U.S. citizens, these factors do not appear to be a deterrent.
When it comes to voting, support for democracy, and civic participation, increasing all these things requires that white women follow black women’s lead in these areas. Black women writers, thinkers, and scholars have spent generations identifying the ways that far too many white women enjoy benefiting from racial stratification rather than doing the work to end it. Even when white women advance feminist ideals, all too often these ideals are designed to erase the gender differences between elite white men and elite white women, with much of the structures that uphold other types of inequality left fully intact. For example, consider the version of feminism advanced in Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s bestselling book Lean In (2013). Sandberg suggests women should respond to gender disadvantage by being proactive and taking the initiative at work. Among many other shortcomings, these suggestions ignore the research showing that black women are more likely to aspire to and pursue higher-status jobs, while remaining less likely to receive institutional and individual support from colleagues and higher-ups (Williams 2015). As Michelle Obama dryly noted in a 2018 discussion of her book Becoming, “That [lean in] shit doesn’t work all the time.” It definitely doesn’t always work for black women.
White women on the progressive end of the spectrum also should take heed of the need to listen to and perhaps change their relationships with black women. Research suggests that even commitment to antiracism and equity does not necessarily preclude whites from behaving in ways that reproduce racist stereotypes, attitudes, and beliefs that are detrimental to people of color. Sociologist Robin DiAngelo (2018) describes the concept of white fragility to capture the ways that even liberal whites react with dismissiveness, denial, and withdrawal when confronted with examples of their own racist behavior. The concept and/or deployment of “white tears” can be particularly aggravating, especially when they commence in response to black women identifying systemic or interpersonal racism. As DiAngelo observes, Whether intended or not, when a white woman cries over some aspect of racism, all the attention immediately goes to her, demanding time, energy, and attention from everyone in the room when they should be focused on ameliorating racism. While she is given attention, the people of color are yet again abandoned and/or blamed. . . . Further, because we so seldom have authentic and sustained cross-racial relationships, our tears do not feel like solidarity to people of color we have not previously supported. (2018, 134-35)
Liberal/progressive white women, then, should carefully consider how they can benefit from listening to and learning from black women, and how they can do so without centering their own emotions. Progressive white women especially should not assume that their liberal bona-fides, support for left-leaning political candidates, or even their doctorate degrees in sociology exempt them from perpetuating racist scholarship, interactions, and aggressions.
Advancing support for democratic norms, public policy that reduces gender gaps, and creating more equitable institutions requires that white women finally begin to listen to and follow the lead of black women. This is not a new argument. Black women have long been quite vocal about both progressive and conservative white women’s complicity in and support for racial discrimination, evidenced through voting patterns, strategies for occupational advancement, and “feminist” leadership. What would be novel and unprecedented at this point would be for white women to listen and change, without engaging in white fragility, tears, or other dismissive tactics.
Moving towards a less stratified society means that black men also should make a similar course correction. Too often, black men are willing to appropriate the labor and energy that black women put into social movement activism and collective action that is designed to highlight issues facing black communities. While black women like Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometti do the work to draw attention to police violence, somehow the default victims of this brutality frequently become men, obscuring black women’s vulnerability to state violence. This is how a separate #SayHerName movement becomes necessary—to draw attention to Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Rekia Boyd, Dajerria Becton, and other black girls and women police have killed or harmed with impunity.
Black men can and should also follow black women’s leadership in other areas of social protest as well. For instance, black women activists, actors, professors, and everyday workers have spoken openly about their own experiences with sexual harassment. In the #MeToo era, these discussions are timely and overdue, and are finally leading to consequences for those who have harassed with few if any repercussions. But as envisioned by women like Tarana Burke, #MeToo is not a narrative about bad men/good women. Burke has eloquently used an intersectional approach to argue that power, not gender, is the core defining feature of sexual harassment. Those who are in positions of power are disproportionately men, and those they harass are frequently women. But women are by no means immune to abusing power once they have it.
Black men also can take a page from black women in this area by engaging in nuanced critiques of the sort of power dynamics that made #MeToo necessary in the first place. Doing so helps to challenge existing structures that disempower women, but it also highlights some of the systemic processes that work to black men’s detriment as well. For instance, my research on black men in professional workplaces shows that they certainly are not exempt from gendered harassment (Wingfield 2010, 2012). In some cases, white women nurses engage in overt forms of sexual harassment, as evidenced by this account from one of my interviewees, Sherrod, a nurse I interviewed for a study of black men working in culturally feminized occupations: The first time, I said, “Look, I’m going to pretend this didn’t happen. Let’s just leave this alone.” And then it kept happening. Every day it was something. She was either brushing up against me, her breasts or something—it was every day, it was repeatedly.
Even black men working in high-status fields like medicine are not fully protected. Rather, intersections of race, gender, and occupational status mean they are exposed to banter and commentary that they find fraught, dangerous, and risky, particularly given the stereotypes of black men as sexual aggressors and threats. My interviewee Nick, an emergency room doctor, described how this creates an unwelcome environment at work: I don’t really joke with them too much. When things get to an uncomfortable level, I just tend to either walk away or not answer. You just try not to get yourself involved. Because when the supervisor or whoever asks, “Who was there?” the response is, “Three nurses and the black guy.”
Establishing workplaces and social spaces that are free from harassment and allow workers to do their jobs without fear of assault is essential for a fully functioning economy and a healthy society. Power dynamics are key to how this harassment persists, and an intersectional approach highlights why and how these do not always fall only along gendered lines. Black women are working to address this. Black men should join in.
Apart from acting in their own direct self-interest, black men also should support black women’s efforts to highlight the corrosive effects of sexual violence and face the fact that, all too often, black women face heightened risk of this abuse from black men. Most intimate partner violence occurs intraracially, and for black women these rates are disproportionately high—more than four in 10 will face physical violence from a partner, and black women are two-and-one-half times more likely to be murdered by men than white women (Breiding et al. 2014; Hattery and Smith 2018). One indisputable success of the #MeToo movement is that men who are found guilty of abusing women and girls are finally facing some consequences. But, as the reports around public figures like singer R. Kelly and comedian Bill Cosby show, despite the racial disadvantages they encounter, some black men are able to construct an ecosystem that allows them to assault black women and girls for decades. It is critically necessary for black men to follow and align themselves with the black women who are leading the way in fighting for an end to sexual abuse and the permissiveness which often greets it in cultural and social settings.
Last, but certainly not least, black women also must hold each other accountable to ensure that we are not perpetuating divisions and internal hierarchies that could undermine our vision for and work toward reducing social stratification. Social stratification is a multifaceted process, built upon divisions that are not just centered on gender, race, and class, but also sexual identity, ability, nationality, religious identification, and even color. While black women have been “reclaiming our time” in ways that offer helpful approaches for reducing social stratification, it is incumbent on us to ensure that we are vigilant against reproducing hierarchies that still serve to exclude and marginalize. Black women have been absolutely visionary when it comes to democratic participation, restructuring organizations, and resisting racially and gender-oppressive characterizations. Are we also mindful of ways that we can chart a path for addressing homophobia? Xenophobia? As we work to change organizations to make them more accommodating for populations of color, are we also considering how these organizations can be particularly oppressive for transgender folx? Those with visible and invisible disabilities? Religious minorities?
One of the most groundbreaking aspects of black feminist thought was its attention to multiple forms of oppression, but in the decades since the theory was developed, the trifecta that has received the most attention has generally been “race, gender, and class.” Collins’s (2000, 2004) acknowledgment that other axes of inequality operate in conjunction with those three has gotten somewhat less attention in scholarly and academic circles. Sexuality scholars have done excellent work showing how binary ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender reproduce forms of stratification that are compounded by racial, gender, and class inequality (Acosta 2012; Garcia 2009; M. Moore 2003). The charge for black women who are leading the way in addressing social inequalities is to make sure that they do not make the same mistake that so many others have—dismissing or overlooking those who should be leading the way.
Conclusion
The goal of this address has been to show how, as U.S. society is growing increasingly unequal and stratified, black women are a group that has consistently used various strategies and means to fight against this. The metaphor of “reclaiming my time” serves as a useful shorthand for highlighting the ways black women are working to promote civic engagement, serving as or supporting political candidates who uphold democratic norms, redefining global representations of black femininity, and changing organizations to equip them to do a better job serving a more multiracial population. As U.S. citizens profess increasing dissatisfaction and disillusionment with growing inequality, political actors who seem disengaged from those they represent, and organizations that are beholden more to influential shareholders than workers and communities, they would do well to look to and support black women’s attempts to resolve these problems. This is particularly true for groups like white women and black men, for whom this has proven difficult in the past.
Whether this change actually happens remains to be seen. As black women continue “reclaiming their time,” they can lead the way. Are others willing to follow?
Footnotes
Author’s Note:
Thanks to Anna Branch and Angie Hattery for their thoughtful comments and feedback on this paper.
Notes
Adia Harvey Wingfield is professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research examines how and why racial and gender inequality persist in professional occupations. Professor Wingfield has lectured internationally on her research in this area, and her work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Social Problems, Gender & Society, and American Behavioral Scientist. She is a regular contributor to Slate, The Atlantic, and Harvard Business Review, and the author of several books, most recently Flatlining: Race, work, and health care in the new economy. She is also the recipient of the 2018 Public Understanding of Sociology award from the American Sociological Association.