Behind the News, 3/19/26

[Music] Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Hinwood. America may be off track but not behind the news. Two guests, two segments. Nancy Fraser will talk about her work relating class to other identity categories like race and gender and then something of a practical application of the theory. Journalists Natalie Weimor will talk about the harsh impact of mass federal government layoffs and black women, one of the weakest cohorts in the US labor force. The class versus identity debates are at least 30 years old and it often seems that we haven't gotten any closer to solving the problem over the decades. Nancy Fraser, an American professor of philosophy at the new school, an entity that might not belong for this world at least in his present form, has been doing some of the most interesting work in this field for a long time and she's here to give us a peek into her work in progress. She argues that it's impossible to separate class from other social categories like race and gender either analytically or politically. In the interview we talk about the Hidden Abode. This is a reference to a famous passage in Marx's capital. Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labor power we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sear that is a market exchange. Where everything takes place in the surface and in the view of all men and follow them both into the Hidden Abode of production on whose threshold there stares us in the face no admittance except on business. Here we shall see not only how capital produces but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. That secret world is that of the capitalist factory. Nancy Fraser, for like the last 30 years we've been afflicted with the class versus identity debates, you've got a strategy for getting beyond that dead end don't you? Yes, I do think it has been a dead end and I think that there's a widespread realization of that right now. I think it's a promising moment. There's a real hunger for trying to scale up opposition to Trump of course but more broadly to the larger social system that made him possible. So it's a propitious moment and what I'm trying to do is see sort of as a trial balloon almost see whether it would be possible to return to the idea of a working class political identity but in a new and expanded way which really is quite explicit about the internally raised and gendered aspect of the working class and I'm trying to give a sort of structural account of why race and gender are not alternatives to class but rather structurally grounded divisions within it. Like I say it's a it's a trial balloon. A lot of people will be suspicious that you know it's some new kind of Leninism but I think it's worth a shot and I think there is a lot of interest now in reviving the idea of class. So we'll see. I'm curious how would that be a kind of Leninism? The sort of suspicion that we've had within feminist movements and anti-racist movements that the second you sort of center class you are had geminizing in a tharterian way. Those other identities are. I've long thought that it might it might be a more fruitful way to think about things. Where do we fit in with the social division of labor and race and gender figure in with a social division of labor as much as one's relation to the means of production it seems. Exactly and this whole question of the means of production is somewhat complicated but I do think that capitalist societies rely on forms of labor that are equally essential and structurally grounded as those that have been traditionally the focus of socialist and trade union organizing not just production workers and industrial workers and so on but people who do care work whether it's unwaged and literally in the home or in a private sphere or whether it's in state institutions social welfare institutions or increasingly now in for profit institutions. This work of social reproduction is just as essential to a capitalist society as the assembly line worker or the miner or the construction worker. The same is true I think of a great deal of racialized work which is not even doubly free as as Marxists would call the proletariat free to sell your labor power in a labor market but also having been freed from any access to means of subsistence or means of production so it's a ambiguous statement free and I rather let's say thin sense but there are plenty of workers in the global economy who are not even free in that limited sense who are really subject to all kinds of direct coercion. An example that's very much on our minds now are migrant workers and especially people without papers but not only because they are essentially deportable they're very constrained in trying to claim any kind of labor right that we would think are you know required in our system. So there's a lot of a coerced labor a lot of tear work and the system is really premised on very large numbers of people doing that kind of labor as well as the kind that like I say has been central in the left wing social imaginary of work so I'm trying to think about how to put these three faces of labor as I call them together that is exploited labor expropriated labor which is this coerced or semi free labor and what I'm calling domesticated labor which is my term for care work or social reproduction work as it's deformed and constrained within a capitalist system. Now you draw heavily on W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction which is a fabulous book. What did you get from that? Where did that take you? It's an extraordinary book I have to say and for me the the the thing that is absolutely striking is this idea that 19th century United States had two labor movements it had trade unionism and socialism which was the movement to emancipate those doubly free wage workers but it also had abolition and that was the movement to emancipate unfree or expropriated labor. Now for Du Bois the whole story in a sense of this period is the failure of these two labor movements to recognize one another and to join forces in a broader anti-capitalist movement to emancipate labor in all of its forms. I think this is just an extraordinary leap of understanding and imagination. It's a story of what might have been in a way that would have changed the whole history. Certainly the United States but I think global capitalism more generally if these two movements had recognized one another and been able to unite. You know I'm a long-standing socialist feminist so my wheels are turning and I'm already thinking yeah but is it really only two if we can think of abolitionism as a labor movement which it obviously was and by extension black liberation anti-racism, anti-imperialism if all of that is in a sense the labor movement to emancipate unfree labor. Why not also see feminism as an unrecognized labor movement that is about emancipating those who perform care work. Feminists haven't themselves except in very rare cases understood themselves in these terms as a labor movement centered on one specific face of capital of slavery. Well they've offered me quite a bit of a shwah. Yes well that's a whole nother story of course but but I'm interested in this idea of does it make sense to think of feminism recognized or not including by its own participants as essentially a labor movement in the same sense in which Du Bois saw abolition as a labor movement. And how far can we get in actually using this labor lens? How far can we get in clarifying what a lot of feminist struggle has been about and I just want to add a caveat I'm not committed to the view that every single feminist issue is in any direct sense a labor issue. Nor would I say that every issue of racism or imperialism is immediately translatable as simply a labor issue. But I think there are all kinds of issues that we don't at first think have much to do with labor but a little bit of reflection shows that they do. So I'm trying to sort of push this as far as as we can go and see whether it has legs in effect. which I think is a very nice formulation that black reconstruction delves beneath Marx's hidden abode of factory production to an even more hidden realm on which the factory rests. Now you can talk about the slave society as being that hidden abode, but also you can say the same about domestic life, gender relations. Yes, that's exactly my point. This hidden abode language I've used in a previous book called Cannibal Capitalism, and I've tried to show that capitalist society and the accumulation of capital depend on these background forms of wealth and of labor that capital helps itself to for which it doesn't pay anything remotely like full reproduction costs, so sometimes none at all. The system relies on that, and so it's much bigger really, if you understand it properly, than the standard focus on exploitation, extraction of surplus value at the point of production in the normal sense of production. And now in this new project, which I call three faces of labor, using that same idea, but training it on labor, and the idea is that capitalist societies rely on two forms of what I'm calling shadow work. That's a phrase I took from Ivan Illich, he's using in a different sense, but I like the phrase, these are two forms of labor that are not front and center in our imaginary of what what labor is, what work is, and certainly not been central for the left. The social is left in any case. I think you can't have exploited labor, industrial assembly line labor, all of those iconic ideas of what the working class is, you can't have that labor without social reproductive labor, which among other things produces labor power and reproduces labor power. And you also can't have it, and this is Du Bois's point, unless you also have a steady stream of cheap raw materials and other input synergy and so on that are produced by semi-free, if not literally enslaved labor elsewhere. So no exploited labor without also expropriated and domesticated labor. These are shadow forms. We don't want to see them, but they're really necessary. As I was reading your papers, I was reminded of a concept that the 1960s and 70s Italian theorist developed out of the social factory of you that the capitalist world extended well outside the classic factory and labor relations into households and communities. The view of capitalism as a strictly economic system is just too narrow. Well, I completely agree with that, and it's true that that Upperismo tendency had a lot of very good insights about this. And I'm working in a somewhat different frame, but I think that what I've said about the expanded view of capitalism with its hidden abodes, that whole argument from cannibal capitalism, and now that the shadow work that is necessary and underpins the visible work, the recognized work, I think these are all in the same spirit as that social factory analysis. Okay, let's talk a bit about these two forms of hidden hidden labor, expropriated labor. It's typically racialized, construed as something special meaning inferior as are the people who do it, right? Yes, absolutely. That's right. You mentioned the Du Bois's account of the factory and the plantation. It's obvious the second you give it any thought that the mills in Manchester or in the northeast of the US for that matter rely on the cheap cotton that is produced by chattel slaves in the US South. So you know, you have this phrase behind Manchester Stans, Mrs. Sippy. That's true, and that's Du Bois's point, and it's still true today. So I mean, I sort of made up these little variants on this phrase behind Cupertino, Stans Chenzhen, Stans Chinshasa and Goma, behind those who shop at Walmart, stand those who sow a DACA, this whole global international division of labor. It's really a continuum in which there are so many forms of coerced and racialized work that are in those value chains. And then you add in the care work and the reliance on their capital's assumption, it treats care work like it treats nature as something just there. Help yourself. You don't have to give a damn about paying for what you take or repairing what you damage. I'm speaking with a feminist philosopher and Nancy Fraser. Then there's domesticated labor, which is typically very gendered, but it also treats those who perform it as inferior, just like bonded labor. But there's a whole lot of talk about women's holy mission that goes along with it. It's a different kind of conception of inferiority. Yes, thanks for reminding me. Yeah, I'm very interested in how the system is not only creating different kinds of labor that it needs, but it's also creating different kinds of people that it's sliding into those forms. So that's what racialization on the one hand and gender on the other are in large part about. And the racialized labor, the expropriated labor is often constructed both in reality and in the imagination as being ill, dirty, degraded animal toil. It's shameful in a way. And the people who do it have to be dumb beasts of burden, who can just take punches and endure pain. It goes with a sense of stupidity, insensitivity, lack of skill and just, yeah, inferiority. Whereas the gendered labor of domesticated labor of social reproduction, care work, as it's often called, is imagined very differently as involving a lot of sensitivity, interpersonal, right? This is very term care, which is a very sentimentalized word. You get this whole idea that the care worker should be very focused on the needs of the other, able to intuit very fine gradations of what's at stake and what's needed. So these are very different images. And of course, there are also the question of their intersections, what happens when care workers are racialized and then you get a kind of a hybrid of expropriated and domesticated work. It's a whole nother story. By the way, that's important to add this point that in trying to give this argument about the three faces of labor and their, as a structural feature, I'm also trying to say something about the paradigm of intersectionality today, which is very popular and it's a word that you hear all the time. And it's motivated by a very similar, maybe even identical, political impulse to the one that is motivating my work, which is let's think about how to get beyond siloed, right, segmented, group specific claims and identities, and let's think about the whole larger system. I think that's the motivation in intersectionality theory. I think what I'm offering here is a way of maybe deepening it conceptually by trying to sketch what the material structural underpinning is in the organization of labor in capitalist society. All of that is to say that I want to show here not only something about where these so-called subject positions of race and gender come from, what grounds them in our society. It's not just prejudices in people's heads, but it's actually how the population is divided in terms of what people actually do in the labor system. In recent decades, domestic labor has been heavily marketized. We've got less cooking, more ordering out to get food delivered by immigrants from the colonies, more third party childcare. How does this change your relationships with the research reduction domestic labor? How do you think about it? One thing is that it's made domestic labor much more visible or domesticated labor much more visible. I mean, now everyone talks about care work and if they don't use the technical feminist term social reproduction, everyone is talking about child care, about health care, education, cleaning, nursing home, AIDS, and so on and so forth. The portion of this work that's paid and you're right, that's increasing. It falls into two broad categories. One is the for-profit nursing home or hotel chain. There you often have immigrant and racialized labor, including people without papers. This is very much at the forefront of people's minds today with the ice and the deportation machine that Trump is constructing. So that's one strand of it, but there's also the question of teachers, nurses, and okay, some of that is also in for-profit, private schools and hospitals and so on, but some of it is public and [BLANK_AUDIO] This goes back really to the social democratic moment in the history of capitalism, where you got this second stream not of commodified care work, but of socialized care work in the public sector. And that gave a lot of visibility to social work as a profession, for example, education. So, we now have a very complex picture of work that is still done outside of monetized systems and outside of state systems. People, you know, taking care of their own kids or their neighbors' kids or, you know, in the community right in the household, we have a lot of that. We have a lot of this institutionalized and almost industrialized for profit. And that's a very degraded hybrid of expropriation and exploitation and domestication. And then we still have the socialized forms of it. And interestingly, that part is a center of labor militancy today. Nurses, teachers, right, the public sector workers in the care sector are among the most active labor unions and so on. So it's a complicated picture. It's not just one thing. Yeah, these fields, healthcare and social assistance is the labor economist column. They're some of the most rapidly growing occupational categories in the entire U.S. economy now. Exactly. Exactly. Healthcare is zooming. And that includes professionals and, you know, people who empty bedpans and so on. Okay, let's say a historical tour here. It's 16th to 18th century, which you read about. The era, if you could say primitive accumulation of the classic Marxist language, privatizing land, conquering colonies, very direct, extractive exploitation. What was happening in the three spheres in that period? I actually think that in this phase of capitalism, it's the go, what I'm calling the conquisted or mercantile phase. In this phase, it is what I'm calling expropriated labor that is represents the work of the overwhelming majority of human beings on the planet, whether it's in the newly conquered territories of where there's literal enslavement and just, you know, working people to death or in second feudalism and so on in Europe. So there's really at this stage very little wage labor in the classic Marxian sense of exploited where people are paid the necessary cost of their social reproduction and capital takes the surplus. Very little of that. So it's a pre-industrial capitalism. There's also in this stage not much labor that is domesticated in the sense of hived off and visible as a third face of labor. Plenty of people are, you know, raising kids and so on and so forth. But that's somehow part of the same social universe as this expropriated labor. And it doesn't have this sense of something hidden and separate. It's not hidden actually. It's not until the industrial era when you really get exploited labor coming out in this very visible way, even though it remains a small percentage of the planetary labor force. Still, it's iconic. It's visible. It's new. It's exciting. And it gives rise very quickly to a tremendous social struggle on the part of the workers themselves. But also on the part of middle class, reformers who are scandalized by seeing how badly people are treated and so on. So then you get exploited labor coming out visibly. You don't yet have a great deal of domesticated labor. I don't think that becomes really visible and distinct until the social democratic era where you start to get a family wage and therefore the figure of the homemaker who does this work becomes visible and even are respected and something many, many women seek as an aspiration to achieve. That goes along with the creation of social welfare and that socialized form of care work that we were just speaking about. There are time lags here about how and when these three faces become visible and demarcated. I've only just sketched the barest outlines of this in my work, but somebody who's a real historian, which I am not, should I hope or would, really track the shifts in these three things and how many people are doing this versus that. What the sense of status or lack of status is in various cases, how they see one another, how they relate to one another. We could have a whole different kind of history of labor movements than we usually have and I think that would be a very good thing. You've mentioned the post-war or two development of the welfare states. There's still a strong racial division of labor in the US, although black men in particular started working in factories. So there was some transformation in the nature of the classic wage labor relation. Yes, absolutely. I mean, obviously the great migration with the mechanization of Southern agriculture sends all sorts of Southern blacks north into the factories where they do the dirtier and jobs and are paid less and so on. This is really what inspired through boys. You get the CIO, the attempt then to organize the industry as opposed to the craft and you begin to get the first glimpse of maybe a cross-racial labor movement. By the way, at the same time, which is this is the moment when Du Bois is writing, black reconstruction at the same time, you've got the US Communist Party in the South doing cross-racial organizing. These are moments where there's a possibility as glimpse that we could have a movement that encompassed, expropriated and exploited labor together. It takes longer for the feminist peace to even become possible, let alone real as an alliance. And obviously even that black white alliance didn't hold to the degree that Du Bois would have wanted and is certainly now being afraid in all kinds of ways. We were talking about the neoliberal moment, the sort of new levels of hyper exploitation and hyper expropriation that are deteriorating living standards across the whole broad spectrum of labor in all three phases. The political point of that is in theory that's creating all these new hybrids, nobody is purely exploited anymore or purely expropriated. There's a lot of more mixed situations, objectively speaking that people have in common. If political consciousness was simply a mirror of structural reality, then we'd be in great shape now because people's structural situation is increasingly converging. But the fact of the matter is instead we get a kind of exacerbation of very toxic forms of misrecognition and hatred because people who are losing something fight tooth and nail not to be dragged down to the level of those people I've always been up here. So then we get back to that association of expropriated labor with the menial, the low, the subhuman even. I'm speaking with a feminist philosopher and Nancy Fraser, capitalist bourgeois ideologists want these categories to be kept apart or even in antagonism with each other. I mean, they plan at the some degree and encourage it, but it's not all a conscious conspiracy. So what precisely is it that produces these divisions among these three spheres of laborers? Right. Yeah, I appreciate the way you introduce this question because the conspiracy theorizing that that race is just somehow consciously introduced by, you know, prophet hungry, greedy capitalist is too simple. Plenty of them do make use of it and stir the pot and so on and so forth. But there is something deeper going on and that's really what I'm trying to get at by looking at the the imbrication of the three faces of labor within one system in which all three of the parts have to be working somehow together, even while the people are divided from one another. The three functions have to work together in order to generate the capital and to accumulate and so on. So if you ask why, I have to say that this is a question that historians are better equipped to answer than I am. What I'm doing in this book in progress is to first make the structural argument that this is the way capitalism has worked and is still working with the variations that emerge in its different historical phases. This is the structure of the system. And that's contrary to what many Marxists in the past have understood the structure to be in a way that's more simple than it really is. This is the structure. It has a history. I haven't actually written a history. I've just tried to sketch what the structure looked like in several phases. But I haven't really said much about how the phases develop. What's the configuration of political forces that come together at crisis moments in history to renovate the system to push it in a different direction. And that's part of the story. And part of it is path dependency, something that gets started in one form with the so-called discoveries in conquest in that first Burkantile conquistory. That lays down patterns that then become very convenient and incentivized, a capitalist to pursue and develop. I can't identify an agency in any singular sense that makes this happen. But it does happen. It happens. There was that amazing moment in 2020 when you had people like Jamie Dimon talking about structural racism. There was the DEI moment and environmental standards on Wall Street and such. And it's as if the capital has saw that and recoiled. And so we had this intense reaction in the subsequent years. It was remarkable to watch that evolution both. I remember signing on to the Chase website and seeing a splash screen about structural racism. And now that just seems like something out of a time capsule. Yeah, but you see they are the consummate opportunists. What they were doing then, it's kind of like in ecology. They were working out the whole project of green capitalism or of capitalist anti-racism. They see a wave and they know that they will be swamped by it unless they can find a way to ride it and harness it. And so that's what that moment was. Now there's a completely different wave. They're basically just sucking up to Trump at the moment. And that's not going to last, by the way, because from everything we can see in this moment, the whole Trumpist thing is very shaky. And I think it's not going to continue in this form. There will be a huge struggle over whether it will continue in some other form or who knows what. But they're riding a different wave now. On this point, I think it's fine to be conspiratorial actually when capital feels itself threatened. Whether it's by Black Lives Matter or ecology, they find a way to try to recuperate or co-opt the centrist strands of those movements and try to put themselves out as very much on board. At the same time that they're developing legal and political and organizational forms that are meant in a sense, you could call it greenwashing or racewashing whatever. They're not going to do the kinds of things that we need to actually solve these problems. Finally, you say the project, as I view it here, is to build a counterhegemotic political block that embraces the concerns of the three labor movements and foster its greater coordination among them. I know this is a really modest little question, but what might that look like in this world of precarity and dead-edness climate crisis, rising social tensions, you know, the whole mess? Well, I think I would start by saying, first of all, that this is not a normal period, but it's a period in which a critical mess of people in the US and elsewhere feel they've hit a wall. Things can't go on like this. Something's got to give. People are in motion around whatever issues they experience in their lives as the most pressing, the most existential, the most urgent. And that's not the same for everyone. For some people, it's dealing with wildfires and floods that are becoming worse and worse. For others, it's worrying that your teenage son is going to be shot by a policeman when they walk around the neighborhood or deportations or whatever. So people are differently situated. They have different priorities. The point, though, is that all of these bads, all of these things that are going wrong for everyone are part and parcel of one social system. So people are in motion. It's not our job to motivate people to act. It's our job. I'm saying this as a left-intellectual. It's my job to try to help people develop a map on which they can locate themselves and see who are their potential allies and who are their enemies. To see how the problems their experience or they experience are generated by the same social system that someone else whose problems seem completely different or also generated by. And whether those people are their allies. So I think it's really about, I use this metaphor of scaling up opposition and direct to it. And I don't, when you ask what it looks like, I don't think it necessarily looks like we merge everything into one labor movement. I think it's entirely possible that we have anti-racist movements, feminist movements, trade union movements, ecology movements, etc. But if in each case there's a critical mass of people that understand this map and the sense of needing to coordinate a lie, share a diagnosis, then you have something like a historic block, a counter-hegemonic block, a shared diagnosis, a shared aspiration. But plenty of room for differentiation of experience and local struggle. That's the picture I'm thinking. I haven't said anything about a political party and I think it's entirely possible that becomes a necessity at a certain point. And then that raises special problems in the United States where the whole electoral system makes it very hard to create new parties. But it has happened. And who knows. And for the meantime we may instead be struggling to empower the left wing or to create an even more left-wing in the Democratic party. All of that, I can't predict any of that. But I do have this image that if we had sort of free labor movements, not one, but free that recognized themselves as fellow labor movements, and that understood that this social system is screwing all of them in ways that are very imbricated and benefit capital. And that none of them can emancipate itself without the others, without the heft, without the vision, without the power of a broad alliance. Then I think we'd be much closer to really envisioning some deep social transformation of the sort we need. But now there's in some circles as a reaction, let's just center class and forget all those distractions that will not get us anywhere. Definitely not. That's counterproductive. And you can see that I'm trying to thread a needle here. I'm saying that class is the story here. It's just that it's a very different notion of class and that race and gender are central to what class is. And that works two ways. It says to the class only folks, you've got the wrong idea of class. And you are actually really speaking to a demarcated section one that might have once been privileged, but is now reeling and needs to align with all these other forces. And by the same point, you're saying to the feminist movements and the anti racist movements that you have to give up the idea of some kind of a cross class alliance of women or a cross class alliance of people of color that the last thing we need are more black faces in high places to quote can get your amount of tailor or more cracked the glass ceiling feminist of the shell Sandberg lean in type. I a few years ago co-authored with Chinsier roots and Tithy by the charia a little book called feminism for the 99% and that's still the strategy here. So there needs to be a feminism for the 99% there needs to be an anti racism anti imperialism for the 99% and environmentalism for the 99% etc etc. We used to in the old days talk about feminist use in especially in Latin America used to talk about the double militancy. Do you remember that you'd have to fight within the feminist movement for a class perspective and fight within the trade union movement or socialist movement for a feminist perspective of a gender perspective. I think that's exactly how I see that the places where these labor movements overlap as places where people are having to do this double or even triple militancy. There was Nancy Fraser, emeritus professor philosophy at the New School. Her most recent book is Cannibal Capitalism from Verso. My name is Doug Henry in the program is behind the news, back after musical break. I'm here to see that you are one of us. Eat it funny how we all seem to look the same. I'm getting lost down. I'll be in being there everyday. My life is a way. I'm not going to stand we forget. I was some of the dirty jobs by the who. I apologize for having a white man make these points musically, but it was the only song about labor market segmentation I could think of when I put the show together. Next, an illustration of some of what Nancy Fraser was talking about, the impact of federal government layoffs on black women by any measure an extremely disadvantaged sector of the labor force, suffering injuries from both their sex and race. Natalie Wyme Moore, a Chicago based journalist who is the author of the South Side, a portrait of Chicago in American segregation, has an article in the new issue of Hammer and Hope, what happened to the black women Trump purge from the federal workforce. Hammer and Hope, if you haven't heard of it, builds itself as a magazine of black politics and culture. It was founded in 2023. You can find it in the web at hammer and hope.com. Here's Natalie Moore with the story. Black women have an unemployment rate now about 60% higher than the national average, twice as high as white women, a demographic group with the lowest job of the rate. Into this situation comes Doge and then waves of federal layoffs. What does the general situation look like? How do black women figure in the body count of 300,000 or so layoffs? I would represent about 33% of those layoffs according to Cataclet Roi, who is a gender economist. She crunched those numbers last year, and I include those in my piece. But then I went back to her in January to see how things were looking after the December numbers. And they still aren't good. Cataclet Roi told me that black women are the only cohort to have lost jobs since February 2025. And when the January 2026 jobs report came out that cover December, it showed that every other cohort, including black men, gang jobs, those numbers are beyond the scope of the federal government. But I also want to add that white men alone have gained 362,000 jobs. You open the piece with the story of Constance Franklin who worked at the CDC. She's the very opposite of the cliche of federal workers, it's lazy and pointless employees. What did she do and what's happened to her? She did a little bit of everything as a CDC analysis. She worked there for 24 years. She led tours at the CDC Museum, which is actually volunteer work. She spent time in African-American churches in Metro, Atlanta setting up tables to encourage flu vaccinations. She worked in the CDC's National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. So that was a range of things where she could be working with college students, or educating workers who are at risk for injury and illnesses, and making them more aware of overdose reversing drugs such as naloxone. So it was very, very eat. She also spent time evaluating an A's relief program under the Bush administration, Bush number two in Botswana. She loved her job and it was very humiliating to be cut out like that. Now, I will add that I checked back in with Constance last month to see where things were. See her, her job, search had gone. She's part of the American Federation of Government Employees Union, which had filed lawsuits against the Trump administration. And so CDC is under health and human services. It rescinded some of those layoffs in her Occupational Safety Division. So she went back to work, but she's not doing the same work. She said, "I don't want to sound ungrateful, but for example, she worked with Morehouse College, historically Black College in Atlanta, and now she's not sure if she can." She was asked to come to do a lecture on global pandemics in the workplace, and she has a little form now to justify how that talk relates to Trump's agenda. The personalization of federal employment as a loyalty to this guy is remarkable development. It is, and I touch on that, none of this is by accident. It is not random that Black women separate the most under doge. If you look at Black women as a whole demographic, they are the least likely group to support Trump. Whether it's in 2016, 2020, or 2024. And at the same time, we hear people elevating Black women. Oh, listen to Black women. Black women are the keepers of democracy, protect Black women, and those are really platitudes. Black women will save America or keepers of democracy. But Black women's refusal to back Trump's policies put them in the crosshairs. And I write that it seems that the Trump administration couldn't wait to get his lick back against so-called "up-booty" Black women who have no interest in showing loyalty to him. Federal employment has been very important to the long sweep going back a century or more. Very important for any kind of upward mobility that Black workers have enjoyed. The federal employment has been very crucial to that. It has. So, you know, I went back and did some research in this piece because my limited understanding had been that after the Civil Rights Act, that's when African Americans were getting federal jobs. That is true. However, Black people were first able to access this type of employment during reconstruction, especially in Washington, D.C. They were getting strong salaries. They were able to buy houses. They were taking civil service exams and passing them. Well, going back to "up-booty," white supremacy does not like "up-booty" Black folks. And they resented Black ambition and under President Woodrow Wilson, a purge started. And I read the book and got to interview the historian Eric Yellen who wrote a book called Racism in the Nation's Service, "The government workers and the color line in Woodrow Wilson's America." Back then, white supremacists were bound to clean the swap. That's language that we hear now. And they lost their jobs. And it wasn't until decades later that they were able to re-enter and mass the federal government. It's interesting you mentioned civil service exams because having those sorts of objective standards makes it a lot easier on Black workers, particularly to evade what would be the prejudices of private sector bosses. Right. One would think. You'd almost think also that the prominence of Black workers, particularly Black women in federal and other public sector employment, might have something to do with the contempt that so many people in the right hold for public employment in general. It seems like racism and sexism figure in that general analysis pretty strongly. It does. And I don't know where the idea of the lazy government worker came from. But we know that we heard some of that type of language when Trump and Elon Musk were taking a chainsaw to the federal government. These are good paying jobs. For some people, they are making more money than they would make in the private sector. One thing that I was told more than once in my interviewing is that a lot of these women spend their career in the federal government. And that it's really hard to translate their skills to the private sector. So going back to Constance Franklin as an analyst, you know, that's a broad term. And she did so many things with it or, you know, a woman I interviewed who got laid off because, well, it's beyond laid off. USAID was, you know, completely gutted. You're spreading speeches for dignitaries or you are their body person. Some of these jobs are Jill of all traits. And how do you articulate that on your resume? A lot of what you're talking about is very important work from a social perspective, even though nobody is making any money on it. So it's really hard to translate that kind of labor into a private sector because, you know, you can't make a buck on it. Right. But then another woman who I interviewed, you know, had a community organizing background. And she was able to make a six figure salary doing that type of work for the US forest service, you know, by doing programming and helping communities get access to money so youth can enjoy the outdoors or see a career path for them at HBCU land grant universities. And I want to say I was surprised, but all the women I talked to don't very connected to their work and they were very proud of their work. You also write about the role of black women in supporting families. They're really disproportionately so-or major support for a whole family and not just it's not just about them themselves. Yeah, and I linked this to a recent report they came out from the conservative Heritage Foundation about saving the family. And I think that this is also building upon Project 2025. This report that came out says that higher marriage in birth rates is the only way this country will survive. And it's really looking at strict gender roles. That black communities reject because black women have historically worked and they are often the primary or co-bred winners. So they can't afford not to work. They can't afford to go back to this 1950s white picket fence nostalgia. Their overall plan would destabilize black women. It also is in a front to our communities. You mentioned this a little bit but let's conclude on this note. It's not just the government that's laying off black women. The decline in labor force participation has extended to the private sector employment as well, right? As I mentioned, the job reports from December and I had friends reach out to me when I was reporting this to say, it's not just federal jobs that are affected. That is the scope of my story. And of course, I don't want to exclude our paper over other groups. This was my assignment. But it is affecting women across industries in the private sector. That was Natalie Weymour, Chicago-based journalist and author of an article in. I never know which preposition to use for a website, Hammer and Hope. The web scene's name is an illusion to Robin Kelly's classic book on black workers in the South during the Depression Hammer and Ho. That's it for me Doug Henwood. Let's go out with this sum of post-empir from Kim Gordon's new album Plamy. Till next week, bye! Where' s my chirret pot And makes me cry Where's my chirret pot And makes me cry Bulgarian Grey That lay a fiber and you fire You're supposed to fire Say say anything Never get back, back Your speech, it's why it's old