Capitalism is built on the backs of black women

“Black women are more likely to work in service occupations than any other broad occupational group”, the report states. “Service occupations—which include personal care aides, maids and housekeeping cleaners, nursing assistants, cooks, and food-service staff—tend to have the jobs with the lowest pay.” Roughly 28 percent of Black women work in jobs that fall under this sector, compared to 18 percent of white women. Meanwhile, those providing key services are largely unable to afford care for their children: In 48 states, child-care costs surpass 20 percent of Black women’s median annual earnings. “We take care of the children so you can go to work, start a business and go to school, yet we are not able to do that for ourselves and our families, because our pay is not yet adequate”, says Toni Johnson, an NDWA member and domestic worker based in New York. “You are using one set of people to sustain you, but you are not giving anything to them to sustain them.” (…) Black women are also twice as likely as white women to be incarcerated, the report notes. A separate study released by University of Washington researchers in 2015 found that in 2006, 44 percent of Black women reported having a family member in prison, compared to 12 percent of white women and 6 percent of white men. Women are more likely to shoulder the financial and psychological burden of having a family member locked up. Black women—especially transgender women and gender-nonconforming people—disproportionately face lethal gender-based violence (…) “We know that capitalism always requires there to be a cheap labor force”, she says, “and we know that racism is the institution that justifies that cheap labor force existing.”

Sarah Lazare in Capitalism Is Built on the Backs of Black Women (Inthesetimes)