interviews
A Bifurcated Approach
by Paul Frymer
February 24, 2021
This interview with Paul Frymer, Professor of Politics at Princeton University and author, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Paul | The Wagner Act was built on the idea of making the workplace accountable to the workers, of getting better wages, and improving working conditions. It is a relic of a time when the government was involved in regulatory action. We just don't do that much anymore at least in the realm of labor politics.
One thing I write about in my book, Black and Blue, is that at the time of the New Deal, civil rights were really not a priority for most U.S. politicians. Though the vast majority of African-Americans had no voting rights and no protection against economic discrimination, these big pieces of legislation like the Wagner Act did not try to change that structure.
The New Deal was built around the idea of a white working class, and the Wagner Act is part of that.
What would it have looked like if it included civil rights?
Most straightforwardly, the NAACP wanted a provision in the Wagner Act that said that employers can’t discriminate on a basis of race. That was not in there.
The Democratic Party, which was reliant on Southern Democrats at the time, did not want that and it was not put in the bill. As such, the legislation allowed companies and unions to discriminate on the basis of race. There is a case in the 1950s that I mention in my book where an employer was accused of firing workers because they were union members. You can't do that according to the Wagner Act. So, he said he didn't fire them because they were union members, he fired them because they were black. That was fine under the law.
Workers in Hole, photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth56863/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Hardin-Simmons University Library.
You write about how labor movements and civil rights movements often act independently of each other, rather than in conjunction. Why is there bifurcation?
It is a great and complicated question. W. E. B. Du Bois, the great civil rights intellectual and activist in the early 20th century, famously wrote about just how easy it is for employers to divide workers on the basis of racism.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, employers used to bring in African-Americans from the South or Chinese workers to break strikes and to create racial conflict. Though we are a long way from those kinds of extreme examples, today, we can still see the ways in which race and class have difficulty coalescing. We have lots of great examples of when they do when multi-racial or multi-ethnic coalitions form around class lines, but it’s very hard to do.
Specifically, in terms of the Wagner Act, the 1930s was the time of the labor movement and the labor movement, itself, was largely white. Later, in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement gets underway. The white labor movement publicly supports civil rights, but not always privately. Just as we have seen in the Trump era, there were conflicts among white workers who did not want greater diversity. Unions have continued to struggle with this.
Democrats have stepped back from workers. Trump towards them. Do you think his labor support is essentially just about race?
No, it was not just race. He gave them a sympathetic story to buy into. He said that he was going to give them their jobs back. He said that the United States and the Democratic and Republican Party had forgotten about the working class and that they don't care about the working class. They shipped your jobs out to other countries, he said. The sympathetic story is not that far off from the same one Bernie Sanders told. Jesse Jackson ran on that message in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a very powerful message that resonates.
The problem is, a lot of people out there, media and politicians, look for a scapegoat, and race is an easy scapegoat. Economic messages resonate a lot more when there are people who “don't look like us” that are perceived as threatening the white working class. So we point to things like building a wall.
[Workers on Platform], photograph, [1965-05-13..1965-05-24]; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1011027/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.
There's long been a debate within the Democratic Party about class and race, and how to emphasize both. One part of the party says it’s all about class and that race is an artificial construction that employers used to keep themselves in power, so we should emphasize economic distribution and racial inequality will be reduced in the process. That goes so far, but it doesn't go all the way. Race may be an artificial construct, in that we no longer attribute race with individual differences, but it still has taken an incredibly powerful meaning in our society as a result of longstanding prejudice and discrimination. Our solutions can’t just be about universal policies. We need to recognize that there is racism, discrimination, and prejudice in America and that it needs to be addressed on its own. It too cannot be dealt with in isolation from issues of class, but it needs its own stress and dedication. It's really complicated to have those conversations, obviously with Trump voters, but with progressives, suburbanites, and just about everyone else as well.
Backing up a little bit — in the 1930s, there were very few black members in unions. Over time it really moves up, but union participation more broadly declines. Why is that?
You are right. During the time in which African-Americans and Latinos have joined the labor movement, labor movement numbers declined dramatically.
Part of the reason for that is globalization. Part of the reason is that employers can reclassify workers so that they cannot be unionized--see the battles over Uber and Lyft and the gig economy more generally. And a big part of the reason is that employers are incredibly aggressive. Employers are very aggressively breaking the law and they can get away with it. What employers will do immediately is fire union organizers. That is against the law, but they know that they will just be slapped on the wrist, if anything. There is a lot of intimidation. Employers have all of these opportunities to make appeals to workers, to talk to them as a ‘captured audience’. The union does not have the right to access these workers, the way employers do.
You can see these aggressive tactics with the current Amazon fight. Amazon is about to have a union election in Alabama.
The union is fighting for the ability to vote by mail in light of COVID, and Amazon, just as the Republican party does, is fighting to make voting more difficult.
They don't want people to vote in the privacy of their homes because they know they will quite likely vote yes to the union.
What do you wish the media would note in their coverage of something union organizing?
The media has often made it seem like the union is the bully and the employer is the individual. They make it seem like people have the right to make as much money as they want, and whether individuals want to work for a certain company or not, is their individual problem. This whole idea of collective action is hard for a lot of Americans to understand.
It is also important to note that in a place like Alabama, where racism is deeply embedded in the history, culture, and still resonates in current politics, the employers use hiring practices to capitalize on this. They will bring in more immigrants to work. This racializes the workforce and the employers know what they are doing. In sweatshops and meatpacking plants, for example, they hire workers that speak all different languages so that they have difficulty communicating with each other.
So union organizing work is very, very hard and incredibly stressful. Especially going against Amazon, a massive corporation that is going to throw everything at you. Any worker who has been part of a union drive knows it is an incredibly stressful and often quite scary period of time. Employers will try to capitalize on this further by saying, vote against the union, and all this stress will go away.
Do you think support from local and national politicians is helpful or maybe even a requirement for successful labor union activism?
Totally. At the local level, we do have politicians to do that, and that is helpful. And Bernie will show up. And AOC will show up.
But what we need is the Democratic Party as a whole to stand by unions.
You see this dynamic right now going on with teachers and the nurse's unions and the question about whether the Biden administration will negotiate with teachers over COVID issues at school. The Democratic Party, generally, supports unions, but they frequently offer very little direct support to union campaigns. I mean the Democratic Party taking on Amazon is a big, big pill. Jeff Bezos gives a ton of money to the Democratic Party. He owns the Washington Post. Look at the conflict a few years ago when he pulled a potential Amazon plant from New York City in response to AOC’s opposition. It is not easy, and it often pits Democrats against Democrats.
Why do you think, politically, workers are sidelined for the swing voter? What do you think this obsession with the swing voter is, rather than the working class?
2020 is a good example of that. The African-American vote was the backbone of the Democratic victory. The African-American was critical to winning Georgia. The vote probably won Michigan, and on and on. President Trump obviously realized that because he was trying to make African American voting in Philadelphia and Detroit and in Atlanta much more difficult, or even throw large numbers of votes out.
But the strategists of the Democratic Party are overwhelmingly white.
Most of them are ambivalent on issues of race themselves. They look at the broader map and they say, "Well, who are voters that we need to win?" And frequently, they draw a big circle around white suburbanites. Election after election, the conventional wisdom is white suburbanites. We see that after what happened 2016. The focus immediately turns to those disgruntled white Trump voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio.
And there is some truth to that. The white suburban vote in Georgia was also critical. Not independently of the African-American vote, but the African-American vote is not a majority vote in this country or in any state. You do need a significant proportion of white voters. But the Democratic Party, I think, has overplayed that idea in the sense that they think that in order to win the white vote, you need to then downplay civil rights, and downplay things like Black Lives Matter. There's evidence that goes in both directions. A lot of political scientists are currently studying how much the Black Lives Matter protests helped or hurt the Democratic Party. This is an incredibly fraught issue.
[Two Construction Workers], photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc499160/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.
And when you talk about Black Lives Matter you do risk opposition from the white suburbs and other white workers. And that requires the Democratic Party, and our government more broadly, to have bigger conversations. They don't want to have those conversations, obviously. They don't want to explain to people why Black Lives Matter is singularly important for historical and systemic reasons, and how in certain ways, it is also for all of us. Those are hard conversations, and the Democratic party doesn't want to have them.
And you know, you see why any time anyone, whether it’s Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or AOC or Bernie Sanders, says anything of nuance or subtlety, it gets shredded, and frequently, they back away.
This is cynical, but the country is becoming less and less white, at some point the white suburbanite won’t be the majority.
If you look at California in the 1990s, the Republican Party made, in a way, the same big bet on white voters that Trump did. And over time, they have gotten crushed. California is a liberal Democratic state because of demographics and so forth. So, there is hope among progressives that California is a sign of the future of the United States and that the Republicans are going to be crushed in the coming years.
Some Republicans think that too because they are focusing on trying to stop people from voting. They're trying to stop immigrants from entering the United States they fear will become Democrats. They're trying to stop Washington DC from becoming a state.
The one footnote to this is that I find the demographic argument a little bit problematic in that populations are not static. Populations are changing over time. Some populations ‘become white’ over time. We've seen hints of this within the numbers of some Latino populations.
We've already seen it with Cubans, a large number who have been conservatives and Republicans from the first migrations in the 1960s. Puerto Ricans are largely Democrats but there are some openings there, with a strong Republican presence in Puerto Rico itself. You see movement with the third, fourth, fifth-generation Mexican populations in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico as well.
The other thing that you touched on is young people.
What happens with young people as they age? Is the take away from what is currently being said, "I believe black lives matter and I think we need a new era." Or is the takeaway, "I believe black lives matter until it comes to my town and my school and my police department and impacts my housing prices."
This is the moment for the progressive white middle-class to decide how much it embraces racial progress and actively promotes it going forward.
Yeah. How serious are you, I guess.
Oh, I don’t doubt people’s seriousness and sincerity of beliefs. But it is once these beliefs are confronted with different dynamics that you have to really struggle with and be willing to face and accept.
You see this in gentrifying neighborhoods, from Brooklyn to the Mission of San Francisco to Silverlake in LA. These are pockets of progressive white populations. How much are they willing to embrace diversity over the long term, and recognize what it actually means?
The gentrifiers are probably the most progressive politically. Housing in LA is expensive, but…
That is why I think the government is so important. Because you hear these stories you can sympathize or you can find a way to understand it. And I don’t think it's just rationalizing. Every individual story is importantly different. But, that's where the government, I think, needs to step in and say, “We are going to set these rules and everybody has to follow these rules.”
That takes the pressure off of the individuals, and puts the onus on the government to create these spaces that are diverse. That is what we should do as opposed to putting all the energy on the single worker who has to go on strike for a year.
We should put the onus on broader government structures and law so that we actually make it easier for everybody to have it.
interviews
BECAUSE SHE'S POWERFUL. In Conversation with Endria Richardson, Hedy Lee, and Megan Comfort.
by Endria Richardson, Megan Comfort, Hedy Lee
June 28, 2018
This interview with Megan Comfort, Endria Richardson, and Hedy Lee was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Megan: How are you?
Tatti: I'm doing well. I'm glad we could all connect. I think the way that this would be the most
interesting for people is just you guys in conversation as the experts amongst yourselves.
Endria: Okay, that sounds great. Go ahead Megan.
Megan: I can kick us off. I am Megan Comfort, and I'm a senior research sociologist at RTI International. I have been focusing on issues of how the criminal justice system has an impact on families and people's well-being for a while now, and I had a book published in 2008 called "Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of Prison", that focused on women who had incarcerated partners at a California state prison.
Then more recently I've been working with my colleagues, Anupa Bir, Tasseli McKay, and Christine Lindquist at RTI, and we've just released a special issue of the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation about the multi-site family study on incarceration, parenting, and partnering. That was a longitudinal study that followed almost 1,500 families who had a father who experienced incarceration, and an outside female partner and minor children. We have really rich qualitative and quantitative data about their experiences.
Endria: I'm Endria Richardson, I'm the research coordinator at Essie Justice Group, and a lawyer who has worked on criminal policy and advocacy for the past four years. My work at Essie recently culminated in a national report we just released titled "Because She's Powerful: The Political Isolation and Resistance of Women with Incarcerated Loved Ones." Our report focuses on the specific impacts of mass incarceration on women who have incarcerated loved ones. We define “women” as cis women, trans women, gender queer people, and gender nonconforming people.
Hedy: I'm Hedy Lee, I'm a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. I would define myself as a sociologist and a demographer, because I primarily use survey data to try to understand social problems. I'm particularly interested in health disparities, especially black/white health disparities, and figuring out what structures in our society produce the persistent disparities we see, because across almost every health outcome that exists you see black/white differences that are pretty large among both men and women. That has led me to study the role of mass incarceration and the impact that it has on particularly women and their health, especially for women whose family members are incarcerated. It dovetails with the work that you two do, except I came at it from the health disparities perspective.
Tatti: Would you elaborate a bit about what you found in the Because She's Powerful report?
Endria: Sure. Yeah. I think one of the most important parts of the report is that it introduces data that should have existed in the field already. Essie Justice Group, as a loving and powerful community of women with incarcerated loved ones, has become a space where the mothers, and sisters, and daughters, and grandmothers of incarcerated people can share their experiences of how the incarceration of a loved one has changed their lives.
While our report is indebted to the scholarship of incredibly brilliant women, many of whom are formerly incarcerated Black women, outside of Megan's work and Hedy's work, we couldn't find very much data that really commented on how women are directly impacted by mass incarceration through the incarceration of a loved one. This lack of data really went against the stories that we were hearing again, and again, and again, that describe the similar and devastating ways that women’s lives change when a loved one is incarcerated.
So we launched a national survey that reached over 2,500 women. Once we cleaned the data set, we ended up with about 2,200 surveys. And, we found some pretty stark data points.
We confirmed that the incarceration of a loved one is psychologically and physically traumatic to women: 86% of women that we surveyed reported that the incarceration of a loved one causes depression, anxiety, anger, stress, and loneliness, and reported that the strain this causes on emotional and mental health was significant or extreme. That number jumps to 94% when women's partners are incarcerated.
Another major finding is that women are taking on an extraordinary financial burdens when their loved one is incarcerated. Women are paying attorney’s fees, court fees, and bail fees at the same time that they are losing the financial support of their loved ones. So all of those costs occur pretty immediately, or within the first six months of a loved one being arrested and incarcerated. A third of the women we surveyed lost their household's primary source of income, and 70% of women with an incarcerated loved one shared that they are their family's only wage earner.
Endria: There are also longer term financial impacts. During a loved one's incarceration, women who are now single parents change their educational plans, so maybe needing not to go to college and to work instead, work more hours, need to change jobs, or take on additional jobs in order to pay for the cost of supporting themselves and their family, and for the financial costs of just dealing with incarceration. The cost of phone calls, and visits, and commissary bills.
And women lose housing stability. 35% of women we surveyed experienced either houselessness, or had been unable to pay rent, or unable to pay a mortgage, or have been evicted, or have faced eviction, because of their loved one's incarceration. That number increases to more than half, so 56% of women, when their loved one was the primary income earner.
And then finally, women with incarcerated loved ones are extremely isolated. We included a scale in our survey that was constructed of six questions that measure social and emotional loneliness, and we used that scale as a proxy for isolation.
The isolation of women with incarcerated loved ones has both social and political implications. It also has health implications. The former U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, declared that there is an epidemic of loneliness in the U.S., and that loneliness can be correlated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that of smoking.
Political isolation occurs when a system of control socially isolates a significant number of historically and currently oppressed people, and their social isolation reinforces a hierarchy that is based on race, gender, or class. For women with incarcerated loved ones, who are disproportionately Black and Brown women, and are disproportionately low-income, two agents of political isolation are blame and shame. Political isolation limits collective action, punishes deviance, protects those in power, and ultimately maintains the status quo.
Tatti: I have a question about the term, "epidemic of loneliness." When the Surgeon General said it, was he referring to incarceration? Was he referring to this epidemic happening because the rates of incarceration in the United States are so high?
Endria: Yeah, that's a really great question. Dr. Murthy focuses a lot on the loneliness of people who are maybe working high stress jobs, who are spending a lot of time at their computers or isolated from their co-workers, isolated from their family members. He does talk about the health impacts of not being socially connected to people, which is certainly applicable to incarcerated people. Some of his work shows that even when that social disconnect occurs as a result of choices that people are making to work long hours, to be away from community, the effects on people’s physical and mental health may be quite destructive. But still, those choices are different from the isolation that occurs when someone is forcibly separated from their loved ones, forcibly taken from their families through incarceration or through immigration detention.
We were actually able to speak with Dr. Murthy on the phone while we were writing our report, and share some of our findings. He was incredibly thoughtful in sharing some of his work and his thoughts on loneliness, as a really universal problem that has disastrous health impacts. It would be great to see more work on how incarceration specifically is linked to isolation and what the health impacts are there.
Tatti: When you find these things, and you say these things out loud and you put them into the world and people digest this information, what are we supposed to do with it? What is the active response to this, really data driven, information?
Endria: Yeah. That's a great question. One thing that we were seeking to do with this report and with our work is to highlight that mass incarceration is a barrier to gender justice.
Endria: We also aren’t listening enough to women whose loved ones are being incarcerated. Women whose mothers or fathers or partners or children are incarcerated. One of our asks with this report is really of the women's rights field and criminal justice fields to start to or continue to center women in work that considers mass incarceration. And to the women’s rights field to start looking at mass incarceration as a gender justice issue.
Also, when we are talking about families, to not use the impact on families as a way to mask the impact on women specifically, or to mask the really core role that women are often playing in holding families and holding communities together.
Endria: Another ask we have is to women who have incarcerated loved ones, to either reach out to us, to Essie Justice Group, to nominate yourselves to our Healing to Advocacy program in California. Or to organize, if you're not based in California, to not wait for us to come to you, but to continue to organize with other women with incarcerated loved ones to help break isolation and end mass incarceration’s harm to women. We know that women are already organizing and advocating for their loved ones in their communities and for themselves.
Tatti: We have had other people who contributed this month say the same thing, which is, not only is this a barrier to gender equality, but this is also one of the largest disparities between black/white health in a lot of situations. Would you elaborate on some of your findings? What are the exact health problems that you're finding in these specific demographics particularly pertaining to women?
Hedy: In prior work that I and others have done, we’ve also found patterns that mirror what has been found in the report, even though the report, I think, provides much more nuance. Prior work has found relationships between family member incarceration and increased anxiety and depression, and increased risk of poor physical health outcomes, related to heart disease, such as obesity.
Tatti: Do you think that these are emotional responses or socioeconomic responses? If you're living in South Los Angeles and your partner gets incarcerated and it cuts your budget in half, or your family income in half, the access to the food that you might be eating is different. Is this a socioeconomic thing, or is this the emotional impact that then leads to depression, that then leads to a lack of self care?
Hedy: I think that there are probably multiple pathways that could link the experience of incarceration to health outcomes. If we take obesity as an example, yes, socioeconomic changes would definitely impact people's food budget, and for some people could compound already existing problems with lack of access to grocery stores that provide affordable, healthy food.
But, there's also a lot of compelling research in the stress literature that demonstrates eating fatty foods is actually a way to deal with and cope with stress. There is also work to show direct biological links between experiencing chronic stress and fat accumulation.
Endria: We were actually very intentional about not asking about obesity in measuring physical health impact, because we didn’t want to pathologize weight, and because we know that there is this tendency--especially when we're talking about women, and talking about women's pain, or women’s bodies, or the ways in which women are taught to process pain, or process grief, or process trauma--there can be a tendency to assign blame to women. Whether through fat-shaming in the case of obesity, or through dismissing women’s specific experiences of pain and isolation in the case of having an incarcerated loved one. And that is part of the complicated ways in which mass incarceration really does function as a tool of gendered oppression.
When we ask "well how are women responding to stress? Are they overeating? Are they not making enough friends?” we are, maybe unconsciously, placing some blame on women. Why aren’t we asking, instead, “Why are women being forced to survive under severely constrained circumstances?”
We also used a participatory action research model in designing our survey, so we had a team of 25 women with incarcerated loved ones designing the relevant questions. Asking about obesity was not a question that people wanted to ask, or thought was necessarily relevant to their experiences. Similarly, we did not ask about “loneliness,” because that is not a word that women used to describe the experience of having an incarcerated loved one. Women, over and over again, use the word “isolation.”
Listen, let's end the trauma. Let's bring our loved ones home. Let's end the practice of incarcerating people, of decimating entire communities by taking people away from their families, and their homes, and forcing people--who are usually women--to really hold their entire lives together without enough money, without enough support, without enough mental or emotional resources. It's important for us to focus on ending that trauma.
Tatti: Right, right.
Hedy: And I support that point. I just want to quickly add that, and I think you're right, Endria, this isn't just about socioeconomic status and access to food. There is a unique association between incarceration and health that goes beyond socioeconomic status or poor health behaviors. This is about chronic stress. The problem is that of incarcerating individuals and removing them from families and causing trauma.
Endria: Right.
Hedy: And a lot of other social problems that we talk about, that are often in the news, are amplified for women who have incarcerated family members.
For example, there's a growing body of work indicating women with children experience discrimination in the workplace. Think about how that's amplified if you have a family member who is incarcerated. We think about the second shift. Well, think about the “third shift” for women who have family members who are incarcerated. My colleague Angela Bruns is doing work on this issue. And those are the kind of things that we should be focusing on. I agree with that point.
Tatti: Absolutely. Let's just stop traumatizing people rather than trying to figure out how to work with trauma. In terms of emotionally dealing with trauma, what have you found is most helpful, especially to women who unfortunately have already been exposed to this?
Endria: Women with incarcerated loved ones at Essie Justice Group are demanding an immediate end to incarceration of all people in the country including people incarcerated in detention centers. So that's not something that can be ignored. That is necessary.
Also, women demand and need access to healing and care regardless of ability to pay or immigration status. Access to healthcare in order to address the physical, very real physical impact of incarceration.
Women also are asking for community support. We can break isolation by acknowledging that women are directly impacted by mass incarnation, by asking women about their experiences. By challenging the narratives around mass incarceration that lead to blame and shame and stigma, that are applied to women who have incarcerated loved ones.
Hedy: I know that you're not phrasing the question this way, but it almost seems as though people might see incarceration as this one-time traumatic event, but Megan's work really shows that there are multiple traumas that happen and reoccur. And there are ways in which the carceral institution perpetuates trauma to happen over and over again.
Megan: I appreciate that. It is a really important point to raise, because most records show that when somebody is involved with the criminal justice system, they have a high likelihood of becoming re-involved, and really are often never disengaged if they come out and are placed under community supervision.
Something that I did want to bring up too along these lines, and I think it's a thread that ties into a lot of what Endria and Hedy are already saying, the research really clearly shows – and the MFS-IP study that I mentioned before that my RTI colleagues and I just completed backs this up as well – staying in touch with loving, caring family members is definitely a positive for people who are coming home from incarceration and going on to lead successful lives.
That's kind of a community good, right? Everybody wants that, everyone wants people to be able to stay out of prison and jail. However, many of the systems and many of the institutions are not actually investing in that in any meaningful way, and especially not compared to the investment in putting people in jail and prison.
When we are talking here about women’s engagement with their incarcerated loved ones,and when their financial resources are being diverted to staying in touch with their loved ones, we are actually talking about women contributing their own financial resources, in addition to their time and their energy, to doing something that is for the community good.
Megan: When Endria keeps bringing up the demands from the Essie Justice Group around ending incarceration, that's because it is a decision that we can make. Our society has set in place all these policies around policing, prosecution, bail, other criminal justice processes that have resulted in what we now term mass incarceration, but it's not like we didn't make a lot of decisions around that.
Bringing women back into the equation, particularly women on the outside who are again, investing time, resources, energy, and then bearing an impact on their health. We have to look at that piece in order to fully understand the impact of the decisions that we made that have resulted in mass incarceration, because if we cut women out from that, and we're only seeing this tiny sliver, which are the actual people behind bars, which is not tiny, considering the historically large number, but compared to the number of people who are actually impacted by this, it is definitely a partial picture.
Megan: No sound policy decision can be made if we're not thinking about this repercussive effect, this impact on the outside.The system that does traumatize people is a system that drains resources away from people who already have scarce resources. This does have an impact on people's health. It is the stress, it is the grief, it is the trauma, and it is also that women are spending six hours in a car driving to a prison on the weekends instead of being able to be out in a park, or making other decisions about how to spend their time.
Tatti: Do you feel optimistic that this all changes?
Endria: I don't know if optimistic is the right word. I do feel that women are extremely powerful, and that we've seen the impact of women mobilizing together recently through the #MeToo movement, through Black Lives Matter, to force discussions about women, especially Black trans women, and sexual violence, and racial violence to the national stage in a way that we've not seen before.
And it's still a fight. Right? Because it is not easy to uproot hundreds of years of white supremacy and patriarchy. So I think that I feel very certain of the power of women, especially the power of Black women, to mobilize and fight for freedom and liberation. I know that it is a very difficult fight to win.
Hedy: I feel as though, I don't know if optimistic is the right word too, but I feel more and more now that people are thinking about connections across different social problems that affect our country, and seeing how they're connected. If we care about women and childcare, and women who are working, and ensuring that they have adequate childcare for their children, we should also be thinking about how childcare is compromised when women are faced with the struggles of having a family member that's incarcerated.
If we care about gendered labor and the ways in which women do more work in the home compared to their male partners, and those kinds of policy conversations, then we should be thinking about gendered labor in terms of how the carceral system works. That women, like Megan says, are pretty much ensuring that their family members are being well fed, that they're getting the psychological and social care they need.
That's being done by women, and not by institutions that should be doing that kind of work. I think that people are starting to see those connections, and that part makes me optimistic. People are starting to see that, thinking about gender inequality and racial inequality as being different but also connected. I am excited that more and more leaders are emerging that are trying to tackle those issues.
Megan: I would echo what Endria and Hedy said in terms of not necessarily using the work optimistic globally, but seeing these pockets of change and strong movements. I think the connections that Hedy was just talking about are really important.
We were talking earlier about the epidemic of loneliness and thinking about that as a public health crisis, which then would tie in with the health crisis that we're talking about for women with incarcerated loved ones, to the isolation that is being imposed on them, and the labor that is being asked of them to support family members who will have better outcomes when they're released from jail or prison. But at their own expense and without support.
There are so many dots to be connected here, amongst things that are going on. It does seem, we're in a moment too, when people are understanding more of the policy piece, that society doesn't just roll along. There are decisions being made every day that have an impact on people, and they have different impacts on different groups of people, and that we really need to hear from those people who are being affected, and think very carefully about the ways things are being put in place. It does seem like there are a lot more people who are wanting to have those conversations now that can be good for the future.
Megan: I think too, the swell of research feels empowering, you know, seeing the work that's coming out from Essie right now. Definitely a really important contribution. It's a good thing too.
Hedy: Yeah. We're armored with lots of facts. And you can't ignore facts. There is so much strength through truth.
Endria: None of our work would have been possible without Hedy's work, among other work her research finding that one in four women has a family member in prison, or Megan's research on women specifically who have loved ones in prison. It is really incredible to be in conversation with both of you.
Hedy: I agree. I think Essie's so amazing. I'm so excited to see what the future holds.
Megan: Right. It's very exciting to see what you all are doing.
Tatti: I'm flattered you guys took the time to talk to me at all, or answered any of my emails. Thank you so much for all of the work and the continued work that you guys are doing.
You can find the full Essie Justice Group Because She's Powerful Report here.