Justice Don’t Trickle Down -How Racialized and Gendered Rules Are Holding Women Back
Among all social groups in the United States, women of color experience some of the starkest
disparities, inequities, and injustices across nearly every social and economic indicator.
Compared with white women, women of color have higher levels of unemployment and poverty; they have significantly less wealth; they are more likely to be targeted by and come in contact with the criminal justice system; they are at a much higher risk, regardless of their income or education, of dying as a result of pregnancy and of losing their children in infancy; they are less likely to own a home and more likely to have high-risk mortgages when they do own a home; they are less likely to attend college and, when they do, tend to carry heavier student debt burdens.Women of color are also at the greatest risk in the current political environment, in
which conservatives are threatening a range of public services from health coverage to
education access to financial regulations, while some on the left wish to abandon “identity
politics” in favor of a singular focus on class and economic issues. The inequities we
describe throughout this paper make clear what women of color have to lose in this era of
increasingly right-wing conservatism, and also illustrate why a class-only approach will
obscure and exacerbate the inequities experienced by women of color