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Like others have found when doing similar processes of political leaders, a man on Twitter followed a lot of dudes.6 Not a huge surprise. But what I wanted to know is if David Brooks listens to any black women, and if he does, who and how many?
Of those 322 accounts, six are black women. Now, black is complex. I wanted to be very generous here. If a woman had any marker anywhere of (1) being African American, (2) being black in America, (3) being of African descent, or (4) having once stood close to the black hair aisle in a Walgreens, I listed her as a black woman. The number is six.
Of the 322 people that a public intellectual chooses to engage however marginally as a professional peer, six are black women.
That may mean something or nothing at all. Important people do not follow a lot of people in social media. It is one of those minute forms of status signaling we do now. A high ratio of followers to followed suggests that you are serious, a leader as opposed to some social media rando. Serious people are not #TeamFollowBack. It is possible, then, that David Brooks only follows ballers. Or, he only followed 300 people when he first signed up for Twitter after someone in the New York Times marketing department told him he had to. The follows may be random and meaningless. Or they could be meaningful or anomalous.
No matter what you think, we might agree that it is not fair to pick on David Brooks. I decided to throw in another writer, of similar stature but a different political persuasion. Jonathan Chait is with New York magazine. He is a Very Serious Person. On the same day that David Brooks was following 322 people, Jonathan Chait was following 370. Now, Chait’s wheelhouse is a bit different from Brooks’s. Brooks muses. He is a muser. He muses about cab rides and meat sandwiches and hippie kids these days and what it all means. Chait is mostly a long-form writer who also writes op-eds. His beat, as he rather defensively described it in 2018, is mostly about the decline of western civilization. There is something in there about current politics—Russiagate and what have you—and a dash of political theory about the Enlightenment and a really serious absolutely-not-weird commitment to exposing the intolerant campus left. It is all very heady stuff.
Whatever their respective genres, Brooks and Chait share this: six. That is also the number of black women Chait follows. Six. It has a magical ring to it. Six is a perfect number because the sum of all of its factors equals six. Six is also the mark of the devil. The six black women on each of Chait’s and Brooks’s list are exceptional. They are primarily colleagues at their respective institutions or in their profession. At least one has a television program, which could be useful as both Brooks and Chait write books and what have you. I could name thirty-six black women whose musings warrant mundane engagement. Thirty-six. And that is without thinking about it.
Twitter is not especially meaningful as an example of how little engagement professionally smart people do with black women. But that is the beauty of it. When black writers are not read or black thinkers are not cited or black activists are not interviewed, we can say that it is just too hard for those who do not live, work, or learn near black people to find any. It is just so hard. But Twitter is easy. It costs nothing, in either time or money, to engage with someone who won’t move into your neighborhood or sit beside you at a dinner party or run into you at the fancy deli. When it is free to do so with little risk to one’s reputation or worldview, some of our most well-known opinion writers employed by some of the most legitimate publications do not have to engage with black women in any real capacity to retain their legitimacy.
When the people we read, even if we only read them to hate them, do not engage black women as thinkers or subjects, we do not feel compelled by our dominant culture to do so either. Presumably, a black woman writer is an exception because we all deal with ourselves as subjects, if we do not deal with anyone else. That has been the basis of my professional writing career. I am a black woman thinker for hire, because so few prestige publications hire us, support us, pay us, give us second chances when we are inevitably human, and present us to their readership as necessary to engage if they are to understand the world.
Every black woman I could think of who was writing op-eds as a regular part of her public intellectual work at a prestige publication was doing so as a second-, third-, and even fourth-shift job. This is what that looks like for me. In my competitive day job I teach, research, write, and administrate. In my second job, I organize and volunteer in my various communities. For women with children, this is usually when they do their yeoman’s share of the childrearing. In a few years I look forward to caring for aging parents. On my third shift, I research, write, and publish essays for public audiences on race, racism, gender, sexism, class, classism, education, economics, and culture. Only one of those jobs provides me pay and health insurance. And one of the others potentially jeopardizes that job.
I do that third-shift work for the same reason I do the second-shift work: I believe it matters. Hill Collins calls this critical truth-telling. It speaks to the masses using the discourse of the powerful that affords me the legitimacy to do both. There is certainly more than a bit of personal benefit to doing that work. I am occasionally paid to do it. I generate a kind of status from doing it that can augment my profile as an academic. I also make it easier for publications not to hire a black woman full-time. I give cover to publications that refuse to call racism racist. I receive death threats and hate mail and can never trust social interactions with strangers in public. I am just public enough to be targeted for harassment without many of the attendant benefits of being very well known.
But I also get letters from black girls who tell me that they saw themselves in something I wrote. I get notes from men and women who have reconsidered their beliefs because they read something I wrote. And I embody for many white people, especially those who will never venture far beyond a high-class deli shop to speak to actual people who are very different from them, a view of an unfair and unjust world.
Still, no one has to respond to me. I am not important enough in the stratified world of public intellectualism to command engagement. A Professional Smart Person can be so without ever reading a black woman, ever interviewing a black woman, ever following a black woman, or ever thinking about a black woman’s existence. That is why I wanted one—just one—black woman safely ensconced in the hallowed halls of prestige media so that the intelligentsia’s cultural critique translates the interests of power into the taken-for-granted beliefs of those who are nowhere near as close to it as they presume they are.
I would not care (much) what that black woman wrote about. David Brooks writes about sandwiches. Thomas Friedman writes about his taxi driver. If a black woman wants to write about the silk head scarf she sleeps in to protect her hair, that would be at least as valuable. I preferred a black woman who was not conservative-for-pay, but I was not even ready to draw that line. Because even such a black woman would necessitate that her peers—mostly white, almost all male, few with any discernible ties to anyone different from themselves—figure out how to treat a black woman as a peer for a public who so rarely sees that happen in any context.
Black women do not have all the answers. We are not superheroes, and ours is not the definitive worldview. But we are trustworthy subjects, of our own experiences and of ways of knowing. One of the more resilient slogans from the social media era of black cultural production is “Trust black women.” Sisters on social media say it to make their legitimate claim to what they know about their own experiences. Others, whether in solidarity or because it sounds cool, say it to “check” those who are questioning a black woman’s truth claim.
More recently, “Trust black women” even filtered out to mainstream politics. As the Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump debates were raging during the 2016 presidential election, high-profile women pointed to black women’s overwhelming support for Clinton as an indicator of how the Democratic Party should govern. “Trust black women,” Linda Sarsour, national co-chair of the Women’s March, tol
d her supporters. The idea of trusting black women is intrinsic to my desire to see a black woman on the op-ed pages.
It is not that all or any black woman is beyond reproach, but that she cannot be reproached merely for being a black woman. It is still a radical idea. It is at the heart of my research: black women are rational and human. Working from that assumption, I work my way analytically through political theory, economics, history, sociology, and culture. It rarely fails me.
I thought about this rarity recently. Donald Trump’s election had been one thing. There was clearly an aspect of race and gender at play. Women, some of them black, weighed in on what it meant that 53 percent of the white women who voted did so for Trump. But, as Trump’s eclectic, manic style of governance set in, public discussion turned to ideas about Russia and fascism and economic anxiety. I understand all of these issues as ones to which black women contribute meaningful analysis.
Black women who think about the liberatory possibilities for black people through forms of governance can surely speak to how we understand Russia in 2018. If Hannah Arendt is the definitive voice on fascism among our intellectual classes, then surely black women who have lived under fascist U.S. policies here and abroad can shed light on our cultural moment. If economic anxiety shapes one’s political attitudes, would not a group of voters who have always lived with near-recessionary rates of unemployment and stagnant wages for generations have illuminating thoughts on labor, on the economy? It seemed so to me.
It still seems so to me. In July 2018, the New York Times announced that Michelle Alexander would be joining their stable of regular opinion writers. She is the first woman of color to ever do so.7 In 2018.
Interestingly enough, as of this writing, Michelle is not one of the six black women on either Brooks’s or Chait’s list. She is a serious writer who writes seriously about criminalization. She wrote a best-selling book.8 She is a MacArthur Award grantee. She is supremely qualified. Perhaps even overqualified, as is generally the case for black women who are, on average, overeducated for their professional positions. She has that in common with the black women on the list of six. None of them can be honestly described as some blogger or an independent iconoclast, which is how we might talk about many white men who wrote their way into the public intellectual ether. There still is not a seriously left-leaning woman of any color or race at these publications. And that is my next complaint. You can catch it on Twitter.
NOTES
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1. Roger Gomm and Martyn Hammersley, “Thick Ethnographic Description and Thin Models of Complexity,” paper presented at the Annual Conference of the British Educational Research Association, University of Leeds, England, September 13–15, 2001, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00001820.htm.
2. Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Inferiority of Blackness as a Subject,” Tressiemc, May 2, 2012, http://tressiemc.com/uncategorized/the-inferiority-of-blackness-as-a-subject.
3. Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2017); Brittney C. Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018); and Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: How Women’s Anger Is Reshaping America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018).
4. The Department of Labor puts it mildly when it says that “[h]istorically, Black women have had high labor force participation rates compared to other women” (2016). Despite entering the paid labor market at young ages and working for longer over our life course, black women have “less favorable outcomes than their White, non-Hispanic counterparts”: lower wages, more frequent bouts of unemployment, a smaller share of the “good jobs” in the professional services sector, and especially dismal representation in predicted high-wage jobs of the future like technology jobs. For more, see Women’s Bureau at the United States Department of Labor, “Black Women in the Labor Force,” February 2016.
5. Using data from the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color, a 2016 report by Darrick Hamilton, William Darity Jr., Anne E. Price, Vishnu Sridharan, and Rebecca Tippett finds that most black families have no more than $25 in liquid wealth, meaning money that they could easily access as opposed to wealth tied up in a home or investments. See Darrick Hamilton et al., “Umbrellas Don’t Make It Rain: Why Studying and Working Hard Isn’t Enough for Black Americans” (New York: The New School, 2015). Despite our pitiable wealth position, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation finds that African Americans give a larger share of their income to charities than any other group. With negligible wealth and lower rates of participation in high-income jobs, black families give. And when they give, black women are instrumental in encouraging how often, how much, and to whom they give. That is all the more impressive when one considers that this kind of charity rarely captures the in-kind services black women provide to churches, schools, and communities. For example, black women financially support family members who are incarcerated. See Natalie J. Sokoloff, “The Impact of the Prison Industrial Complex on African American Women,” Souls 5, no. 4 (2003): 31–46; and Sandhya Dirks, “How Mass Incarceration Shapes the Lives of Black Women,” KQED, July 6, 2016, https://www.kqed.org/news/11010927/how-incarceration-shapes-the-lives-of-black-women.
6. In 2016, black women made up 61 percent of all students enrolled in historically black colleges and universities. They earned 50 percent of all degrees that HBCUs awarded that year, and black men earned 25 percent. (Author’s calculations from table 313.30 of the Digest of Education Statistics, “Selected Statistics on Degree-Granting Historically Black Colleges and Universities, by Control and Level of Institution: Selected Years, 1990 through 2016.”)
7. Whether single parents, coparents, or married, research has shown that black women disproportionately contribute to the economic and social well-being of their family units. The Center for American Progress’s 2016 report on breadwinning women says that “black mothers are by far the most likely [group] to be the primary economic support for their families, both because they are more likely to be single mothers and because they are more likely—when part of a married couple—to earn as much as or more than their husbands.” Sarah Jane Glynn, “Breadwinning Mothers Are Increasingly the U.S. Norm,” Center for American Progress, December 19, 2016, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2016/12/19/295203/breadwinning-mothers-are-increasingly-the-u-s-norm. See Rhonda Sharpe, Nina Banks, and Cecilia Conrad, Black Women in the US Economy: The Hardest Working Woman (New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2019).
8. For a host of reasons, both economic and cultural, black women’s political participation is a critical part of modern electoral politics. In 2012, black women voted at a higher rate than any other group according to the Center for American Progress. Maya Harris, “Women of Color: A Growing Force in the American Electorate,” Center for American Progress, October 30, 2014, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2014/10/30/99962/women-of-color.
Indeed, had white women’s participation been equivalent, we may have seen a different presidential result in 2016. Beyond electoral politics, black women’s civic participation spans the entire U.S. history. For a starting point on that literature, see Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2011).
9. In social movements, new research makes a clear case that black women have also been central to building and sustaining black social movements. To read more, see Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); and Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Knopf, 2010). The Black Lives Matter movement has made notable inroads in renegotiating the invisible labor of black women in movement work. To learn more about that struggle, see activist Patrisse Khan-Cullors’s memoir with Asha Bandele,
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018).
10. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage, 2011).
11. Predatory tax assessment schemes have been used to extract black wealth for generations. It continues apace today. Although much is made about how the foreclosure crisis of the 2010s decimated black household wealth and security, racist schemes at local municipal levels have been doing much the same for generations. For examples of this in practice see Kriston Capps, “How the Black Tax Destroyed African American Home-ownership in Chicago,” CityLab, June 11, 2015; and Leah Douglas, “African Americans Have Lost Untold Acres of Land over the Last Century,” The Nation, June 26, 2017. The shadow of these stories trailed every black family I knew, including my own, like a bogeyman. As a result, every year our family gathered in fear, intent on raising enough money to pay taxes for a plot of land we owned in an undeveloped part of North Carolina. Even paying the taxes never got rid of the fear entirely. That, of course, is the point of systemic legal racist terrorism: to keep people like us living in fear.
12. For more on the racial hierarchy of the rural eastern North Carolina region where my family is from, see Malinda Maynor Lowery, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).