Black women’s unpaid political activism deserves acknowledgement. Economist Nina Banks argues that their community work should count as a form of work. And she means “count” literally!
Community activism as work
Feminist economists have highlighted how neoclassical economics wrongfully excluded domestic work, primarily done by women, as productive work that contributes to the economy. Likewise, Banks argues that both mainstream and feminist economists have missed how the community is a site of unpaid work for Black women. According to Banks, counting unpaid activism as a form of productive work is necessary to understand Black women’s economic activity.
Side note: Though most of Banks’ examples examine African American women’s activism, she suggests that her argument extends to other groups of racialized women. She cites Indigenous and Mexican American women’s activism within the United States, as well as community work of indigenous Kenyan women in the Rendille community, Dalit women in India, and Munduruku women in Brazil.
Arendt’s categories of labour, work, and action
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt explores the activities of labour, work, and political action. For her, “labour” is private. Activities under this umbrella are ones that ought to be hidden from public view. Labour includes embodied activities that sustain daily life, such as cooking, cleaning, and caregiving. As feminists have pointed out, activities Arendt describes as labour have been labeled historically as “feminine.” Moreover, women continue to do the bulk of domestic labour today.
In contrast, work and action are public. Work corresponds to productive activity that contributes to the durability of the world. The stuff that humans make helps comprise the common world that we share. Action is the most distinctively human and political activity. Freedom manifests in collective action, when people coming together and act towards a common goal.
Arendt’s distinctions between labour, work, and action seem at odds with Banks’ conclusion: That Black women’s political action isn’t just political; it’s also work.
Reading Banks alongside Arendt
As I read Banks’ research, I could not help but wonder how to make sense of it from an Arendtian perspective. This can happen when you spend a lot of time with a theorist; they won’t leave your head.
Granted, it may be inappropriate to apply an Arendtian lens to Banks’ project. Banks is an economist, whereas Arendt a political theorist. Their goals and the kinds of questions they formulate differ. Banks provides an intersectional framework for understanding the complexity of Black women’s economic activity. Arendt is interested in how norms of labour and work (as she defines them) take over political concerns.
Nevertheless, reading Banks alongside Arendt serves as a reminder, at least to me, about how feminists might interpret Arendt, or revise and apply some of her insights, to further social justice projects.
Lesson 1: Resisting rigid categorizations
It is a mistake to read the distinctions between labour, work, and action too rigidly. This is true reading Arendt on her own terms. Art, she claims, straddles the boundary between work and action.
Political action as apperance
Even when Arendt seems most categorical, feminist interpreters have reasons to resist rigid boundaries. Seyla Benhabib argues that appearance is what really counts for Arendt’s account of political action.
For Arendt, to speak and act with others is to appear publicly in the world as a unique individual. A person does not appear in their uniqueness when labouring. Indeed, reducing women to domestic roles is part of a feminist critique of associating women too closely with household labour.
In political action, Arendt tells us, a person reveals who they are. You do not get a sense of who I am when I am eating and cooking. You might notice that I only make plant-based meals, but without us talking about it, you don’t have a sense of how that practice relates to my identity.
Ambiguous categories
Benhabib’s example of ambiguous boundaries is industrial factory work. Worker work producing goods. But, the factory can also be a site for politics. It is a space where power might be negotiated between employers and workers. Workers (and employers) might appear as unique individuals and disclose who they are through such interactions.
Following Benhabib, an example of an ambiguous boundary from ym research is commercial contract pregnancy. Paying someone to gestate an embryo expresses Arendt’s concerns about labour taking over work and politics. But, it can also be the site of political action around gender, race, class, and caste inequities.
While Benhabib illuminates how something that might be interpreted as work can also be political, Banks argues in the opposite direction. Political action can also be labour (as Arendt defines it). As Banks’ examples show, Black women’s political action is not only about social and political resistance. It can be about the very survival of Black women’s families and communities.
Lesson 2: The public/private boundary centers white perspectives
Just as Banks’ argument reminds me that some activities can be action, work, and/or labour, it also encourages me to think about ways in which Arendt’s argument (or the way in which feminists draw on it) centers white experiences.
When Arendt introduces her private/public distinction, she contrasts the household and the polis in Ancient Greece and Rome. Feminists have critiqued Arendt’s discussion, especially her lack of condemnation about how women and slaves cannot be free because they are relegated to the household. In these critiques of Arendt, feminists draw parallels with contemporary experiences. When women are confined to the household, they are not able to be active participants in the public sphere. Or when they are income earners, their work is not valued as much economically or socially as “men’s” work.
As Evelyn Nakano Glenn (for just one reference point among many) has pointed out, this feminist analysis of the public/private distinction characterizes, broadly speaking, white women’s experiences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it does not accurately describe the experiences of Black, Chinese-American, or Mexican American women. Each of these groups, Glenn demonstrates, have different social positions and experiences of the labour market in America.
Although Arendt’s public/private distinction renders labour and physical survival something to be hidden, for many racialized groups, political action is not only about claiming their rights or access to public space or political recognition. It can be about their very physical, embodied survival. Or to put the point slightly differently, political recognition requires that one’s life needs are met.
Dwelling with ambiguous categories
Banks’ argument prompts me to reflect on ways in which various activities may constitute labour, work, and/or action depending on how they are taken up. Mutual aid activities, such as communities providing health care or food access for their neighbours, may be a good example. Feminist theorists such as Cristina Beltrán and Ayten Gündoğu draw on Arendt while also challenging rigid boundaries between labor, work, and action. (Both center the experiences of migrant peoples in their work.)
Ambiguous categories are not necessarily a bad thing. Messiness often points to multiplicity, nuance, and complexity. Feminists limit the usefulness of Arendt’s political thought when we fail to recognize how expansive political action can be. We limit the usefulness of her thought when we fail to see how concerns of labour constitute political demands.
Credits
Photo by Scott Umstattd on Unsplash