This year, instead of raising my fist in protest on Equal Pay Day, I felt frustrated.
It’s not that I wasn’t inspired by so many women turning out across the nation to fight our right to equal pay for equal work. I was. But once again it seems to me that black and brown women are being used as pawns to advance the equality of our white sisters at the expense of our own well-being and equality. And like generations of women before me, I feel unequal in a women’s movement that professes equality for all.
Since President John F. Kennedy signed the equal pay law in 1963 — when white women made just 59 cents to each dollar white men made — we’ve witnessed woman of all races standing, marching and singing together to demand equal pay. And this is important work that must continue.
Yet the message always sounds off-key to me because there is no expanded conversation on how to help the women who struggle most gain a little more ground. I hear no calls to examine the reasons behind the racial pay gap among women.
We need a new strategy if we are serious about equality. This one doesn’t work for all women.
My white sisters are great at articulating a one-note statistic of how women (meaning white women) today make about 82 cents for each dollar white men earn. But they seem less willing to acknowledge that the gender pay gap doesn’t affect all women equally, or to advocate for the women most affected by it. Black women, for instance, earn 65 cents, and Hispanic women make 58 cents to each dollar earned by white men. Asian women fare better than most at 87 cents, though that is still unacceptable.
The conversation always flips back to the 82-centers. Their struggles, their demands. Their privileged perspective — intended or not — dominates the entire Equal Pay agenda.
Other successful equal rights agendas, from civil and gay rights to the fight for minimum wage, have set a strategy for incremental advancement. But in the Equal Pay movement, too many women seem satisfied to see the gains of everyone’s efforts mostly benefit those already at the top of the pay scale.
The march toward a living minimum wage is a good example of how fighting for incremental economic equality can improve lives immediately. Though many civil rights advocates want a $15 per hour federal minimum wage, reaching that goal will be a fierce legislative fight. So across the nation, the livable wage movement has adopted a multi-pronged strategy that is playing out in many states, municipalities and private business.
In North Carolina, the state general assembly enacted a “preemptive law” in 2013 that prohibits cities like Durham from passing laws to increase the minimum wage above the state minimum of $7.25 per hour. That roadblock has neither stopped the Durham City Council from agreeing to raise the rate to $15, nor the more than 100 companies that have voluntarily agreed to raise employee salaries. So far this year in the United States, 19 states have increased the minimum wage. But the battle continues: 23 states, mostly across the South, have adopted laws that ban its urban municipalities from passing laws to increase employee wages. So now livable wage advocates are taking their message to the rural areas, and crossing racial lines.
“If we want economic justice, we can’t focus just on urban areas or one demographic of workers,” North Carolina AFL-CIO Secretary MaryBe McMillian told The Guardian last week at the first Fight for $15 rally in Gastonia.
The same can be said of the fight for Equal Pay for women. Women of color will continue to lose if the tone of movement focuses mainly on pay equity for white women.
White women have narrowed their pay gap with white men by 22 cents, up from 60 cents to the 82 cents they now earn for every dollar white men earned in 2015, according to recent Pew Research Center and Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The news is not so promising for black women, who’ve gained 9 cents in earnings on that same dollar, up from 56 cents to 65 cents. Hispanic women are at the bottom, earning just 5 cents more today than the 53 cents they earned to every dollar white men made in 1980.
Let’s be honest, oftentimes women can be the gatekeepers of our own oppression. It’s easy to lay the blame for our inequality at the feet of white men and make them our common enemy. But is it really that simple?
I’ve had more jobs than I can recall since I first began working as a teenager. But I do remember that it wasn’t always a white man who determined how much or how little I got paid. Whether working part time at the mall, flipping burgers or climbing the corporate ladder, plenty of white women were happy to pay me less. Less than white men and far less than women who looked like them, doing exactly the same work — even when I was more experienced and outperformed my higher-paid coworkers.
Throughout my media career, especially after I was promoted to the executive ranks, I watched these seemingly well-intentioned women. They are the same women who urged women of color to join their diversity groups, to lead discussions of inequality in the workplace, and many times to be the face of the latest corporate diversity initiative. Yet when given the opportunity to make corrections to the gender pay gap, I’ve seen many instead continue to set lower salary ranges for women of color.
Not exactly a unified front.
Women — Blacks, Latinas, Asians, Native Americans and others — have been on the front lines, fist raised, for equality since day one. We lifted our voices when our hands were shackled generations back. We lift our voices today because we know that we’ve come too far to turn back now. But don’t think for one second, my sister, that we don’t see you quietly sitting there. Your silence, whether it be unconscious or not, limits us all.
Imagine what we could accomplish if we truly believed all women were equal, no matter their race, religion or politics. If only we lived by the words of protest we so passionately speak, our possibilities would be endless. And who knows, maybe one day we’d even stand together to elect a woman President of the United States — not simply because she’s a one of us, but because we recognize our own value.
Now that would be a day worth celebrating.
