You co-authored a piece for Essence magazine
last week headlined “Your Job Is Deemed
Essential, But Your Abortion Is Not: Black
Low-Wage Women in Texas Are Being Robbed of
Their Humanity.”
In it, you wrote, quote, “Nonwhite women
are more likely to hold jobs deemed 'essential'
than any other demographic.
… Even though your job has been deemed essential,
your humanity, your ability to earn a living
wage, your ability to access health care — pandemic
or not — is not.
I think this is really what we’ve seen in
the public health infrastructure around COVID,
right?
We’ve seen just the number of deaths, right?
COVID is touching all of us regardless of
age and class and race.
And yet the folks who are dying, the folks
who are being most subjected to fatality,
are largely black and Latinx in major urban
areas.
And this challenge — right? — that our
access to public healthcare infrastructure
has already been challenged, and then you
layer on bias, you layer on patterns and systems
of discrimination over centuries, quite frankly,
that have concluded, in fact, that we are
— particularly women of color are the ones
who are not able to get the right amount of
care.
So, when you layer on other challenges around
black maternal mortality, regardless of income,
our bodies literally are much more subject
to dying during childbirth or just thereafter
because of the bias built into discrimination
in the system.
And when I look at these executive orders
in states that are the same states that did
not expand Medicaid, you know, states who
have been layering on these restrictions largely
for low — affecting low-income women of
color, to me, it’s no surprise that we’re
the ones being called in.
We’re the ones who are being asked to be
essential workers, and yet our ability to
actually control our own bodies and to really
control our own futures and freedom is being
denied by the state.
