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Workers of the World Unite: From Domestic Workers to Santa's Elves

A living wage is a human right, even for Santa.

This year was a quiet Christmas at my childhood home in Virginia with just my parents and me. Inevitably, we began reminiscing about young Shana and her hilarious ideas about Santa. I realized that when you are honest with your children about labor, wages, and money, Santa is somehow less magical. My innocent questions (and my parents’ answers) about Father Christmas reveal a lot about my current…

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#capitalism #elves #labor #santa claus #workers

The Blogs I Thought I Wanted to Write but Didn't and the One They Prevented Me from Writing

Mama Linsk thought Pearl was a thief long before that $2 went missing.

So here’s what happened in 2016 which was supposed to be my year of once a week blogging. Well, a lot of things happened in the world. Things I felt pressured to write about. Then I repeatedly couldn’t find the words to write about them in long form. I missed blogging. I love blogging. But s*** just kept happening. The kind of s*** that I don’t want to think about let alone write about. Here are…

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The Prodigal Daughter Returns...Again

I'm blogging again!!!!!

It was a busy summer. Busy but good. I decided about halfway through that I wouldn’t get back to blogging until September. And this post has been sitting in my draft folder since then. For the first time I couldn’t pull the trigger. Let me back up a bit. Sometime in the middle of the summer, about the time I declared my blogging sabbatical, my father received a random email from a white woman in…

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When We Analyze Representation in the Absence of Reality

Oh snap look at me back to posting once a week. *sips tea* So Franchesca Ramsey has her own segment on MTV News called Decoded. The premise is essentially y’all people don’t read, stop being racist, let me break it down for you. It’s actually pretty good and necessary. The kind of thing young MTV viewers need to watch. (Insert joke about young white kids and music festivals.) But the most recent…

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"White People Have So Much Dirty Laundry": Mother's Day Edition

“White People Have So Much Dirty Laundry”: Mother’s Day Edition

For those of you who don’t know, when I am not postdoc-ing I spend my time with a lot of poets, musicians, and artists. They are my family. I think we underestimate the important political work that these folks do. Novelists, playwrights, poets, and musicians have given me quite the education. Sometimes more than historians. As a labor scholar, it’s important to me to recognize these folks as…

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Queer Folks are Caregivers Too

There is an implicit assumption that domestic work is intimately connected to marriage, monogamy, and heterosexuality. But I know a number of queer folks that also work in the field. And sometimes they do so for other queer people who are raising children. Yet, this dynamic does not change the racialized, gendered, and classed dimensions of domestic labor. As usual, I have thoughts. Nearly half…

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Domestic Worker Wage Theft? There's an App for That.

Domestic Worker Wage Theft? There’s an App for That.

Domestic worker activists are some of the most innovative organizers on the planet. So I was very excited to learn about a new app designed by immigrant rights activists in Jackson Heights for day laborers. The app allows users to record hours and wages, document working conditions, and identify abusive employers with a history of things like withholding compensation. What is most important about…

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#activism #day labor #domestic worker #domestic workers #immigration #undocumented workers #workers justice project

Black Women's Work Songs

Black Women’s Work Songs

The other day I came across a song from 1928 by Hattie Burleson called “Sadie’s Servant Room Blues.” In it the singer laments about the low pay, long hours, and lack of privacy associated with being a domestic worker. I have been absolutely obsessed with music since I was a kid. Music has a way of explaining things better than…

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On Teachable Moments

I feel like I hear the term “teachable moment” more often than I’d like to lately. And it makes me cringe. But I suppose it shouldn’t since I am a teacher and “teachable moments” are my bread and butter. But I’m also a black teacher. Who teaches about black things. And a woman. Who teaches about women’s things. So I find myself in these awkward moments where someone says something ridiculous or…

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Moments in Black History: The Moynihan Report

Inspired by this article in the most recent issue of Dissent Magazine, I decided to share my thoughts about the Moynihan Report. The report, written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was released by the Office of Policy Planning and Research in March of 1965. It read like racial propaganda, and billed itself as an exposé on the tangle of pathology in the black community. “The Negro Family: The Case for…

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In Which I Speak Frankly About Sex Work

The most interesting aspect of my research, and the one detail I want to explore more, is the proximity between sexual labor and domestic work. Most analyses of this proximity are simplistic at best. The dangers of sexual assault at the hands of employers are commonly expressed in black women’s accounts of domestic work. From a theoretical perspective, I wonder to what extent sexual labor is…

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Bonus Post!

I’ve been doing pretty well on this weekly post thing. No excuses so far about not writing enough or being distracted. Don’t judge me for patting myself on the back three weeks into the new year. I’m proud of myself! Anyway, I think I mentioned before that I am working on this awesome project called Newest Americans, in which some of my favorite colleagues from Rutgers meditate on our city.…

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Domestic Workers in the American Imagination...and in mine.

Domestic Workers in the American Imagination…and in mine.

Today I’ve been working on a literary lesson plan on black minstrel tropes. Lesson planning always has me in my feelings. Particularly when it comes to images. Grappling with what people see in their minds when they think of black women…it’s maddening. And that all starts with mammy. But when I think of mammy, I think of this: This is “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” by artist Betye Saar. And it’s…

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Profiles in Black History: Georgia Gilmore

“The maids, the cooks, they were the ones that really and truly kept the bus running…And after the maids and the cooks stopped riding the bus, well, the bus didn’t have any need to run” -Georgia Gilmore, on the Montgomery Bus Boycott The best part of black history for me is learning about ordinary women who did extraordinary things. Georgia Gilmore was one such woman. At the time of the boycott…

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Allow Me to (Re)Introduce Myself

On paper I am Shana A. Russell. I’m an academic. Well, I like to think that I’m more than an academic. The kind of academic that is full of both facts and feelings. The facts are all in the dissertation. The feelings are buried somewhere here on this blog. I think. In theory, I have been writing since I was twelve. It started with poems and short stories. I wanted to write in a way that words…

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2015: The Year of Dignity for Domestic Workers

It’s been quite a year for me. I finished a PhD. I learned a lot of new things about the history of domestic work in my family. I traveled to three countries. I read for pleasure. I published 15 blogs on this site. And, more importantly, my musings about domestic workers became a part of an amazing media collaboratory, a project we call The Newest Americans. But even more than that I witnessed…

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#activism #domestic worker #domestic workers #immigration #ndwa

Black Women Are Amazing...That is all.

Black Women Are Amazing…That is all.

For the last several weeks, as a part of this fancy postdoc, I have been thinking a lot about philanthropy. Ultimately, as the university enters a series of partnerships with institutions and organizations in various places all over the African continent, my job is to make sure these partnerships look like partnerships, and not like philanthropy. While we are supposed to think of philanthropy as…

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#domestic work #domestic worker #domestic workers #history #race #washerwoman

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