 Hi, welcome to the State of Working America podcast, where we seek to elevate workers' voices to ensure they're heard in the economic policy debate in Washington and beyond. I'm your host Pedro Ducosta. I'm here on the sidelines of EarnCon at Pittsburgh, and I'm really excited to have Nina Banks, who's a professor of economics at Bucknell University and is also on the board of EPI. We're honored to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much. Thank you, Pedro, for having me here. I'm really excited to be able to participate today. So this has been an awesome conference, and so many issues just bubbling up, but one of the issues that have not been discussed is something that you've been working on. But before we delve into your work generally, I just want to talk about just race in America today, given that that is a central focus of your work. What has it been like to teach and study race in a political environment that has become so intensely racist and is literally being controlled by a president who is racist? Oh, wow. That's a great question. Well, let me start by saying that my research focuses on gender from an intersectional standpoint that tends to highlight race and ethnicity. I'd say that the political climate has made me think very critically about the role of white women, not just in the election of Donald Trump, but also more generally in the ways in which white women have materially benefited from racialized patriarchy. And then why they have been active in supporting it and even constructing it, unfortunately, not only to the detriment of women of color, but also to their own detriment, and yet they continue to support it. The political climate has made me think more critically about my own area of research, which is feminist economics. This past summer, I spoke at the opening plenary of the International Association for Feminist Economics, IAFI conference, and I essentially issued a call to feminist economists to be more self-critical. I said that the criticisms that we as feminist economists have leveled at the discipline of economics must also be made about the practice of doing feminist economics. So if the gender of most economists matters in shaping disciplinary research, that's what feminists argue, if it matters in making policy recommendations and if it matters in hiring, then we need to employ an intersectional understanding of gender by incorporating race and ethnicity. And so what that means is that we should ask how do the perceptions and the concerns of white women, especially those in the global north, affect what feminist economists regard as worthy areas of research? In other words, what issues of concern by other women have been neglected or even ignored within feminist economics? What are white women's biases in our profession and how do white women's class, position, sexuality, and race, ethnicity inform those biases? How do these biases shape the different economic areas of research, for example? I think that there tends to be a privileging of, and even how does it shape the construction of care work, or even the emphasis that feminists place on intra-household relations between a cohabiting or a married couple? If I could ask a quick follow-up, so this is fascinating that you bring up these kind of intra-gender divisions, because I do think of Trumpism as a kind of divide and conquer of all sorts. It's literally a philosophy of pitting people against one another in every area. But that particular dynamic is so perversely sort of fascinating to watch white women vote against what many perceive against their own self-interest in the face of his hyper-shovenism, his hyper, you know, just machismo and overt, you know, sexual commentary. And yet white women voted for him in droves and continued to support him, despite all of that. But I wanted to talk about that in the context of your work. So you have white feminist economists and scholars who look at unpaid work as far as kind of household, what would you think of maybe as parental activities, right? Kind of household duties falling primarily on the mother rather than the father. But you've been thinking about unpaid work in a much broader sense, in a sense that I really haven't seen other scholars pursue. Could you talk a little bit about that? Yes, thank you. I would be very happy to. And I think that your description is very accurate. So and this is something that I have been thinking about for a very long time. And so what I'm trying to do is create a paradigm shift in the way that we, the way that feminist economists think about unpaid work and even beyond feminist economics. So the framework that I develop places the lived experiences of particular groups of women of color at the center of analysis. So primarily I'm focusing on the work of African American women, Chicanas and Native women. For each of these groups, membership in racially oppressed communities shapes their consciousness. But in mainstream analysis, the firm and the government are the primary sites where goods and services are produced in exchange. If we look at feminist analysis, the household is also a site of production. But it's also a site that involves, as you said, unpaid labor, cooking, cleaning, caregiving activities. There's another approach that is often not studied in the United States. It's studied in other parts of the world. It's called the social economy. It examines the production of goods that are produced collectively. And those goods are produced for social objectives, such as providing employment to community members. Non-profits and cooperatives fall within the social economy framework. So my framework looks at work that is missing from each of these other frameworks, and so I'm looking at non-market, unpaid work that's performed collectively for social objectives by primarily women of color. Women of color have historically engaged in non-market collective work in order to challenge or to address racial disparities that affect the well-being of people who live within their communities. They are often responding to either community threats or unmet needs that their communities tend to have because the government or firms haven't sufficiently provided for those needs. When women of color respond to these unmet needs or community threats collectively, the tendency has been to think of what they are doing simply as political activism against racial injustice. My argument is that there is a lot of work that goes into those activities. We need to recognize it and call it as work. It's not channeled through a market. It's unpaid work. So I argue that the community should be theorized parallel to the way that we theorize the firm or the household. It's a site of production. It's also a site of production where unpaid work is performed collectively for social objectives. And I think that we especially see these non-paid collective activities in the environmental and food justice movements. I can give you some examples if you'd like. Yes, please. OK. Native women who have organized against environmental contaminations and the health effects from, say, uranium mining or more recently from oil pipelines on their lands, I can think of Chicanas who've mobilized their communities against having a toxic waste incinerator or African-American women. And African-American women are really the people who've launched the environmental justice movement in the United States. But African-American women who collect information from community members over cancer rates due to toxic land contamination and pollution and also protest the actions of the state and private companies for putting landfills within their communities. So there's a lot of non-market work that goes into all of these efforts. And again, as feminists say, if somebody else was paid to do these activities, it would be recognized as work and recorded as such as part of GDP. So how do you start to think about this in terms of operationalizing it as far as policy thinking and making it active in the world? I have been trying to. This is, yeah, that's the tough question. So I have been theorizing it. And I've pulled together my theory. I'm about to send it out to a journal for publication. I actually have a book contract on this already. And so what I'm planning to do is engage in field work in communities across the country, different racial ethnic communities, to actually record the unpaid work that women are doing collectively. So that's a big project that I'm planning to take on in another year or so. And then the other part of it would be then quantifying the unpaid work that they perform and thinking about, somebody asked me at a conference recently, what are they producing? And I said that they are producing collective goods. So thinking about the benefits more collectively. The first thing that came to my mind when you talked about, as you were describing, the various forms of unpaid labor and unrecognized collective work are the mothers of boys like Tamir Rice and Michael Brown, who were forced to be an Eric Gardner, not a young boy, but a young man, who were forced to become activists for life, basically, because their lives are marked by that level of tragedy. And that seems to happen on so many levels. We're not just gun violence, but as far as the need for community activism. Can you speak to that in the environment that minority communities face? Particularly in the context of not only the usual social blight that we're used to in the United States, but also, as we were talking about before, this hyper-racialized, ice-raid environment. I mean, when we think about mobilization, these communities really have to mobilize to figure out where they need to hide from la migra at this point, right? Yeah, thank you. Absolutely. And so, again, women often play a prominent role in those movements early on, because women are so closely connected to children, caring for children, feeding children, protecting children. And so you gave great examples of activities. And so we see these activities, as I think I said, especially in the environmental justice movement and the food justice movements, we see them in cases of harm done to migrant communities, policing of communities. My work focuses on the work that people are doing before it often moves on to having a paid staff. So it's that early period where primarily women, they're often men, but primarily women are organizing. They're doing. They're collecting information from community members. They are making phone calls. And as you said, you talked about Tamir Rice and some of the other mothers who are involved in the movement for Black Lives. That's a really good example. And I don't know. I think that Black Lives Matter now has a paid staff. And so to the extent that they do, their efforts are captured by the social economy framework. And I would be looking at the work that they do up until the point where they have a paid staff. But the work that they do is not only important for the community, it's also really important nationally. And so we know that the movement for Black Lives has led to an attempt to engage in criminal justice reform nationally. That's so important. This has a long history. If I think about African-American women in the 19th century, early 20th century, who were trying to build their communities due to exclusion, they were involved in these efforts. I can think of the Black Panthers party movement in the late 60s and early 70s who launched a program to provide free breakfast for children who lived in their communities, underserved. I don't know it, but I suspect that women were the ones who were primarily cooking and feeding children. That had a national impact. That was part of the reason why we have a federal program to provide free breakfast to school children today. So these are really important, not only within the communities, but also they tend to have national impacts. I wanted to ask you about your work in the context of the broader field of economics, especially in the context of this climate survey that recently came out from the American Economics Association about just how sort of chauvinistic and white dominated the profession is. And I know that the statistics have always shocked me because even within social sciences, I know that economics is an outlier. It's even worse maybe than STEM as far as woman participation and minority participation. Could you tell me a little bit about what that does to the field in terms of people's research focus and how your work, how you go about doing your work, which is so unique. And I feel like it's unique in part because people aren't asking the questions because they ask questions that relate to their own experience. They don't ask questions about others. Thank you. That's exactly what happens is that who we are, our life experiences tend to shape our concerns, the questions that we think are worthy of research. And so I learned this early on when I was a graduate student and I wanted to do research that really honored the work of African American women who had always been working at low wage jobs in order to support the community. And when I got to the dissertation stage, I realized that I had accumulated a lot of knowledge about Euro American and European women but very little in my economics classes about African American women. And so it really, it motivated me to do a lot of interdisciplinary work. And so I wrote a dissertation that focused on unpaid work, the black women, women who were migrating from the South to the North during the Great Migration Period, what they did for their communities. So it's really important, the questions that were raised in that survey and the findings, I don't think that they're surprising at all because we've known for a long time feminist economist, black economist, economist of color have documented various forms of hostility that they face within the profession. But I think also more fundamentally that the curriculum tends to pathologize black people in particular. Research often by non-black scholars tends to ask problematic questions, come to problematic solutions. And so my research is really trying to, I think give a more authentic account of work that African American historically have performed and are performing today. Thank you so much. I'm gonna leave it there. I really appreciate your time. That was Nina Banks from Bucknell University, also a board member at EPI. And this is Pedro Dacosta. And that was the State of Working America podcast. You can subscribe on our YouTube channel. You can sign up at epi.org slash podcast or download us wherever you get your podcasts.