Racial profiling, health care reform, wage inequality: The burden on minority women

Big talk about the persistence of racial profiling after the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard by a white Cambridge police officer. Lots of discussion of the subtle racism still experienced by middle-class male African Americans. (http://bit.ly/DHmhL)

All true and troubling, but to paint a fuller picture of the subtle forms of discrimination dominating the lives of African Americans, we also need to include the experiences of minority women. For them, the problems center less on the perils of 'driving while black' and more on the hobbling inequities of 'working while black.'

Ntozake Shange's 1975 play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf... (produced on Broadway in '76, with a film version scheduled for release in 2010 http://bit.ly/6emAk), first pointed out to a broader American audience something that African American women always knew: They labor under the dual disadvantages of being both black AND female.

In the 34 years since Shange wrote the play, not much--or not enough--has changed.

This is relevant to both the health care debate and to the (woefully inadequate) imminent increase in the minimum wage. Why? Because far greater proportions of minority women and children live without health care, and far greater proportions of minority women with children are single heads-of-households toiling in low-wage jobs. Even for middle-class black women with secure jobs and health care benefits, such as female lawyers (http://bit.ly/BqGmN), wage discrimination hits hard.

The lead editorial in the same issue of the NY Times (July 24, 09) (http://bit.ly/2ztxSa) points out--improbably and stunningly--that the minimum wage in this country, adjusted for inflation, was at its highest in 1968.

This means that unskilled single black women with children are earning less in real dollars than they were 40 years ago. And when those minority women move up into better-paying fields, wages in those fields fall. (Employment Inequities and Minority Women: The Role of Wage Devaluation, by Vinita Ambwani and Lorraine Dyke, International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities, and Nations. http://bit.ly/efXDj)

With so many American families, including many white families, now depending on women as their primary wage earners, compelling evidence suggests that many problems in the American economy could be addressed by eradicating wage inequality.

Equal Pay for Working Families (1999), estimated that "If women were to receive wages equal to those of comparable men, working families across the United States would gain a staggering $200 billion in family income annually, with each working woman's family gaining more than $4,000 per year." (Research funded jointly by the Institute for Women's Policy Research and the AFL-CIO: http://www.iwpr.org/pdf/c344.pdf)

The benefits for minority women would be even more dramatic: In 1999, minority women earned only 58.5 percent of wages earned by white men (this percentage has changed very little since then), significantly less even than the percentage earned by white women (74.4 percent of men's earnings then, 78.2% now).

This seems like a no-brainer: So much talk about wanting to help out the American family, so many big brains looking for ways to boost our struggling economy. How about starting with simple fairness: Paying people for the value of the work they do regardless of their race or gender?

See also:

Wall Street Journal, Wage Inequality is Bankrupting Social Security: http://bit.ly/jKXNV

Thomas Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African American, http://bit.ly/VvuUo