Dr. Nina Banks discusses Black Women Economics and the Invisibility of Black Women’s Community Work

VERNON OAKES: Good morning, everybody. This is Vernon Oakes. Welcome to Everything Co-op. We’re celebrating women’s history month, but today we’re going to talk about black women. The theme is valiant women of the vote, refusing to be silent. And today we have Nina Banks, who refuses to be silent. She’s one of those valiant women and she’s going to talk a lot about how black women’s contribution to the economy has been silenced through the years. They refused to be silent and yet this history has not been told, has not been brought up. Good morning, Dr. Banks. How are you doing this morning?

DR. NINA BANKS: Good morning, Mr. Oakes. And please call me Nina. I’m doing very well period, thank you so much for having me on your program.

VERNON OAKES: Okay, so I’ve taught 11 years of my career in higher education and I chose honor folks who have gone through and gotten their doctorate, so I’ll try to call you Nina but I really have tremendous respect for that, Dr. Banks, for the work in education and research that you do, the writing that you do. And so, okay, Nina, I’m just honored to have you on this morning and I’m glad that you’ve taken time out to share some of the research and some of the things that you have been doing in your life. Thank you so much.

DR. NINA BANKS: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.

VERNON OAKES: So, let’s get right into this invisibility of black women’s work. What got you into this world? What got you to want to study this?

DR. NINA BANKS: I studied this because I’m a feminist economist and feminist economists do work that generally focuses on gender-based disparity, the disparities between men and women. And feminist economists often focus on the amount of unpaid work that women are performing within the household that disproportionately benefits other household members. Cooking, cleaning, caregiving activities. And I used to use that framework. It’s very important. One of the things that feminists have been arguing over the last few decades is that work has a lot of social value. And in a market-based economy, one of the ways that value is assigned is by having a price attached to it. And so, feminists have been arguing that if we had a price attached to this unpaid work then we could kind of quantify the value of it, the contribution that women’s unpaid work makes to our national output. And so, for me, at some point I started to realize that that household approach doesn’t really explain a lot of the unpaid work that black women are doing. It no longer explained the unpaid work that I was doing when I divorced my husband, for example. So I ended up thinking really critically about that approach and coming up with another approach that really centered the analysis of unpaid work around this long history of African-American women who have been doing cooperative unpaid work for our communities. And that’s a part of it. The other part of it is that white and black women have different identities as women. And so, for white women racial oppression has not been a part of their experience, but for black women racial oppression is very much a part of our experience. It shapes our consciousness. And so, for black women, it’s impossible to really separate out our connections to and ties to the community in terms of thinking about the work that we do that is unpaid and isn’t channeled through a market.

VERNON OAKES: Well. You said a lot. That’s interesting. So I get that my mama, who went back to school and graduated when I was 15, magna cum laude, she would go to school, come back, and fix us our meals, wash clothes, make us wash the dishes, and then she would go to sleep and get four or five hours of sleep and then get up at 2 o’clock in the morning and study. And she taught me how to do that, which got me through school. But all of that unpaid work in the household, I get the quick with the experience of my mother. Now, she was not that involved in these other activities that you talk about. But how do you quantify that? Because you say there’s social value, but I find that men don’t value that work that women do in the household.

DR. NINA BANKS: Yeah. Well, and that goes to the argument of having a price tag attached to it. So for the project of quantifying the household work, it’s tricky. It’s tricky because what has to take place is to find a market equivalent value to the unpaid work in the household. And we can do that. We can think of laundry services, for example, or day care services. But there are two things that are really tricky about it. One is that a lot of the work that women are doing in the household is multitasked. So there’s lots of activities that take place simultaneously. That’s a challenge than to kind of quantify that separately. And the other with a big part is that the market undervalues the work that women are doing in the paid workplace. And so when we end up with a market value for the unpaid household work, it incorporates this bias, this gender bias that devalues women’s contributions to the economy. So those are some of the problems that are involved in trying to quantify women’s household work. But my analysis is really well beyond that, because I end up talking about the work that black women have been doing cooperatively for our communities, nonmarket, unpaid, and how to quantify that, which is a much bigger challenge. And I think when we go through and we talk about this analysis we can come back to that and talk about why it is probably going to be very difficult but necessary to quantify.

VERNON OAKES: Okay, so let’s talk about it, because I need to understand this nonmarket unpaid work that black women are doing. What is that kind of work? Give us an example of what work you’re talking about.

DR. NINA BANKS: Yeah. So, thinking about it in terms of the household is the easiest example to begin with. So we know that the work in the household that women are doing is not compensated. So that’s what is meant by unpaid. And household members receive the benefits. There’s no market transaction taking place. A market transaction means there’s a buyer and a seller. So the household work is unpaid nonmarket. The work that black women —

VERNON OAKES: Let me just say one more before. But you said the household receives the benefits, and I argue and I think you agree with me, but let’s see, I argue that society benefits from the women being in a household because they help to nurture the children and without the women in the household nurturing the children the children can go wild or crazy in all of this stuff. It has not only a value to the household but a value to the community, this work.

DR. NINA BANKS: Right. And I would qualify what you said, just a little bit, tweak it a little bit to say the work that is performed disproportionately in the household by women has great social value because we want children to be well-adjusted and all of that, right, but I wouldn’t frame it as valuing women within the household because I think the feminist argument is that women should have a lot of choices. And so what we are not saying is that this is an argument for women being in the household.

VERNON OAKES: Oh, no. I was just talking about the two values. No, I won’t get into that. So we got the household. Let’s go to the other.

DR. NINA BANKS: To the community. Okay. So here we go. Our consciousness as black women is tied to a community. Our oppression as black women is based on the oppression that we experience as members of the black community. It’s not just about relations between men and women within a private household. So, when we talk about black women and oppression and black women at work, we need to broaden it to capture the work that black women have been doing for our community. So I take the analysis all the way back to the late 19th, early 20th century, where Jim Crow segregation was imposed on the African-American community. They put laws on the books to segregate facilities, to segregate schools, for example, so by 1900 in this of, black and white children, black and white young adults were in racially segregated schools, black schools received less funding in terms of supplies, less funding for teacher salaries, for equipment, for buildings, and so on. And so, Jim Crow, in terms of public transportation, recreation, privately owned restaurants and so on, all of these various institutions in the South and eventually in the north is more black people began to migrate from the south to the north, those institutions in the North also became racially segregated. So, what happened by the early 20th century, due to racial segregation, is that African-Americans had to respond to this exclusion by building their own community institutions. Add African-American women played a very prominent role in developing and creating those community institutions. And part of that is a reflection of the fact that black men were experiencing occupational segregation. If they had a college degree, it was very difficult for them to get a professional job. Black women also experienced occupational segregation but black women were able to get jobs as teachers and nurses. So, those are fields that enable black women to provide services to the community. On the other part of it is that African-Americans have a cooperative ethos. And so, Black women will often, I think especially middle-class black women, and the research that I’m doing is research that was developed by African-American historians and sociologists, but they establish that black women had a sense of social obligation to the community.

VERNON OAKES: So black women are working in a household, not getting paid and not having value added to it, any woman in a household, for that matter, but then there’s this social part that they end up playing and spending time and effort in to help their men, their children, their community. All right? And we have a minute before we take our break. So can you give me an example that in the early 1900s? What are you talking about and what were black women doing?

DR. NINA BANKS: Yeah. Think about this in terms of the club women’s movement. We’ve always been thinking about it as racial uplift and betterment, but my argument is we need to think about the actual work that went into those cooperative efforts on the part of black women. And so one example is the Atlanta Neighborhood Union that was formed in 1908, and I wrote about this in my article. This is a group of middle-class women who came together cooperatively, they’re coming together and they were trying to figure out the needs of their community.

VERNON OAKES: Thank you. And I would like to come back after the break and talk about the Atlanta Neighborhood Union and what they were doing and how this all helped the community, and they were not given any value, not given any money. We’ll be right back. Please don’t touch that dial.

ANNOUNCER: Celebrating women’s history month.

VERNON OAKES: Welcome back, everybody. This is Vernon Oakes. The program is Everything Cooperative. And we have Dr. Nina Banks is our guest today. She wants me to call her Nina but I just get so excited about this doctorate she has and the work that she’s doing, the research she’s doing. And before the break, last section, we talked about how women do not get credit and do not put the men, particularly white man that runs the economy, do not put any value to the work that they do in the household and they do not give value for what black women have done outside of the household to help with the racism that the black community has experienced particularly during Jim Crow starting about the 1900s. And right before we took a break, Dr. Banks, Nina, was talking about the Atlanta Neighborhood Union as an example of these, what she called club women’s movement. So, Nina, would you please tell us more about what they were doing, what this group of women were doing, and the value that it brought not only to the black community but the US economy?

DR. NINA BANKS: Okay. So let me focus on, because the US economy is a big question and we can unpack that one later. Let me start with some of these examples of this really important community work, going back to the Atlanta Neighborhood Union. This is a group of middle-class women in Atlanta who were really concerned about the lack of services for this growing, impoverished African-American population in the city. So they formed in 1908 and what they began to do is collect data on the needs of the community. What were the problems that they were facing in trying to live in Atlanta? And again, think about this in the context of the city officials, the white city officials were neglecting the black population. And so they collected data and they began to actually pull together services for the community. Health services, health clinics, services for schoolchildren in terms of afterschool programs. They called attention to dilapidated housing. The need for playgrounds for black children. Educational services. Again, here’s my point, there was a lot of work that went into doing all of that organizing and fundraising and that eventually you talk about the benefits. There were benefits to the African-American community, certainly, but it also meant that eventually city officials took on this work. They were also calling attention to issues of sewage. I mean, a whole host of issues. And this is just one of many examples in the early part of the 20th century. There are lots of examples during the Great Depression, for example. The Housewives League of Detroit —

VERNON OAKES: Before we moved from Atlanta, so you’ve got these middle-class women in Atlanta, black women who come together to say hey, we’re not getting services in our community. The same kinds of services that we talk about today. Educational, housing, health, environmental things like sewage. So they’re collecting data about this and then presenting it to the white elected officials to get these services? Or do they go out and create their own companies to do these services?

DR. NINA BANKS: They do both. Because this is just one example of black women’s cooperative efforts on behalf of the community. We see this going on in the early part of the 20th century across the country where black women are engaged in these fundraising campaigns, they are creating orphanages and kindergartens and libraries. They’re doing a lot of unpaid nonmarket work that had value for the community. And you hit the nail on the head when you said that we think about these things today, and that’s my point, is that this is an unbroken tradition for African-American women. We have a long history of doing work that has been viewed as uplift. And even when, because I’m not the first person to refer to this as community work or unpaid labor. What I’m doing as an economist is theorizing this within and intersectional feminist political economy framework. That’s my contribution. To frame it as work that is every bit as important as the unpaid work that goes on within a private household. And also to situate it from a theoretical standpoint in the context of the formal workplace, the firm. So I want to make that very clear. I’m not the first person to call it unpaid work, but lots of examples of what they’re doing, and I can give you more.

VERNON OAKES: Okay, so I just really need to unpack these last several sentences that you made, because I don’t quite get it and I want to make sure I get it in that other people out there get it, is that I get that you’re not the first one, and I’m okay with that. But I’m more interested in you’ve distinguished that there’s unpaid work in the household that’s no value in it, and then you go into there is unpaid work in the community. So in the community, in the black community, that these black women have, in this case they were middle-class women, have said look at our community and all the things we don’t have, we don’t have our children, we don’t have our families, and we need these things. And then once they have identified and collected data then they go about making sure these services are made by creating a business to do housing or health or putting clinics together, orphanages. So they create these businesses and-or they get the white elected officials to put some of the tax dollars into helping to solve some of these issues. Did I summarize it?

DR. NINA BANKS: Yeah, that’s it. Right. And so, again, my point is there’s a long history of that that we haven’t been thinking about as unpaid work. We’ve been thinking about it in a political context. Let me give you a quote from DuBois, which I think is really revealing. This is a quote from 1924, from WEB DuBois who talked about the importance but the invisibility of this work that black women were doing which he viewed as the most effective work in the nation that provided social uplift to the vulnerable. Quote, the women of America who are doing humble but on the whole the most effective work in the social uplift of the lowly, not so much by money but as by personal contact, or the colored women. Little is said or known about it, but in thousands of churches and social clubs, in missionary societies and fraternal organizations, in unions like the National Association of Colored Women, these workers our founding and sustaining orphanages and old folks homes, distribute impersonal charity and relief, visiting prisoners, helping hospitals, teaching children, Edmund and ministering to all sorts of needs. So that was 1924 by DuBois. And so it speaks to the importance of black women grassroots efforts on behalf of the community where he says little is better known, and that is still the case. Invisible.

VERNON OAKES: Wow. I have as invisible, and you’re saying it’s you’re refusing for this to continue to be invisible, refusing to be silent about it, and I get that attraction one of these valued women out here. You’re bringing light to this. You’re doing the research and writing papers. It’s interesting to me that white folk, white men don’t value women’s work, don’t value black people’s work. They saw us as slaves and don’t give us anything or as little as possible. Even when they try to say well, we fed you and we housed you, yeah. Gave us the scraps of the tables and put us in shanties. So they didn’t value our work. And so this to me is just a continuation of that non-valuing of work, and you’re putting some light to that.

DR. NINA BANKS: Yeah. And what I would say, again, to qualify what you said, and I agree with everything that you said, is that it’s not just white men but also white women. And so, when we’re talking about black women we can never leave out the role of white women in helping to maintain and reproduce a system of racialized patriarchy and racial capitalism. White women have been very instrumental in exploiting black women’s labor for their own benefit. So this invisibility is, I think, tied to the fact that white people have always viewed women as black workers and not respected black women for the caregiving activities that we gave to our own families. White people think about black women as workers and the work that black women can perform for white people that will benefit white people, but white people, white men and women, have been unconcerned about the work and the caregiving activities that black people perform for black people. That’s a part of it. And then the other part of what makes this unseen is this cooperative ethos that we have, a sense of social obligation that we have to our community. And so, for many black women performing these activities, Black women think of it as service to the community. Think about black women in churches. Black women see it as a service and not his work.

VERNON OAKES: So, we’re going to take our second break here, and you know, and I want to come back and talk about this. You mentioned cooperative ethos several times. So I want to come back and talk about that. You’ve mentioned churches and unions and different organizations that black women have done this work in and white folk, men and women, don’t put any value to this. We’ll be right back to talk more about this with Dr. Banks. Please don’t touch that dial.

VERNON OAKES: Welcome back, everybody. This is Vernon Oakes and the program is Everything Cooperative. And we have Dr. Nina Banks talking about women, particularly black women, and the contributions that black women have made in the household and in the community. Nina, you had mentioned cooperative ethos several times. What do you mean by that?

DR. NINA BANKS: What I mean is that African-Americans have tended to think collectively around the benefits to the community, whereas Europeans and euro Americans tend to think on a more individualistic basis. That’s not the history of African-Americans. And this of course goes back to West and Central Africa and ways of thinking. That wasn’t lost in the transatlantic slave trade. Africans and their African-American descendants here in North America continue to think cooperatively. Our family structures are extended. We have strong family ties and community ties. So that’s what I mean when I say cooperative ethos. And the really important work of people that you’ve brought onto this program I think is a testament to that long tradition of cooperative ethos. The really important research that Jessica Gordon-Nembhard excavated is a great example of this long tradition of cooperative ethos that African-Americans have always instituted.

VERNON OAKES: So, I’m glad you brought up Dr. Nembhard. Jessica has been on this show about four times and she’s told me a lot about this history that you talk about. That’s why I wanted to go back to this cooperative ethos. In a lot of West Africa it’s just the way of being. And I have it, the center part of humanity is how do we work together. If we go back to the tribes and clans, it was Nina had her job and Vernon had his jobs and the kids at their jobs and the old folks had their jobs. Everybody had a job to do. They had their tasks. And the whole community depended on that. And this is cooperativism. This collective way of thinking. Same way with governance. So yeah, I do have that. And how we could be a slave with crumbs, they would throw the crumbs, with left over from the table, and we would pull it together and come up with churches and historically black colleges and universities. And as you said, the women in Atlanta, you started to go to the women in Michigan, in Detroit, of how we put things together and solve community problems. And that’s what I was told is what politicians is all about, should be about. In this is definitely what cooperatives are about. How to solve community problems. So, you have found this cooperative ethos, and so I have it that you do work in cooperatives and a lot of your work fits in what we’re talking about here. You mentioned Atlanta. Can you talk about the work that was done in Detroit and the women and what was that group called?

DR. NINA BANKS: That was called the Housewives League of Detroit. The housewives league. And so they formed during the Great Depression. And again, as a group of women who were concerned about the really severe impact that the depression was having on the African-American community, because it was more severe in terms of job losses and loss of black businesses, small black businesses. It was devastating. And so, we were ingenious. These women came up with a campaign to try and keep the money and the resources within the African-American community in terms of ways of stabilizing black businesses and black employment by having a campaign to support black businesses and even white businesses as long as they hired black workers. So the Housewives League of Detroit ended up spreading two, I think it’s about 25 other cities across the United States, entirely run by black women who were volunteers. Again, my point is there was work that went into that. Let me give you another really important example. The AKA sorority, also in the Great Depression, operated, and I think it was the first, mobile health unit within the United States. They recognize that rural black people in Mississippi Delta were without health services. And so, the AKA mobilized this massive campaign to get health services to black people, poor, impoverished black people in the Mississippi Delta. And they did that from 1935 until 1942. It was called the Mississippi Health Project. They provided immunizations and health screenings and health information to African-Americans who were not getting services. As today, we’re always left out. And so, the AKA mobilized its efforts. In the person who was documenting these activities for the AKA, the historian, her name is Marjorie Holloman Parker, described this as, quote, and experiment in cooperative community service between the sorority, the local health profession, and other official health department workers, and of quote. So another really good example of this work.

VERNON OAKES: So my sister is AKA, 1935 to 1942, provided this health service, this mobile health in Mississippi. So, I have you talking about what happened in the Great Depression and I see it’s the same thing with COVID-19. Because we have the same issues and it’s almost too bad that this mobile health unit didn’t last longer. We could still use it today, whether it’s Mississippi or Detroit or Los Angeles, anywhere, rural or urban. We still need those services today in our community.

DR. NINA BANKS: And that’s the tragedy. Because African American men and women are cooperative and we are very creative. We focus on the larger need. So I think about Linda Gordon has a piece that compares the activities of black and white women who were engaged in social work types of efforts in the early part of the 20th century, and the vision of the black women who were social workers was very progressive. And her argument was if the black women’s vision had been put into place in the United States, a lot of the problems that we are dealing with today is a society in terms of disparities, health, environmental disparities, and so on, we wouldn’t be thinking about, because black women were always at the forefront of thinking cooperatively in ways that would benefit the larger community in terms of the provision of programs on a universal basis rather than on a means tested type of basis. But I guess I’m getting off track there a little bit.

VERNON OAKES: No, no. That’s right on track. But I want to switch a little bit. How did you get into this? What’s your background that would cause you to get into the study of what the contributions of black women have been in the household and in the community? How did you get here?

DR. NINA BANKS: Yeah. I went to graduate school and I ended up, you know, economics is a really hard discipline. And you go through all kinds of hoops. Hard in terms of the math requirements. And so I had gone through all of the hoots, it was time to write a dissertation, and I really came to the realization that I didn’t think that I had to prove anything to anybody anymore but myself. Now that wasn’t true, but that’s what I thought. And so what I realized is that I had all these years of education on white people, Europeans and Euro-Americans, and I knew very little about African-Americans. So I decided that I was going to write a dissertation on the African-American women who were important in my life come in my history, and the history of my people. And so I started looking, and again, this issue of work that’s not valued, so I started looking at the work of black women who were domestic workers. The washer women who helped to sustain our community because of discrimination against black men that made their earnings irregular. But there was also really good work done in economics by Mary King on that topic. So I ended up reading literature by these amazing African-American women historians and sociologists and eventually came to the realization that there were some questions on black women in the great migration that I could answer. And that work was unpaid community work. I didn’t frame it that way at that time period I used a different theoretical lens. But that’s how I ended up focusing on this work. I’ve always been interested in the work that people do, ordinary people do to sustain their families and their communities. And that’s what brought me to this.

VERNON OAKES: So you said all of this education. Give us a quick snippet, where did you grow up? Where did you graduate from college?

DR. NINA BANKS: I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania called Chambersburg. I went to a women’s called in Maryland, Hood College. It’s coed now but it was a women’s college. I had a spectacular education there period I studied history and economics and sociology. I decided to go into economics because there were so few black people in economics, compared to history and sociology. There are more, there aren’t a lot, but there are more. I went to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst because I wanted to be in an environment that provided lots of different approaches to understanding economics, and that’s what UMass Amherst did. There are about five universities in the country that have what we call heterodox approaches. It’s not just the mainstream comic that focuses on markets. UMass Amherst provided education in socialist programs, for example. So it’s just really rich and interesting. It was because it was multidimensional. So I got a doctorate degree from UMass Amherst and I did research that was archival, since I knew that in order to be able to research the voices of African-American women that have been silenced I would need to do archival research. So I did it and that experience was wonderful because it really prepared me to do the type of archival work that I have been doing since 2003 on Sadie Alexander, who was the first African-American economist. People had thought that she had given up her interest in economics after she wasn’t able to practice and she became a lawyer. And I went to the archives at Penn. I excavated her life as an economist when I realized that she had in fact continued to think about economic issues and to practice economics in the public realm. So that has been my career within economics.

VERNON OAKES: Let me see if I get it. You can go to the library, to the stacks, to history. You’re not researching people today and giving out surveys and analyzing that and seeing what that gives. You’re going to the history books or articles and magazines and then you do the research there, and that’s what you mean by archival?

DR. NINA BANKS: What I mean are primary sources. So yeah, sometimes they are connected to a library. The archives that I went to for my dissertation were at the University of Pittsburgh. They have an archives of the industrial society. And so I studied papers, documents from the Pittsburgh Urban League to do the research on Sadie Alexander. Her family donated huge amounts of papers to the University of Pennsylvania archives, 81 boxes of materials that span this incredible woman’s lifetime. And so, it means going through primary documents, correspondence, personal letters, a huge amount of information.

VERNON OAKES: So, we’re going to our last break. Dr. Banks, Nina, we’re going to our last break and when we come back out of the break I’d really like to talk about what you have learned from these archives, what you’ve learned from your studies, how it applies today. When you look at these women, the work in both the household and in society, how can we use that cooperative ethos to help us come out of and maybe change the economy, come out of this coronavirus where we have a new norm, not go back to the same old way we’ve been doing things. That’s what I’d really like to talk about if you’d think about it. We’ll come back right after the break and talk about that.

VERNON OAKES: Welcome back, everybody. This is Vernon Oakes and the program is Everything Cooperative. This program is sponsored by the National Cooperative bank. NCB has been our sponsor for the 7 1/2 years that we’ve been on this show. NCB’s mission is to support and be an advocate for America’s cooperatives and their members, especially, Nina, in low income communities. And that’s where we find a lot of black communities, in the low income, and they been doing a fantastic job of providing innovative financial and related services. So before we took the break, this 45 minutes has gone by really quick because you’ve talked about women whose work has been silent, black women particularly in the household and in the community. And in this first month that we were on the show, Nina, I had a guy from Senegal, Papa Sin, and he said cooperatives formed to solve community problems. If there’s no community problems, there’s no need for a co-op. And this is what black folks brought from West Africa and central Africa, is how you can pool resources, work collectively, and solve community problems, whether health, housing, or education. And this huge wealth gap that we have that helps to increase these problems in the black community, we have very little money to go to it. So what do you see what we can do collectively today that will help us come out of COVID-19? I have five pandemics we’re working in, really six. COVID-19, racism, climate change, poor economy, we got all these murders going on, which is five, and then there’s stupidity, that people do not get out this information and they want to say all of the wrong things read too many people in politics say the wrong things. To keep them in power and keeping them having the money. So what can we do with the research that you have that black women particularly have been doing in the household and in the community to help us out of this COVID-19?

DR. NINA BANKS: Okay. Great question, Vernon, and a really big, I think, question as well. And I think to go back to the earlier point about the archival research, that’s the importance of maintaining records and documenting our really important history, how are really important rich history and important history of work that we haven’t been thinking of work in this case. You talked about poverty and all of these crises that we’re going through, and you said five crises. We are always in a state, the African-American community is always in a state of crisis. And you’re absolutely right. These five crises that you’ve identified, it’s exacerbated this constant state of crisis that we are in. Black women today have been very active in performing unpaid community work in the environmental and food justice movement. And so that I think about in the context of your point about poverty, because so many of the disparities that we are dealing with are tied to living in racially segregated and impoverished communities in terms of the health effects of not having access to whole foods, healthy foods, or the contaminants, the toxins that are dumped into our communities. And again, black women have been at the forefront of performing unpaid community work to address those problems.

How do we address it? We deal with the disparities as a society. And when I say we here, I mean this nation needs to tackle all of those different crises that you just identified instead of leaving it to black women to pick up the burden. That’s why the approach that I’m calling for is that we have to see this as work, and then once we see it and document it, we need to find a way to quantify it. Because quantifying it in a market-based economy, quantifying it means defining a market value so that we can assess the contribution of this important work to our national output, to gross domestic product. But what is really tricky about this unpaid nonmarket work that black women are disproportionately performing is, as you said, it’s in response to not just unmet needs but also harm and threats to our communities, to these disparities that are tied to these things that are negative. So, on the one hand, then we have to be able to assign a market value and we can figure that out and do that, but, and this is the really critical point, is that once we figure out and quantify the value, it ends up being subtracted from national output because these are community harms. And so we need to think more broadly about national output in the context of well-being. Gross domestic product is a value of our national output, the final goods and services that are produced, but we need a better indicator that also assesses human welfare. And so, one example is the genuine progress indicator, and the genuine progress indicator then subtracts harm to society. It would subtract the effect of depletion of environmental resources. And so, if we’re looking at what black women are producing collectively, they are producing collective goods that benefit large numbers of people. That’s what a collective good is. You can’t exclude people. So the entire black community would benefit from racial justice. It means that we can’t quantify that properly because you can put a monetary value on racial justice. So whatever number we get is an underestimate of the true value. But then the other point that I’m making is that the work that I’m talking about in response to community threats and harms means that we have to address those harms. And so, when we quantify it we subtract it from the value of GDP. How do we solve the problem? We solved the problem by dealing with our economy that is not working for the vast majority of people in our country. We need a society that is inclusive.

I guess the other point that I want to make before we run out of time is that my analysis is built on the lived experience of African-American women but it applies to the experiences of other racialized women in the United States, because we see that indigenous women and Mexican-American women and Asian American women have been also engaged in this type of unpaid collective work on behalf of their communities. Indigenous women in other countries have been collectively performing unpaid work to challenge disparities. Women in India have been doing this work. So what I’m calling for is a completely different paradigm for thinking about unpaid work that women perform that is inclusive of the lives of racially marginalized women and women who are marginalized by their caste into their class, perhaps sexual identity, a whole host of ways in which women have been marginalized.

VERNON OAKES: Wow. That is phenomenal. So I have it that it is very difficult for people in power to put value on black folks’ work, and in particular black women’s work. So you talk about putting value to it. That’s an uphill value. And then you really expanded this, and I’m glad you did, that marginalized people around the world face the same stuff and women around the world have been addressing it, because women are nurturing period they want to take care of their children. And they want them to have successful and whole lives, as my mom and my wife and my children with my grandchildren, they’re all wanting to make sure that there is an environment that is wholesome for their children to grow up in and they’re valued. I got it. How do we get that value known, appreciated, and it’s around the world? It’s not just here. It’s not just black women. Although you’re looking at that doing the archival research, going through those stacks, finding out about it. I don’t know how we can support you in your work but I’d really like to keep track of it, really like to understand it and help to put it out there, because it’s invaluable. It’s hard to put a value on it.

DR. NINA BANKS: Thank you. Do you want me to give you a recent example of what we can do to shine a light on this?

VERNON OAKES: Yes. Absolutely.

DR. NINA BANKS: A lawyer contacted me in response to the New York Times’s profile on my work and he congratulated me, this is a Washington DC lawyer, and he talked about a case that he’s involved with in Delaware where there is a coalition for education reform that was focused on really the dumping of black children, especially black boys, into a special ed program. And so the profile that I read on this lawyer quantified his pro bono work to the tune of about $1 million over several years. And then I asked him. I said why is the coalition for education reform, did it include black people? And he said it was all black women. This is what I’m talking about. So we see his work, the lawyer, but what we don’t see is the unpaid nonmarket work of all of these black moms who did the work to bring attention to this harm done to our children.

VERNON OAKES: Fantastic. That is the way of leaving this. There is a lot of work to be done today to get us out of these pandemics that we’re in. I really appreciate your work and I appreciate you for what you’re doing. Thank you for educating me. Everybody out there, I know in your communities, in your churches, your sororities, unions, you’re doing this work. Keep doing it. We need it done. Nina, I’m thinking you should run for president of the United States too, but that’s a whole other subject.

DR. NINA BANKS: I love it. My son said the same thing to me several years ago, so…

VERNON OAKES: All right. There we go. I’m with him.

DR. NINA BANKS: Thank you, Vernon, for having me on your show.

VERNON OAKES: And please, everybody out there, we’ll see you next Thursday. Please live cooperatively. Thank you.