Why the “Double Tax” is the Canary in the Economic Coal Mine We Need to Pay Attention To

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About This Episode

Today, I’m talking with Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, a writer and researcher as well as the youngest-ever recipient of the Women’s Human Rights Award by the UN Convention. Her new book, ⁠⁠The Double Tax⁠⁠, is out now. We covered:

• (00:00): Intro
• (07:45): Black women as the group whose economic progress (or stagnation) signals what’s coming for everyone else
• (24:20): Beauty spending as an investment in respectability and social capital
• (50:35): The study that explored hiring discrimination and what came out of it
• (01:00:00): Why reputational damage is one of the only consistent levers of power that “the masses” can wield to force change
• (01:04:00): The rational economic case for solidarity as the only way forward during crises

RICH GIRL NATION IS HERE. GRAB YOUR COPY.

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.

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Transcript

Anna Gifty:

There is strength in community, and that’s kind of the thesis of The Double Tax. That when you link arms with somebody, it’s a lot harder for somebody to push you down. And so you better link arms with somebody, especially during a crisis.

Katie:

The conversation that you are about to hear with my guest, Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman , was so wide ranging and enjoyable. We actually booked 90 minutes just to be safe, make sure we had enough time, and we barely got through half of what I had planned for us.

So welcome back to The Money with Katie Show where today we are talking with Anna Gifty about her new book, The Double Tax. Now Anna Gifty is a researcher first and foremost. She’s a researcher and a writer currently getting her PhD in public Policy and economics from Harvard’s Kennedy School. She also happens to be the youngest recipient of a CEDAW Women’s Human Rights Award by the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. And The Double Tax feels a little like a spiritual sister to Rich Girl Nation for reasons that you’ll hear shortly, but about the ways in which black women’s experience of money is different.

And as you’ll hear me tell Anna Gifty in our conversation, I think oftentimes, especially in this political moment, focusing on one specific marginalized group’s, financial outcomes can often be hand waved away as meaningless identity politics or oh, virtue signaling without analytical merit and necessity. But Anna Gifty’s core thesis is that Black women in the US are a little bit like an economic canary in the coal mine. It is in their statistics where the economic cracks are always first to show. And it’s why studying the levers that make gains for Black women specifically have ripple effects that boost other groups, particularly the working class.

So some of what we didn’t get the chance to cover, but I wish we had, included the role of student loans and home ownership in the racial wealth gap. Now, I received an interesting listener email the other day that noted some of the specifics of the post-war GI Bill, which couldn’t pass federally without the support of Southern Democrats. So a clause was included that while the federal law was to be race neutral, its enforcement would be local; that way, racial covenants could be added later and Black Americans could be redlined out from neighborhoods and homeownership more broadly. Anna Gifty covers the longstanding effects of redlining in the double tax as well as the fact that high-earning Black and Latino women were at least four times more likely to be targeted for predatory loans during the lead up to the great Recession than similarly economically positioned white men.

Now, I’m telling you this because I believe that this is an enormous component to this conversation that we simply did not have time to cover but does feature prominently in her broader thesis and her work that’s on me, that is on my inability to stop asking follow-up questions. So I will work on that. And with that, please enjoy.

Anna Gifty. Thank you so much for joining me today. Welcome to The Money with Katie Show.

Anna Gifty:

Thank you so much for having me. This is such an honor.

Katie:

So something that jumped out to me immediately when reading your book, I noticed a kindred spirit in you. You introduce your book with an antagonist who ultimately prompted you to write it. So will you tell us a little bit more about that?

Anna Gifty:

Yes. It’s so funny that you say we share our kindred spirit there. Sometimes you got to flex on the haters. You feel me? The story here is basically I was at a conference, I was giving a speech about this concept called Black Women Best. Essentially it’s the idea that the best outcome for Black women is a better outcome for everyone else. And afterwards, most people bought it. They were like, okay, that makes a lot of sense. I understand that argument. Except this one guy, he came up to me afterwards and he said, I heard your speech. You’re a very good speech giver. And I said, okay, thanks. He’s like, but I have some notes. I said, okay…

Katie:

You’re starting to sound like the emails that I get.

Anna Gifty:

He said, yeah, so are we sure that improving things for Black women, for women of color, would actually make everybody else’s life better? And at this point, I was like, were you not in the room with us when we were…?

Katie:

Like, well, please reference the last hour of material.

Anna Gifty:

You know what I’m saying? So I was like, that’s interesting that you’re asking me that question. I said, of course, that’s what I believe. That’s what I was just talking about.

And then he said, prove it. And that’s when I realized, I don’t know, my mind went blank. So I was like, you can just cite the last hour. But also, it made me think he’s making a good point here because my baseline is all the data and research that I’ve immersed myself in because of the work that I do. So for those who might not know, I’m a PhD student on the side, I like to joke, at Harvard where I study race, gender in the economy. So I’m always in this work, whereas someone like him, that’s not his baseline.

I think for me, I realized, wow, maybe everybody’s not operating from the same set of facts. And I know that right now facts are suggestive in some parts of our country and the world, but the facts remain the facts regardless of whether or not you believe them. And so I figured to myself, I wonder if there’s a way to bring all the facts into one place and to not just bring it into one place, but to really make it accessible, make it easy to understand what numbers mean, what these data mean, what these stories mean in the context of your life and in the context of society, so that the next time a man asks me to prove it, I can say, I just did it. You can go ahead and read my book. That’s right.

Katie:

Yeah, yeah. Cohering all those facts into a—putting forth a really solid argument for here are the series of if then statements that lay out logically why this is true. I share your maybe antagonism-driven desire to, as you put it, flex on the haters. As I put it, maybe make an argument that is so logically sound that no one will be able to push back on it, that I think is my north star.

Anna Gifty:

You get it.

Katie:

And whenever I tell people that, they’re like, that sounds like an unhealthy goal. You probably need to accept that some people are just not going to be persuaded by you. And I’m like, no, no, no. There is some argument out there that I can make that will bring them to my side.

But there are a lot of very kismet parallels that I saw in the way that you and I independently approached the structures of our respective books. And I think where we both identified the biggest areas of challenge, but also the biggest areas of opportunity. You go from navigating beauty standards for the first time to applying for a job, choosing a career, buying a home, which is a chapter that I also had originally included in my book, and then later scrapped in favor of writing a chapter about marriage instead, and then having a child, becoming a caregiver, moving into retirement. So you’re really taking this robust lifecycle view and saying, which this is my read of it—I think a lot of people are at least now be beginning to understand and share that assumption that those milestones are different for women. But your argument is that they are different still for Black women in particular. And you interviewed a lot of women for this project. Can you tell us how many and what was that process like?

Anna Gifty:

Absolutely. So this process is actually crazy. So I got to sit down for this. So we went ahead and put out a call. We put out a call to several women organizations across the nation, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. And we said, we want women and non-binary folks, basically people who identify as women, to sign up and share a little bit about their experiences with costs that they face as women, just kind of navigating life. Katie, almost 4,000 people signed up.

Katie:

Oh my goodness.

Anna Gifty:

It was insane. So I saw that as, oh my God, we might’ve just discovered something that we didn’t realize was a topic that people really wanted to talk about. So the way that this process went, I’m a researcher, so I said, okay, we got to screen go through our ethical board review because we have to make sure that everybody’s protected. And so we ended up screening about 1,200, 1,300 individuals. And then we randomly selected representation, right? Randomly selected a hundred of those individuals to be part of the book. And namely, we focused on Black women and white women because as the data makes very clear, those are the two groups of women that oftentimes sit at opposite ends of the experience of being a woman. Though we did have some opportunities to talk to Asian women, Latina women, unfortunately not native women, but learning from their experiences through the literature and through stories that have been told both online and offline.

But ultimately, I think the sheer interest in just having this conversation honestly should have been a clue to me that we were on the right track about the types of questions that we were asking here, which the really big question is how expensive it is to be a woman. Is it expensive to be a woman in America?

And you’d be surprised. People think that question is debatable despite the evidence. I was on the streets of Philly and I was asking folks like, yo, is it expensive to be a woman in America? And I had folks come up to me and be like, man, why are you saying this feminist stuff? Whatcha talking about? Whatcha talking about? A lot of people were saying that to me, and I was like, okay, not too much. But then there were some women who came up to me and they were like, absolutely, do you know how much I have to spend on childcare and just getting my hair done?

And I think a lot of people think about womanhood through a very singular lens of when we talk about costs, we’re usually talking about whether or not you’re getting married, whether or not you’re satisfying beauty standards and whether or not you’re having kids, but people don’t think about all the other things that you brought up. And I think that that’s actually extremely important, especially as we talk about the differences within womanhood as it pertains to race and class.

Katie:

That just made me so excited. I know the differences within womanhood as it pertains to race and class. I’m like rubs hands together. Yes.

Yeah. There were a couple really prominent instances that I planned to bring up today that I found particularly illustrative of the nuances between the financial challenges that Black women describe and those that white women were describing, because often it sounded like the core assumptions that were being made were actually different. And so that I think was really important learning. And you held these interviews separately, so you were able to identify those subtler trends and themes in the data. So I think to level set here and to give us a little bit of a foundation contextually, for every dollar of wealth held by white men in 2022, white women had 78 cents. That’s bad. That’s not great. It’s bad. Black women had 8 cents.

Anna Gifty:

That’s right.

Katie:

You write, and this was the subject of this speech that this audience member took exception to or was feeling resistant to that for this reason and others, we should be using Black women as the benchmark for real progress. Can you tell me more about the thesis?

Anna Gifty:

There’s a bigger question to ask here. And the question here is when we talk about women, who are we talking about? It’s actually a very important question. I know we’ve been having this conversation, namely around sort of sexuality and the LGBTQIA plus community, which I think is extremely important. But I also think that across race, I don’t think that people see women of color, especially Black women as women. If we did, we would say gender equality includes Black women, it includes Latino women, includes native women. And so if you’re seeing these disparities across these different types of women, you can see very clearly that we actually haven’t achieved parity. We’re very far from it.

So the question of who’s the benchmark for whether or not we’ve made it, I think that is really what this book and what that particular statistic which I brought forth from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis brings about, right. I remember seeing that stat as I was writing that chapter. That’s one of my favorite chapters in the book. It’s about housing and wealth. And I remember seeing it and being like, there’s no way.

But the thing is, it made a lot of sense, at least for Black Americans in particular, the long shadow of enslavement is undeniable, undeniable. And I think people don’t realize how recent enslavement was. People don’t realize that there are folks alive who are one generation removed from people who were enslaved. And so this is all to say that when I see those numbers and when I see kind of how they manifest in real life, we need to really think critically about when we say that we’re moving forward for gender equality or gender parity that we’re not missing. Going back to what you were saying, the nuances of who exists within that group that we’re trying to fight for wealth here is made up of a lot of different things.

We’re talking about assets, we’re talking about housing and that sort of thing. And what the book ultimately reveals is that the double tax is not existing in a vacuum. It’s not like, oh, I’m dealing with a double tax in one area of my life and other areas of my life where I could deal with the double tax, it’s not showing up. By the way, the double tax is the compounded cost of racism and sexism, but you’re dealing with it in housing and wealth, but you’re also dealing with it in beauty, and you’re also dealing with it and caregiving.

Think about just a bill, yet you have at a restaurant, the waiter keeps bringing you food over and over. That bill’s going to add, you know what I’m saying? You’re like, wait, hold on, hold on. Can you slow it down? So I think that’s essentially how I want people to really envision the double tax and how it really manifests for Black women.

Katie:

In the current political and cultural climate that we are in conversations that segment people according to these identity markers, like gender sexual orientation can sometimes be dismissed, I think as just doing identity politics. But I think that this highlights something that’s really important about what that sort of slicing and dicing of the data allows us to do, because it shows us that when outcomes are that disparate, now we actually start to focus on different root causes that are a little bit harder to see or easier to miss overall if you are treating the population like they’re a monolith.

So we had Tressie McMillan Cottom on the show a few months ago, and she said something in her vast brilliance to the effect of, “I’m a materialist. I believe that it is people’s material conditions that shape their outcomes. I am also a Black woman, and I believe that being a Black woman in America is a material condition.”

So to give a personal example from Rich Girl Nation, how I’ve kind of been thinking about this is the bulk of the tactics in my chapter about earning more money and about income is devoted to essentially negotiation. And there’s a section that emphasizes things like unionization and the power of collective bargaining. But when you think about the entire country, something like 75% of the workforce in America are non-managerial wage workers who if you’re writing to the audience that is the broadest encapsulation of who probably needs to earn more money the most, you would be writing a chapter about labor organizing, not tweaking interpersonal negotiation skills.

And so in that respect, I think, and I’m again using myself as an example here it is clear who your intended audience is by where you are placing the focus of your effort. And it’s only in looking at those finer tranches of the population and getting really clear on what is the problem that these people are actually facing, that those solutions can even be tailored appropriately. And so I think that that to me is why it’s so important to have conversations like this one and to make sure that we aren’t taking a monolithic view. Because when you take a more specific view, you get more specific solutions.

Anna Gifty:

That’s right. And I think another way I’ve been thinking about this is that Black women in particular are at the middle of the Venn diagram of many overlapping communities. I like to say that Black women sit at the axes of inequality. So we’re Black, we’re women. We oftentimes are working class, maybe poor, maybe middle class. We’re highly educated, but we have a lot of student debt, the highest student debt on average. We’re mothers. We’re breadwinners. You know what I’m saying? Our experiences oftentimes overlap with so many other groups lived experiences.

But if you really think about it, if you’re hitting the group that overlaps the most with everybody else, you end up solving problems for other groups without even meaning to. And this is sort of that Black Women Best framework coined by Janelle Jones, shout out to Janelle. Hey Janelle. I’m a disciple of that framework because I just think it’s such an important and clear way of thinking about how we make the world a better place.

And it really boils down to the best outcome for Black women is a better outcome for everyone else, or put differently, Black women are the rising tide that lifts all boats. And I think that a lot of times people see Black women as sort of other, are we sure that they are really representative of what’s going on in society? Are we sure that what’s happening with Black women can actually tell us about my community and about the experiences that I’m having with my neighbors?

And the reality is yes. I think the metaphor that I like to use right now to explain why the double tax is really important to address is, that you saw a fire at your neighbor’s house, five houses down, or even in an apartment building, let’s say five doors down. Is your response, dang, that’s a lot of smoke. I’m going to go back and catch up on Family Feud, right? Sorry, I picked the show. I was like, I don’t know if I should reveal what shows I watched.

Katie:

Wait, wait. Is this you telling me that you watch Family Feud?

Anna Gifty:

I don’t, sorry, Steve Harvey. I do not watch that show.

But it’s like, you see the smoke, you smell the fire, and you can see that it’s starting to spread. Fire spreads. Your intuition is maybe to run potentially, but if you don’t want your house to burn down, you need to find a solution to put that fire out.

And the way that I think about the double taxes, a lot of times the experiences that Black women go through, even during the good times, we’re going through a really tough economic, but without added policies that are needed to strengthen the economy, we might be headed towards a recession. But what I will say is that Black women’s labor outcomes, so how Black women have been performing in the job market, that was something that we were flagging back in March. I remember this because I remember seeing the first headline and saying, see, the last time this happened was COVID. And I remember everybody losing their job right after, or the time before that was post 2008, great Recession recovery. They had put out some recovery policies. It was helping some groups, but then I saw that Black women actually lost more jobs. I feel like we’ve been here before, and I think that it’s good that people are sounding the alarm, but the alarm is not loud enough.

And what’s been really great to see is the New York Times reporting on the numbers recently, and also seeing just a huge wave of mainstream conversation about Black women’s job outcomes. Because I think what people are finally beginning to potentially learn is that what’s happening with this minority group that you’ve been othering, this minority group of women that you’ve been othering, is actually a five-alarm fire for the whole neighborhood. And I think that that is one, I’ll say that I’m very proud of folks for covering it. Thank you very much for doing that. But also, I think it’s indicative of where we’re headed as a country.

I think there’s a group of individuals that are kind of emerging from the ashes of whatever’s going on right now and realizing that, in order for us to not land in a situation similar to this one, we’re going to have to think about what we pay attention to a little bit more carefully. And a lot of that is going to come down to what you said, splicing and dicing the data to better understand where are the pressure points that are being pushed and what fires are being set as a result of that.

Katie:

We will be right back to this conversation with Anna Gifty after a quick break.

You’re making me think about this idea of Black women’s outcomes economically as sort of the canary in the coal mine.

Anna Gifty:

Absolutely.

Katie:

That this is the group that because of these intersections that you’ve already pointed out, that this is where we’re going to see that strain first and where you’re going to witness the economic hardship unfolding that will theoretically then expand outward.

Anna Gifty:

Yes.

Katie:

I want to dig into your version of what we call the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel.

Anna Gifty:

Yes.

Katie:

I’ve been dying to ask you about this. We love the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel conceptually, not in practice, conceptually, and you define costs in the double tax more broadly as money, time, and effort.

And you included some of the statistics that I also found very worthwhile in the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel chapter that I wrote. And you take it a step further and you say, Black women spend around 20 cents more per ounce on hair products than white women. Now, there is this question that I get a lot in response to my own discussion of this topic, which is it sounds like there are real returns on investing in how you look. It sounds like meeting these conventional beauty expectations translates to things like easier promotions, a more frictionless experience of life in the workplace, more generally.

And then I think with Black women, you have this added respectability piece, which Mikki Kendall introduced me to, this added dimension of, you are assumed to need to perform, that you have put effort into the way that you look to be respected as a human being, to be treated with dignity. How do you respond when people ask if all this spending this time, this effort, this money, which you quantify as in excess of what white women are spending on average, how do you respond when people ask? Well, if those are the stakes and if that’s how it is, then is it worthwhile after all?

Anna Gifty:

Woo. That’s a loaded question, Katie, but it’s a good question. Many such cases. Listen, it is. I co-sign on everything that Mikki said, and Mikki, by the way, has endorsed this book. So I hope people—

Katie:

Let’s go.

Anna Gifty:

Use that as a sign to check it out. And I think what I want to add here to what Mikko has said is some of us can’t afford not to, right?

So I think the example that I used in the book is when a white girl dies her hair pink or purple, folks like to say, oh, she’s quirky. No one is questioning her economic status, whether or not she was raised right, whether or not her humanity should be fully acknowledged.

But let a Black woman dye her hair blue and suddenly her economic status enters the question, right? Oh, wait, she’s ghetto. Right? And I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with being ghetto. I don’t think that, but I think that when people say it is used in a derogatory way where it’s like she’s unkempt, right? That’s really what they’re saying. Who raised her? Doesn’t she know that she needs to look a certain way?

And that goes back to sort of this baseline expectation that Black women in particular have to always be fighting for their humanity. Our humanity is never assumed. It is always something that has to be debated, contested. It’s conditional depending on things that we satisfy. And I think in presentability, you really see that rear its ugly head.

I remember telling a story in this book about when I got my first perms, when we get perms, Black women, Black girls, it’s to do the opposite of what perms do for girls with finer hair. But there’s a lot of data that’s come out now correlational data that has shown that the things that we were using back in the day and even now are associated with higher risk of cancer, fibroids, et cetera. It’s not even just that the cost of presentability is high for women. It’s that it’s potentially fatal for women of color and Black women. But you can’t afford not to spend that money because there are other costs to consider, right?

If I don’t come into the workplace with my hair done, I could lose my job because someone could say, I’m unprofessional. I’m not representing the company well, and why would I put you in a client facing meeting? And even within the workplace, we could say there’s a certain look that’s associated with climbing the ladder. And if you don’t fit that look right, that’s true for all women.

But I think for Black women, it’s especially true. And it shows up in our hair especially where it’s like you have straighter hair. Maybe you’re rocking a different texture than you would if you were just hanging out with your girlfriends. And so again, it’s expensive not to invest. And so if sitting in a braiding salon for eight hours, that was my experience recently, and getting my hair braided saves me a world of trouble professionally, socially, if you don’t have your hair done as a Black woman, there’s also a social stigma that’s attached to you.

And again, it goes back to what Mikki was saying, which is your humanity is just questioned. Who are you? Who do you think you are that you’re just walking around being natural? And I want to be very clear that I love that Black women, especially Black girls, are starting to embrace their natural hair, embrace the hair that grows out of our heads. But we all have an understanding, especially young girls. This is the chapter where I interviewed high school girls that there is a cost to not investing in how we look. That was so deep.

Katie:

That was deep. But it’s a deep topic. I’m going to say something that sounds redundant; superficially, it sounds superficial. It’s like I think that sometimes topics like beauty standards and the way that we present ourselves to the world are easy to dismiss as like, oh, you’re just shallow. That’s just vain. But we know these things have material outcomes in people’s lives.

Anna Gifty:

100%.

Katie:

I was really discouraged in the research that I had done just to find how quantifiable pretty privileges, I mean throughout the education system, workplaces really does complicate this straightforward narrative about what’s on the inside is what counts. Well, obviously, we would all love for that to be true. And right now we know that that is not true.

Anna Gifty:

That’s right.

Katie:

And so I wanted to dig into the hair of it all with you specifically, because I think what I often emphasize in conversations like this is it’s okay to participate, to choose to participate, but it’s also important that we recognize what these systems are, which is means of stratifying people. These are ultimately extractive. They are never ending side quests. The goalpost is never going to stay still long enough for you to catch it.

Even this month, I’m seeing headlines about the new mini facelift, and it’s like, and now how will we fix the wrinkly hands? And I’m like, I just want everyone to take a step back and recognize that the baseline level of beauty and self-care, quote, self-care that we have been inoculated into believing is kind of just standard par for the course is actually optional. And there actually are probably things that you can and should be opting out of.

And so there is a level of minimization that I think I do with this topic to get people to think twice about all this expensive beauty labor and perceive it as labor and not just this fun thing that you’re doing because you just also want to, your personal self-expression of beauty just so happens to be exactly what is popular right now. But I think that the point that you’re making and what has been emphasized both in the book and in this conversation, is that hair really is a significant fixture in Black culture. It is not just hair. It is not so easily dismissed.

Anna Gifty:

Yes. But I would also say it’s important in western culture. It’s something that’s been policed for centuries.

Katie:

It’s a really good refinement of that.

Anna Gifty:

And so I think that this idea that Black hair especially has just been sort of under a microscope and has been used as a tool to even proxy discrimination. This is what the Crown Act is getting at, where I can’t discriminate against you because you’re black, but I can’t discriminate against what Black hair typically grows at your scalp. And I’m using that as a proxy for your race to say that I don’t really want people who have the hair that you have coming into my workplace, coming into my establishment.

And I think that what people don’t realize is that it’s a long journey for a lot of Black women, a lot of Black girls to embrace their hair. I mean, I think one of my favorite lines in the book is I talk about how I didn’t have a lot of reminders growing up that I was beautiful. Not that my mom wasn’t beautiful, not that my sister wasn’t beautiful, but in pop culture, I didn’t see women, my complexion being desired, being praised. And I talk about how Lupita Nyongo was such a critical moment for me. I get emotional talking about it. I don’t think she even understands the kind of impact she’s had on my life in the life. A lot of dark-skinned Black women like myself were seeing her during Oscar season when she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. That was my senior year of high school. I remember seeing her and being like, oh my gosh, she’s gorgeous.

But then people agreed. People agreed. And they said, yes, she’s gorgeous. Her dark skin is gorgeous. Her hair texture is gorgeous. Oh my gosh, look at her afro. So gorgeous, so beautiful. And suddenly I was like, wait, you think she looks good? I look like her though. And so that’s when I started to see a shift in my own self-esteem around, okay, maybe I can’t embrace my natural. I’ve been natural ever since.

And I think that going back to the numbers, I know we talk in numbers here, that 20 cent difference in products for coily hair like mine and products for straight hair like yours, it’s really a signal that if you want to be seen as presentable, you’re going to have to pay a premium for that. And I think that that’s kind of crazy. And you talked about labor too, which I think is so important, right?

There are actual returns to being beautiful. There’s actual returns to being presentable. But the question of what beauty is and what being presentable looks like varies across race and class, and it comes at different price points across race and class.

One thing I want to note here for folks is that I mentioned that I was in the braiding chair for eight hours. Nowadays, people will go on their laptop and they’ll do work, I’ll multitask and stuff like that. Back in the day, you had to take the day off. You can’t take the day off and say, hey, I’m getting my hair braided so I won’t be able to make it to work today. That’s unpaid days off. You’re losing income. But if you don’t lose that income, for a lot of women who might find themselves in the corporate workplace or in workplaces that have very strict standards around what professionalism is, that could be your job.

So either I take a day off and lose income or I potentially lose my job. These are the trade-offs. And that’s different from white women, quite frankly, where it’s like if you want to go ahead and get highlights, if you want to go ahead and dye your hair blonde, I know a lot of folks have dyed their hair blonde. Dr. Cotton has talked a lot about the power of blonde. I think it’s a wonderful essay people should check out. I think that white women experience a microcosm of even these politics around hair and hair color and how that manifests into different outcomes for y’all economically, actually.

But at the same time, you don’t have to do it. It wouldn’t impact whether or not you’re seen as hireable or impact whether or not people think you’re professional or not professional, it might affect your desirability. Maybe there’s some evidence around sort of workplace outcomes. I know there’s one study that found a correlation between blonde hair waitresses getting tipped more than their counterparts. And I think that that’s interesting, and something that kind of adds some nuance to what I’m talking about. But ultimately, that premium that Black women especially have to pay to be presentable is really a signal of this is the extra effort you need to do to make up for the fact that you’re Black, that this is the way your hair grows, et cetera, et cetera.

Katie:

Oh, yeah. I mean even I think in the essay that you’re referring to, I think it’s called the Enduring Invisible Power of Blonde or something like that.

Anna Gifty:

Yes.

Katie:

And she makes the point that even blindness though, the reason that blindness is preferable is also racialized blindness is also just kind of another word for white.

Anna Gifty:

Exactly.

Katie:

Yeah. I think that there’s a really interesting connection point there. Same with the amount of labor and money that goes into performing and meeting those standards. I think something that I was drawn to and why I love the way that these topics all intersect so nicely with one another is the fact that a lot of times, most times, in fact, the thing that is considered desirable is really just the thing that signals your proximity to capital. What you’re really doing when you’re spending eight hours, and I don’t know how many hundreds of dollars to get hair braided, is to say, I have eight hours to do this. I have the money to pay for this. There is an implication about your socioeconomic status in your ability to perform this labor. And the way that beauty standards shift over time signals to me that these are, and these are not my ideas, these are things that I’ve learned from Dr. Cottom and others, but signals that these are not just natural preferences that humans have. They just shapeshift to fit whatever is convenient for or beneficial to capital, C capital.

Anna Gifty:

Lemme double click on that. We love Dr. Cottom in this household. Thick is a defining book for me. Honestly, I 1000% agree with her, and I think I’m going to take it a step further to what you said. I think she’s probably alluded to this in her interview in the books that she’s written, capital is proximate to whiteness.

Katie:

Oh, see, bringing it right back again. Amazing.

Anna Gifty:

Okay, we’re bringing it right back. So I think even this idea of blonde is so interesting. I remember when Beyonce went blonde, right? For Cowboy Carter, people got really mad, and I think people were really mad because they were like, you don’t get to be this proximate, but she has the capital. And so in some ways, if she wants to kind of inch her way into that or inch her way out of it, it’s her prerogative. I thought she looked great with the blonde hair, to be honest. Shout out to you, Beyonce.

But there’s one topic I wish I had really drilled down on that I didn’t, because it really gets at what you’re saying more squarely. Colorism is something that is essentially thinking about race through sort of skin tone and proximity to whiteness. And what we know from the evidence is that light-skinned folks are perceived as more intelligent. They’re perceived as more attractive, they have better economic outcomes, better job market outcomes. And I wish that that had added this because I feel like it really drives home that black women are fighting almost like a losing battle in some sense, especially if they’re my complexion when it comes to being presentable.

Because already, the standard is not rooted in you. It’s not rooted in your existence. There is no real room for you to meet whatever standard the western culture has set because you’re not that light. And this is why people will bleach. They’ll bleach your skin if people know that folks will take chemicals, put ’em on their skin, lighten their skin. It’s a multibillion dollar industry worldwide. I believe a lot of the biggest countries that do this are India, lots of countries in West Africa, and it’s really about proximity to capital, which has been associated to proximity to whiteness.

And a lot of the places I just mentioned are formally colonized. So this is all tying together. That’s kind of something I wish I had included in that chapter, but nevertheless, I think hair still gets at that because even the idea of introducing perms or really obsessing over good hair, which is what the chapter is titled, right? Good hair being synonymous with straight hair, being synonymous with hair, that I can manage hair, that it flows in the wind.

And I’ve had really personal experiences with this where growing up I was predominantly white environments, predominantly white private schools, and my hair would stick up, it wouldn’t come down, and people would be like, oh my God, Anna’s hair is funny and dah, dah, dah, dah. And I had to learn over many perms, many tearful nights that it’s okay that my hair does that. In fact, it’s really okay. It’s very versatile. There’s so many things that can happen with that. But that doesn’t mean that the shame that I felt when I was six is coming out of nowhere. As Dr. Cottom, as you have pointed out, it is baked into how we think about who gets to be beautiful and who doesn’t.

Katie:

You closed chapter one with this discussion of the Crown Act, which you’ve referenced now, which basically would make discrimination based on hairstyle illegal. And I’m curious how you think about that interplay between essentially legislating around, no, you are not allowed to express bias against somebody in this way and shifting a culture that is apt to try to police these things in the first place. I think so much about that relationship between legislation and culture and think there are many instances that we could point to where culture changed first and then the law responded, and then other instances where the legislation had to come first, and then culture kind of caught up. But I’m curious how you think about those two things in their relationship.

Anna Gifty:

It’s funny because right now I think legislation and culture are kind of converging a bit if you ask me.

Katie:

Oh, interesting. I wasn’t expecting you to, I love this little side door answer.

Anna Gifty:

Let’s go, a little side door answer. Yeah, I feel like, I mean, you can just see what’s happening with this current administration. I think they’re very much driven by culture. A lot of the decisions that they make are about, Dr. Cottom has mentioned this where it’s very steeped in macho men, and I’m trying to signal my manhood, and that’s very much rooted in norms and culture.

Katie:

I mean, day one of the administration, they’re like, men are men and women are women, and here’s an executive order that declares that binary.

Anna Gifty:

Unprovoked, unprovoked. You know what I’m saying? No one asks about it. I think the two move together. But I think that at least from what I know about history, Black folks have always shifted culture, especially bBack Americans, and that has ultimately resulted in pushing policy and legislative forward.

And I think the same thing is true opposite actually as well. But I’m just thinking about while we were seeing the civil rights movement unfold, we were seeing some of the best music unfold and sort of protest and art also unfolding as well, scholarship unfolding as well. I think when it comes to Black hair in particular, we see folks like Tabitha Brown featuring a big haired afro child on her cover. And I think that that’s one way we can shift it, where we’re starting to normalize that different hair textures and different ways that people show up in the world, especially Black people show up in the world is okay, it’s normal. Because I think a lot of it’s about it’s not okay, it’s not normal, and that’s why I’m policing it. That’s why I’m trying to control it.

I think also on a very local level, there’s policies that are taking place at schools around who’s seen as presentable in the classroom that I think that also goes hand in hand with culture. I’m curious if the places where kids can’t wear braids also have kids with braids in their libraries. You see what I’m saying in the books in their libraries, right? You can’t be saying, I’m going to have Hair Love in my library, but then I’m also going to punish this young Black girl for having beads in her hair. That seems antithetical to itself. It goes hand in hand, at least to me.

But sometimes one pushes the other depending on what the current moment is. I would say this moment, I feel like culture is really pushing potentially the conversation around policy. And a lot of times culture is a driver of that. If I see on my television show or on my film screen that this girl is rocking cornrows and beads in her hair, oh, that’s beautiful. I’ve never seen that before. But then when I see it again, it’s not surprising. I’m not like, oh, that’s scary. I don’t know what that is. I want to control it. And so I think that as culture starts to sort of again, bring more Black representation.

I know there’s a new show on Netflix that is so good, so good. What’s good? I had to stop and say so that it’s called Forever. I think it’s by the creator of Girlfriends, and it follows two young black teenagers falling in love. It’s gorgeous. You like The Summer I Turned Pretty. This is a good show. Messy, but not that messy. You know what I’m saying? But in that show, the Black girl is rocking braids. She’s rocking all sorts of different styles, her natural hair, braids, twists, and that show was the number one show at one point on Netflix, the second watch show on Netflix. And I just thought to myself, man, she’s normalizing people who might go to school with folks who are just watching this. They might have one Black student in their school or something like that.

And I think that that’s extremely important. That’s culture. But that’s going hand in hand with the Crown Act being pushed in several states, and it’s almost justifying why the Crown Act needs to be pushed. And it’s also justifying the Crown Act is also justifying why the culture needs to be pushed. So I think, again, these things are in conversation with each other. I know that was kind of a roundabout way of saying that.

Katie:

No, I think that—thank you for that. You use such a helpful example when I think about that question. I think oftentimes of just the relentless organizing and protests within the Civil Rights movement for integration for the Civil Rights Act, and how at the time culturally that wasn’t a popular idea.

Anna Gifty:

No,

Katie:

People supported it conceptually or in theory, but they didn’t want it in their neighborhood or they didn’t want it in their swimming pool. And so I think that that’s an instance to me where the legislation had to come first because culture was not catching up. The issue had to be forced.

I think gay marriage is probably the opposite example where the culture, but again, because of Will and Grace, I actually think did a huge service to that movement of normalizing be like, oh, this isn’t scary. People that you like and care about are gay and want to be married to one another. And just doing that normalization effort so that by the time it actually marriage equality passed, culture was already pretty much there. So I was curious about that. I think that a lot of this work really relies on policy, but I think that can also sometimes make it feel as though without the policy, there’s nothing we can do, and that’s not true.

Anna Gifty:

That’s right.

Katie:

I love that you said that.

Anna Gifty:

I think with Black folks in particular, Black Americans, sometimes the political actions that are taken in that community especially do become culture. I’m a Ghanaian American. That is why my respect for Black Americans is so deep. Because if there’s any group that is especially American and that is integrated into the roots of America, it is that group. And I think we even see that. I’m going to reference Beyonce again, and Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter people were really mad about it, but I think even the way it started was American Reqium and kind of interplaying sort of country music roots that people were familiar with, but then country music roots that kind of sparked the stuff that people are now familiar with. It’s sort of like where Elvis got his inspiration, et cetera, et cetera, that a lot of times Black culture is American culture, and a lot of times Black culture is pushed by Black politics and vice versa. I think those two things are very much intertwined. And in my opinion, and what I’ve observed in my short life is that when those two things work together, our society moves forward for the better. And I think that is ultimately what I argue in this book, that when Black folks have an opportunity to advance, to move forward, other groups benefit society benefits. And we see this even in history where Asian Americans benefited from the Civil Rights movement, even though that’s not something that’s usually at the forefront of the conversation.

Katie:

We will see you right after this quick break.

I want to shift gears to talk about earning power again and basically to get into the resume whitening of it all. So there is a famous study, I’m sure most of our listeners are familiar with, where researchers submitted otherwise identical resumes. But one set had a traditionally Black name associated and the other set had a traditionally white name associated. And what these researchers found was that the white names were something like 50% more likely to receive a callback for a job. Again, everything else on the resume the same, you include an updated study that I was not familiar with from 2023 that submitted 80,000 fictional resumes to 108 of the largest employers, and found there was a 9% racial callback rate difference.

Now, there are a couple things that once you got into the meat of this study that really jumped out at me. So for starters, it seems the gap has narrowed from the last time that this type of study was conducted, which is encouraging that, okay, maybe progress is being made here, maybe culture is shifting in a positive direction.

Secondly, the researchers did not find that gender played a role, which was actually really surprising to me, and maybe it shouldn’t have been, but that jumped out at me. And then finally, and maybe this is the most interesting and important part of what they found, nearly half of the discrimination came from just a quarter of the companies think actually fewer than a quarter.

So there’s so much here. When you were parsing these results, what did that tell you? What was the real kind of nut there, the meaningful takeaway for you?

Anna Gifty:

Well, lemme start off by saying to folks, hiring discrimination is illegal. I just want to remind the class because it takes place. It’s so persistent, but people forget that it’s not supposed to be happening at all.

So what kind of jumped out to me first and foremost was just the sheer amount of resumes that they sent out because, this type of study is what we call an audit study, meaning that they’re holding all else equal. They’re holding the resumes equal. They’re not changing anything about the characteristics, but all they’re doing is they’re changing the name. They’re signaling the race.

I think when it comes to gender not being important, I know that in this study, gender was important for jobs that were associated with gender professions. So think about if you’re working at an Ann Taylor, they might’ve discriminated more against men, right? Because they want a woman.

I think by and large, they didn’t find that gender mattered as much, which is interesting. What I take away from this, this is actually the work that I sit in. So my research focuses on how do we sort of disrupt hiring discrimination and hopefully eliminate it for good is that people are still not hiring people because they’re Black. That’s the takeaway. And so it sets up really nicely that the next part of that chapter where we go into resume whitening. So if you’re not hiring me because I’m Black, well, then of course I’m going to go ahead and hide those parts of myself on my resume, because I’m trying to get a job.

Lemme maybe back up and say that Black people are people too, right? Black women are people too. People need jobs. People need to make a living. We’re living in a cost of living crisis. Rent is more than 30% of people’s income. People are rent burden right now. And so you are not hiring me because of my melanin content. That’s crazy. So if I have to take matters into my own hands and strip aspects of my identity on my resume so I can make a living, that’s the way I would like to think about it, right? I’m going to take those matters into my own hands.

And so I feel like that is really what this particular chapter left me with. I think the work that Bertrand and Mullainathan have done, it’s on top of years of research like this. But that being said, can I say something very honest? Please. As someone who’s studying this right now, I’m kind of sick of these studies respectfully. I like this study. Shout out to them, but I’m sick of these studies because it’s almost like people don’t believe it.

Katie:

Oh, that’s really interesting. It’s like, yeah, we already know this is happening. We don’t have to keep proving it. When are we going to do something about it?

Anna Gifty:

Girl, you all done tested this 300 plus times, and the employers are telling you the same thing every time. They don’t want to hire Black people because they’re Black. They don’t want to hire people because they’re Black. And there’s a lot of meat in that.

By the way, let me maybe unpack that for a little bit. There’s something called statistical discrimination. Let’s the idea that as an employer, people belong to groups that have fundamentally different distributions and productivity, meaning that center groups are more productive than others on average. And as an employer, if you hire one group versus another, you are going to observe those productivity differences eventually. What this definition argues is that over time you’ll observe that white people are more productive than Black people, and therefore it justifies why you should be paying Black people less than white people.

Katie:

Are you saying that that’s what they would say, or that that’s legitimately what one would find?

Anna Gifty:

So I’m saying that that is a framework used to understand why there are racial differences in pay gap. Now, a lot of people have a lot of issues with this framework. I’m just going to say it right off the bat.

Katie:

Yeah. I guess what I’m trying to get at here is are you of the belief that productivity gap that is suggested by that definition is real?

Anna Gifty:

I’m not suggesting that, but I would say that that definition is suggesting that it’s saying that if you observe some sort of objective measure of productivity or skills, you’ll see that Black folks are less skilled or less productive, unproductive than white folks over time. And that justifies why there are pay differences between these two groups.

Katie:

I see what you’re saying because that’s kind of like the, you write quote, an argument often used to justify the underrepresentation of women, particularly women of color in high paying fields, is that we either lack the skills to succeed or simply don’t choose these career paths. Which again, anytime I see the word ‘choose’ in these explanations, my alarm goes off like, oh, yep, the choice defense. These women, they just don’t want to make a lot of money. They would prefer to do really hard labor for low wages as one does. And so I guess what is your response to that?

Anna Gifty:

Yeah, I have a lot of responses. I mean, I don’t love it, and I’m in the agreement with the late Dr. William Spriggs, that believing that one group is inherently less productive than another group is racist. Sorry to say, that’s what he said, and I don’t think he’s wrong. And the thing is, there’s been a study that’s been done by a sociologist at Harvard where he does this with gender, and he introduces this definition of these two groups are inherently different in their productivity distribution. And you observe that over time as an employer. And what he finds is that when he introduces this definition of folks with managerial experiences and then puts them in a situation where they have to hire men versus women, the folks who are introduced to this definition rely more on gender stereotypes. That makes sense because it’s like, oh, well, if men are more productive than women, I’m going to go ahead and use that as a justification to say, oh yeah, women are not productive enough.

And so my overall reaction to this entire literature and really this entire conversation around persistent hiring discrimination, especially across race, is that we get it. The employers don’t like hiring Black folks, but that doesn’t actually solve the problem. Knowing that they don’t like hiring Black folks actually doesn’t stop them from acting that way. We actually need to do something about that.

And what I say in the book, but also what I echo in my own work is that if you want to be a bigot in your bathtub, that’s your prerogative. You know what I’m saying? If you want to bathe in your bigotry, good for you. The moment you step on that mat outside and breathe the fresh air there, I’ll be holding you accountable. I’m just not going to let you be a bigot out here in the, what are we talking about? I don’t trust people to be benevolent at this point because we’ve had, since the 1970s, so much evidence that people could have said, wow, we’re doing a bad job at this. Let’s try to drastically improve or stop doing this illegal thing. And even though things have steadily improved over time, they’re still hiring discrimination happening across racial lines at minimum.

And so I’m very much of the belief that we need to hold people accountable. And let me tell you what these researchers did. These researchers, it’s very knuck and buck energy. I really love that for them. They went to the New York Times and they named the companies.

Katie:

Thank you. Okay. That is exactly what I was going to say is, okay, first of all, the need to keep studying and you kind of raising the, like, I’m tired of these studies. We know this is a problem. Or how many more times do we need to prove that this is true? It has the energy to me of the guy coming up to you and being like, prove it.

That’s the same thing. And I think the fact that it can be isolated to 23 companies that was to me the biggest finding where it clicked, where I was like, oh, so it’s not about this squishy diffuse individual bias that we’re never going to be able to root out. We can name names, we know exactly where this is happening, and once you know that it’s happening systemically in certain places, okay, well now we can start actually looking at structural biases in particular hiring processes or compensation schemes. And I think that that is, to me, research used productively in this realm where it’s like, yeah, we know that this is a thing. So I love that they did that. I think that that was the exact right step to take.

Anna Gifty:

It was an incredible step to take. And they got criticized for it, by the way. People were like, is this ethical? And I said, what the companies are doing is illegal, right? And see, they’re breaking the law. What they’re doing is not ethical. You know what I’m saying? Dude, I’m so proud that they did that. It was really holding those companies accountable.

And I think that’s why, quite frankly, a lot of spaces in corporate America got rid of their DEI spaces because I think a lot of people think that DEI is requiring companies to hire Black people who are not qualified. And I just want to make it very clear. If you in a workplace and you have a Black colleague, they probably busted their butt to get there. We just talked about how many barriers that Black women have to face just to totally get into the door. You don’t think that they were qualified, they probably had to be twice as qualified just to get half of whatever you’re paid. You know what I’m saying? So let’s just keep it buck.

And I would say I really appreciate them going off like that. Sometimes accountability looks like holding people accountable in public. Other times it’s thinking about different mechanisms that internally can hold people accountable. There’s a lot of different ways that we can go about doing this, but you’d be surprised, Katie, how little work has been done on thinking about, at least through an economic lens, how we disrupt this very well-documented phenomenon that is hiring discrimination.

Katie:

I am reading this book right now for another author that we’re going to have on the show, and he’s talking about a couple different unionization efforts that have been successful worker to worker organizing. And a pattern that I noticed in the processes that ultimately netted results is that almost always happens is the group of workers who are trying to unionize are being retaliated against. And what ultimately forces the company’s hand is they go to the media and they make it a PR problem for the company. They make it so loud, they go to their community, they tell their customers, they get consumers involved, they hand exposes to journalists. And it’s only when those journalists are requesting comment that something actually starts to change.

And I think that that reputational capital is one of the only things that we can actually affect when it comes to these companies. And it’s one of the only tools, because they have so much money. You’re never going to outspend a company like this. You’re never going to be able to hire a better legal department than they are, but you can mess with their reputation. And that is such a tender spot, a pressure point that is such a valuable piece of leverage. And it’s why I would guess when they went to the New York Times and said, these are the worst defenders, why there were calls of this is unethical or no, no, no, we don’t want you to protest that. We don’t want you to share your results that way because that’s the only way that things happen.

Anna Gifty:

That is crazy, man. That’s a powerful statement. And I also think that’s true across time. I always say that the masses, which we are a part of, I think we underestimate our power a lot. We are so powerful as a collective in that when we all decide that we support something or we don’t support something, things move and things move quickly.

And I think that that is, to your point about reputational capital, I arguably what happened in 2020, a lot of these companies, we reputation, started to impact their stock price. And they said, hold up. Wait a minute. We don’t want to come off as a racist company because we didn’t say something about this racist incident. And of course, once the smoke cleared, they said, okay, we can get back to being ourselves as we were before. But you want to make sure that what’s taking place is actually being held accountable at every step.

As you said, I think that a lot of these companies have so much concentrated power and wealth that the only way for a lot of these companies to be held accountable is by affecting their bottom line. And the only way that masses do that is either by you don’t buy their products. And that’s hard to do for places like Amazon where it’s like it’s integrated into the way that we live, and you can’t get certain things if you don’t go through Amazon or it takes longer. And so you are making a tradeoff. Whereas a place like Target, well Black folks said, we are not buying there anymore. I haven’t purchased a target since when they called the boycott and the CEO stepped down.

What you said makes a lot of sense. I’m thinking about the French Revolution. I’m thinking about the Civil Rights movement. This is really about a reputation. What is the reputation of power in that given moment? And how can the masses disrupt that if what power is doing is not to our benefit, we have power to affect change, to affect our circumstances.

And that’s why I think there’s a lot of dividing and conquering happening from the top people are, they’re trying to say, well, that person is a Black woman. I don’t know if you have anything in common with them. And I remember SNL did that one skit a while back where Tom Hanks played a MAGA supporter or something, and he was doing Black Jeopardy. And the point of the whole skit was he has a lot in common with the Black folks he was playing Jeopardy with, right? Comes from a similar background, we love similar music.

I’m just kind of like, I think this is actually a really good commentary on there’s these sort of artificial lines that are created by the powers that be to make it really hard for us to organize because they know that the moment we organize that power can be redirected or that attention can be redirected collectively towards the people who are sort of sowing those dividing lines to begin with to get something better out of our circumstance.

I think someone said something recently that really kind of hit something in my brain. Rich CEOs who don’t like unions, don’t like unions for one reason. They just want to be able to do what they want. And the only people holding them accountable are their employees coming together saying, wait a minute, you can’t do that. Right? And I would argue, even in politics, you kind of get that too. You have politicians that absolutely hate the people they represent, but they do. You can tell by the way they vote, okay. But the only people keeping them in check are those folks who come into town hall regularly and say, what are you doing to my life, to my family, to my neighborhood? If there’s any takeaway folks take from this conversation, I hope that you take away that there is strength in community. And that’s kind of the thesis of The Double Tax, that when you link arms with somebody, it’s a lot harder for somebody to push you down. And so you better link arms with somebody, especially during a crisis.

Katie:

That was so powerful. I’m like, damn. So you also include data from a 2019 experiment that I found pretty alarming from a personal finance standpoint that Black people who attempted to negotiate higher salaries were actually offered less than what they were initially offered compared to Black people who did not attempt to negotiate. This gave me a lot of pause because it feels as though it really might mean that women of color in particular need to be even more wary of adopting negotiation advice wholesale than I previously even realized.

And one of the themes that I explore in Rich Girl Nation is informed by the work of a negotiation expert named Kathryn Valentine, who essentially found that when women employ negotiation advice that was built by and for men, they’re actually more likely to experience pushback. That there is a gender dynamic to this that has to be considered if you want to get the best results. And this feels like that phenomenon times 10, but at the same time, accepting that at face value and then being like, well, then I guess you shouldn’t negotiate. That doesn’t feel like the right takeaway either. So in your interviews though, what struck me was that you found that Black women and white women were operating from different baseline assumptions about negotiation. Can you shed some light on that?

Anna Gifty:

Yes. And so I’m glad that you brought that up. It actually illustrates the double tax quite well. So women have to sort of reassess how they negotiate or they get penalized. And Black folks have to also do that as well. So Black women who set the intersection overlapping experiences. Now I have to consider both things. Those interviews were so revelatory to me and what I learned from them, and maybe my own experience is that there’s just more to lose when you’re Black, if you’re already facing discrimination, when you’re trying to get a callback and you’re probably going to face some discrimination where you’re trying to get an interview, there’s very little room to be like, okay, if I ask for more, isn’t this another place that discrimination could take place? But I don’t even know to what extent. It could be that they offer me less, but it costs to be that they just don’t offer me the job at all.

And they can attribute it to something like, oh, she was unprofessional, or whatever, and people will believe him. It won’t have anything to do with my merit. Because going back to what we were talking about with Mikki, my humanity is always being contested and questioned. And so someone can write off my humanity, write off my skills, write off my merit, and say that she was unprofessional and she was wasn’t a good fit or whatever. And that’s why we didn’t hire her or hire them.

And so in talking with the Black woman that we spoke with, my team, and I, by the way, shout out to the qualitative researchers I worked with that helped with the interviews. They did such an amazing job. Kaylee and Alexa, shout out to y’all. They basically shared that Black women are having to think about, okay, if I ask for more, at what cost does that come to me? Whereas I think with the white woman we spoke with, it was very much like I’ve been advised, it’s been normalized in my community to always ask for more. Sometimes I’ll get it, sometimes I get slightly more.

But I think the difference actually now I’m thinking about it, is like, do I have an outside option? That is really kind of key to this. I think white women oftentimes do, the discrimination is not being faced, at least from what we’ve seen with the recent evidence from client at all. But also what we were even hearing from with respect to the conversation that we had with women in that particular group, that yes, you’re going to face some gender discrimination as you’re trying to negotiate, but there might be an option that actually satisfies what you’re looking for. You might get paid higher if you go somewhere else. Whereas I think with Black women, it’s like, it’s this job or bust.

Katie:

You touched on this distinction where even if the white women that you were interviewing didn’t know the exact number, the exact timing, it was like they knew though that they should be asking. There was at least this acceptance of this basic fact in that the Black woman expressed a discomfort around that idea at all. This underlying sense of, well, you should be grateful that you’re even being considered for this job. That’s the implication.

Anna Gifty:

Exactly. I would even say that’s explicitly stated in some cases where it’s like, we’re offering you a very competitive wage. Why are you even questioning this where somebody’s making $20,000 more than you? But I shared in that chapter about my first experience negotiating a salary, and the only reason I got the number I wanted was because a Black woman inside the organization double clicked. And this is kind of speaking to some sociology work that’s been done by Deva Pager and her co-author around how Black and white networks operate very similarly in the sense of, oh, you’re connecting people to opportunities, you’re connecting them to job pathways, et cetera. But the outcomes are very different because of proximity to capital, to power to opportunity. And so whereas the white network might manifest you a job, the Black network, if there’s enough Black people in the organization to begin with, it’s not clear that that’s going to lead to a job.

Or even that Black person who might be in there might not feel like they’re empowered to even advocate for you because they themselves are being tokenized or they’re dealing with their own sort of discrimination that they’re trying to navigate. And so they’re even afraid to ask for more because there’s an expectation that they should be grateful for where they’re at. This is kind of what I mean by the double tax compounds, where it’s like I’m trying to navigate the job market as a young Black woman, and I’m dealing with a compounded cost of racism and sexism because of hiring discrimination, because of this friction around negotiation, et cetera. But then even if I try to reach back into my job networks of other Black women, they too are also dealing with some sort of the double tax when it comes to promotion, when it comes to turnover, when it comes to whether or not you even get an opportunity to be in spaces of power, in spaces of influence within the workplace.

So even if I need her to throw me a lifeline, she might be hesitant to throw me a lifeline because she’s already trying to get a lifeline herself. It kind of trickles down. And I hope that Black women especially who are listening to this feel seen because I hear you sis. This is literally, you are not going crazy. There’s numbers and evidence to back up this experience and it’s really horrible.

And so I think once again, going back to what I was saying, I think community here is really important. The moment you get into a workplace, if you’re really trying to sell solidarity with another woman, you should really be telling them how much you’re making. But there’s a taboo sort of aura around having honest conversations about how much you’re earning, how much you’re making, how much that promotion came with in terms of a bonus check.

A lot of sort of fear can manifest in silence when you’re not having a conversation about what’s taking place. Fear sort of enters the picture and you’ll be fearful to say, I want more, I deserve more, that sort of thing. Whereas if you are all having a conversation about, I’m making this and I’m making that one, it increases the floor of pay that people get paid, right? The next generation coming after you is going to start at a higher wage, but also it empowers you all to organize and ask for more, right? It kind of goes back to what we’re talking about with unions, which is why unions are so effective, where people are regularly having these conversations and they can say, well, you’re making 20, I’m making 30. Well, let’s see if we can ask for 40 for all of us.

Katie:

Something that feels important to me, switching gears here, just to touch on caregiving and motherhood today, is that when we talk about the motherhood penalty and we talk about a lack of structural support for families and children in the United States, is that this is something that is true across socioeconomic statuses. It disproportionately hurts women. It just hurts women in different ways. So if you are a woman who has enough money and opportunity to afford quality childcare, you are still likely to experience lower pay in the future loss of income to pay for it. We know that your life will probably just be extremely strained. You are going to constantly feel like you’re falling behind in most cases. And those who do not have the money and the opportunity to pay other people to provide them with quality childcare end up being the ones who provide it. And they do it for low wages in many cases.

Now, we know that this has a racial component. We know that the former group tends to be white, that the latter tends to be Black and Latina. We know that there are obviously a couple policy layups. We talk about those all the time on the show. That could make it really serious dent in this problem, paid family leave the care for all agenda, a well-funded public option for childcare. What I wanted to ask you about, you talk about an interesting distinction that you noticed in your interviews about motherhood that I want to talk about. So I want to talk about what you found in talking to white mothers and black mothers about the things that were coming up for them day to day. But you also know that the burden of childcare costs tends to be about 8% higher for Black families. And I also want to understand where that difference comes from.

Anna Gifty:

Such a great question, such a great topic. Let me even preface by saying this is one of my favorite chapters in the book, probably one of the favorite things I’ve ever written in my life because it made me understand my mom better, and it made me understand my sister, who’s now a mom a lot better, it bred empathy in me.

Childcare is expensive. And the eight percentage point difference that we’re seeing is really because of all the things that we’ve discussed over the course of this episode. There’s so many different costs that Black families and Black women in particular, and I would even say families of color because Latinas and native women are also in similarly worser economic circumstances as Black folks have. And so this means then when childcare is a current sticker price, it’s going to be a higher share of Black and brown folks income than it would be for white folks. It’s just a math problem, like a division problem. So when you have two groups that are dealing with different financial circumstances and different financial baselines, cost, especially childcare costs can be a bigger share or a smaller share depending on what that baseline is.

And so for me, seeing how much childcare costs, especially the cost of raising a kid, I don’t know if folks know this, but according to CNBC, on average, you’re investing about $300,000 per kid up until they’re 18. We’re not talking about college yet, okay? We’re not talking about extracurriculars, summer camps, none of that. And I think that that is a significant investment that if you already don’t have a pool of wealth to pull from, or if you’re already facing discrimination in pay and discrimination and job opportunities and discrimination in other areas of your life, that can become a huge burden.

And I think what we saw in our conversations with white mothers and Black mothers is that all mothers agree that there is a lot of pressure that comes along with parenting, especially as a woman. Everybody expects me to make my kid my life. That’s the pressure. This is the mom guilt phenomenon. But what I notice with Black women is that it’s not just that you’re dealing with all these pressures of showing up for your kids and showing up as a mom in society. It’s also that people are questioning the quality of the mothering that you’re providing. And I think that that is, it is hurtful, actually. I know a lot of Black moms, right? My mom’s my Black mom. I’m Black, so unserious, my mom is a Black mom. My sister’s a Black mom, and they work so hard. And I’m just kind of like, man, you also got to navigate people thinking that you’re a bad mom because of your race, because of what your race might mean economically.

And this is sort of where that welfare queen stereotype really seeps into culture and seeps into the way that we view Black mothers so much so that the state gets involved, right? When we’re thinking about Black mothers who are low socioeconomic status, that perception runs even deeper. And then the government makes decisions about whether or not you can even be in relationship with your kids. There are real costs there, not even just financially, but also emotionally. There’s a lot more to lose when you’re a Black mom because there’s a lot more people doubting you.

And one thing that came up that was really interesting is that this is actually affecting, at least the Black woman that we spoke to, who they even let into their house. You want to go out for a date night or whatever, or you want to go out and spend some time with your girlfriends or hang out with your friends, you’re going to go ahead and call a babysitter. But as a Black mom, because there’s so much fear that folks have around how you’re being perceived and you not have to think about, okay, the house got to look clean. I can’t look like I’m not taking care of my kids because they’re going to try to punish me as a mom when I’m trying to provide for my children. And so I think that that’s been the most revelatory thing for me in this chapter that Black moms are mothers are navigating an obstacle course when it comes to choosing motherhood. We also know that moms deal with more discrimination in the workplace and in the job market where they’re hired less, they’re paid less, they’re promoted less.

But then we just talked about hiring discrimination across racial lines. So now imagine if you’re a Black mom. So now you’re dealing with that plus all of these other statistics that we just brought up around motherhood and discrimination in the workplace. And I think for me, what I’m realizing is that women are punished for choosing motherhood and for not choosing it, especially if they’re Black. There’s a stigma that is associated with it. Even if you’re Black and you choose to be childless, people will be like, how dare you, you should be expanding our race. And that’s something you also hear for white women as well.

But I just think that there’s a lot more layers of, is the word here neglect when it comes to Black moms? Yeah, I think so. I think society neglects moms, society hates moms, actually. But I think it’s a bit ridiculous because of how much we ask of moms minute by minute. We ask moms to be there all the time, every time with snacks in hand. And then for Black moms, we say, actually, those snacks suck. What did you think you were? You know what I’m saying? Yeah. You’re actually not a good mom on top of all of these things I’m expecting you to do.

Katie:

Well, I think you’re actually helping me connect some dots right now that I want to sketch a little bit of a connection here and get your thoughts on it.

Anna Gifty:

Yes.

Katie:

On the welfare queen of it all, the Reagan era demonization of Black mothers and this suggestion, Black women in particular are somehow really bumming off the state and their freeloaders and all the connotations that are wrapped up in that phrase. I think a lot of the hangups culturally that we still see today are continue to be downstream of that core idea and what is now clicking for me, and as I say this, I feel a little like Charlie “Always Sunny” murder board of the things connecting, but it does feel like a very convenient way for a politician to demonize the welfare state by using people’s kind of latent or explicit racism.

We don’t want Americans to ask for their government to do anything for them. We don’t want people to expect anything of us. We don’t want people to think that they’re entitled to a social safety net. And so in order to do that, we’re going to sort of invent this caricature of a person who is easy to demonize a Black woman and say, see, when you ask for things from the government, that’s what you’re being. And so I think that there’s an interesting, the function that that really ultimately served politically.

Anna Gifty:

That’s so smart, Katie. That makes a lot of sense. And I love that you just named that because that is the double tax. Black women are dealing with this individual cost of being subjected to racism and sexism in the welfare state and in mothering. And as a result, you can’t get food to eat because they want to take SNAP from everybody.

Katie:

Yes, exactly.

Anna Gifty:

They want to take public housing from everybody. And of course, we know there’s nuances and differences across race, across time, for sure. But the point here is when Congress strips millions of dollars away from Medicaid, that affects you, and it also affects me. They could be targeting Black women, but like I said, Black women are at the center of the Venn diagram.

Katie:

That’s the burning house.

Anna Gifty:

That’s the burning house. And so now that house is burning, the next house is starting to burn, and your doorstep is next. And so that’s why you want to address the double tax. Right?

And I think the welfare queen trope, I had an opportunity to take a class about the 1980s. I know I’m dating folks right now, which is hilarious. But in that class, I learned about Ronald Reagan’s administration. The demonization of Black mothers during that period harmed Black mothers, but it also harmed the Black community, which relies on Black mothers. 69% of Black mothers right now are breadwinners.

So let’s just take this all the way. You’re telling me that 69% of these women who are providing for their family are bad mothers, are bad people. And then you start to take benefits away from them because you want to punish them for your perception of how bad they are. That affects their kids, that affects their community, that affects their relatives. And we’re talking about caregiving compounds that’s probably going to affect their aging parents and aging relatives as well. So whole communities that really are kind of coming out of these Black mothers providing care are destabilize because you turned perception into policy. That’s crazy. You turned perception into policy. Wow.

Katie:

That’s a bar.

Anna Gifty:

Low-key banger.

Katie:

Anna Gifty, thank you so much for joining me, for spending so much time with us today. That was really, really my pleasure.

Anna Gifty:

Oh my gosh, it was my pleasure. I am always happy to be anywhere Dr. Cottom is, and I’m so, so happy to be connected with you, Katie. And shout out to folks on the back, Henah and Dan?

Katie:

Nick,

Anna Gifty:

Nick. Oh no. Lemme do that again. Do that. I got to do that again. I’m so sorry. And shout out to Henah and Nick in the back. I appreciate folks who are always doing the audio stuff and making sure that things like this run. You guys are doing an incredible, incredible job. Thank you so much.

Katie:

That is all for this week. I will see you next week for a Rich Girl Roundup, where we are going to be answering a slew of new tactical listener questions.

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.