The Trump Administration has used its first months to take direct aim at the tools that have been critical for Black workers’ entry into the middle class. From Day One of his second term, President Trump and his foot soldiers have sent a clear message – that the efforts to expand opportunity, unravel entrenched discrimination and systemic barriers, and create spaces that are more inclusive and equitable are no longer priorities and should be viewed with disdain and derision. The Administration’s attacks have sought to erode access to educational and job opportunities, threatening lawsuits and loss of funding if institutions or businesses seek to open doors that used to be closed or counter longstanding biases and discrimination. The effects of these policy reversals have been far-reaching, especially for Black workers who frequently have had to navigate persistent inequities in the labor market, resulting in job losses, reduced opportunities, and increased economic instability. But the consequences of this Trump agenda are being felt, not only by Black workers, but people of all races and all genders, across communities and in every state, limiting economic mobility while distributing power and wealth to a concentrated few.
For Black women, the ramifications of the Trump agenda are enormous. Black mothers are more likely to be co-, primary, or sole breadwinners in their families when compared to other groups of mothers, meaning that their families rely on them to make ends meet. Black women have seen rising levels of unemployment as the long-term trends of the Administration’s economic policies continue to unfold. They have also been on the receiving end of some of the harshest narratives trafficked by the Administration that have sought to stigmatize efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion as unfair and misguided.
As the Trump Administration continues down its path of division, it is important to draw attention to the different ways that Black women – and Black workers and their families more broadly – are being harmed. Here are five ways the Administration is pushing economic stability and security further out of reach:
1. Unraveling Anti-Discrimination Measures and Civil Rights Enforcement Mechanisms
The Administration has undertaken an aggressive effort to undo anti-discrimination and economic inclusion measures that were developed over decades to counter a status quo rooted in longstanding, entrenched biases. The scope of economic progress in Black communities has been deeply connected to the effectiveness of the tools available to dismantle discrimination and ensure that opportunities are available to all. Indeed, for Black Americans, economic progress and freedom has never been a guarantee. This is in part because the traditional markers of the middle class – access to higher education, good-paying jobs, and home ownership – were more out of reach because of discrimination. Upward movement has required concrete strategies to remove barriers to achieving full participation in the economy, building assets, and finding steady employment.
Strategies to grow the Black middle class are often a contested, complicated topic because many of the groundbreaking legislative and policy achievements that are identified with growing the middle class frequently benefited solely white workers and excluded, either explicitly or in practice, millions of Black workers. From slavery to the Reconstruction Era, to Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement, and even to the present day, the racial dividing line has been key in determining who experiences progress and who does not, with Black workers too often getting the short end of the stick. Today’s fight for equity, liberation, inclusivity, and economic progress must be understood in this context – and understood as a fight about whether we are committed to disrupting old systems that were built to preserve inequities harming Black workers or whether we’ll continue practices that concentrate wealth and power in the pockets of a privileged few.
The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 – passed amid a fervent push to unravel the country’s deep legacy of slavery, segregation, and racism and advance equal opportunity – enshrined comprehensive protections against discrimination in U.S. law, some for the first time. The law prohibited discrimination in employment based on race, color, sex, religion, and national origin; in the following years, agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) were stood up with the understanding that sweeping protections against discrimination were only as strong as the government’s ability to enforce them.
Under this backdrop, Black Americans saw important progress. Black women’s opportunities often had been limited to domestic and care worker roles, but greater civil rights protections led to more opportunities in different roles and fields.
This progress has been crucial but rocky over the decades – race- and sex-based employment discrimination are still stubbornly prevalent and require robust civil rights enforcement to combat the problem. But what has become crystal clear is that the Trump Administration and its allies sit squarely on the side of protecting a status quo that relegates Black workers to the economic margins and ignores the importance of enforcing civil rights protections. The Administration has sought to downplay the existence of discrimination, ending programs that have helped document disparities, rewriting and whitewashing history to minimize past problems, and redefining the corrective measures used to combat discrimination historically as being the cause of the problem. They have closed or significantly reduced offices charged with civil rights enforcement, and rescinded longstanding anti-discrimination rules and orders. The President fired officials at key agencies such as the EEOC and the National Labor Relations Board. Further, the administration has weaponized the phrase “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” to make it synonymous with perceived discrimination against white men and then hidden behind that term to accomplish their real goal: trashing the hard-won civil rights laws that have been central to both Black women’s economic progress and the growth of a Black middle class.
2. Decimating and Reshaping the Federal Government
Employment in the federal government and public sector has historically been a critical pathway to the middle class for Black Americans, even before the Jim Crow era or the foundational protections of the Civil Rights Act. Throughout the 1940s, President Roosevelt and President Truman issued a string of executive orders aimed at combatting racial discrimination in the federal government and undoing the segregation of the federal government re-implemented by President Wilson. In 1948 for example, spurred in part by a wartime labor market and sustained advocacy by Black Americans, President Truman issued executive orders formally calling for the desegregation of the military and the federal government workforce. As the private sector continued to engage in racial and gender discrimination largely unchecked, those increased protections in the federal government – and public sector jobs overall – became an important avenue for economic opportunity and mobility for Black workers. According to one 1967 study, Black Americans made up 28% of new jobs in the federal government in the 1960s, despite making up just 10 percent of the U.S. population at the time. Jobs in the public sector offered stability and job security, better wages, stronger employment protections, and Black workers were also able to benefit from unionization in the public sector.
Today, this trend persists. Approximately 19 percent of the federal workforce is Black, compared to 13 percent of the overall civilian workforce. And for Black women, careers in the federal government have been especially important. Compared to their counterparts in the private sector, Black women in federal jobs are paid more, have better benefits, and are more likely to have union representation, contributing to a generally narrower pay gap and supporting their economic security.
The Trump Administration’s attacks on the federal workforce – including through unprecedented reductions in the workforce at federal agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Labor and a series of executive orders villainizing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – are also a targeted attack on one of the most important pathways Black Americans have had to the middle class; as we see these attacks intensify, Black workers and Black women in particular, will continue to face economic pain.
3. Making key markers of the middle class – such as homeownership and access to a higher education – increasingly out of reach.
“Middle class” is an amorphous term, without one easy definition or measurement, but homeownership and access to a higher education have consistently been understood as key markers of middle-class achievement. For Black Americans, this seemingly straightforward measure is complicated by a unique history rooted in racism that continues to shape their present-day reality.
Entrenched segregation and discrimination in housing and education required robust policy and legal interventions to allow for greater access. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) filled important gaps in educational access, creating opportunities for Black Americans to acquire a quality education, advance into new careers, and successfully traverse a key pathway to the middle class. Additionally, the passage of landmark laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, key Supreme Court cases and executive orders all helped to open up more opportunities; as colleges and universities were required to unravel discriminatory admissions practices the percentage of black students at undergraduate institutions rose from 4.3 percent in 1960 to 9.8 percent in 1975. Despite startling, sustained racial and gender inequities in access to a 4-year degree, research consistently shows that there are still high returns on an investment in college for future economic mobility and positive outcomes, especially for Black people and women overall. A college education is a reliable predictor of middle class status for Black households in particular.
Where a college education is a key pathway to higher incomes and job security, homeownership is a key pathway to creating and maintaining generational wealth. For many Black Americans, the journey to homeownership has been rife with discrimination, redlining, systematic undervaluing of their properties and those in majority-Black neighborhoods, and predatory bank practices. Interventions such as the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 helped put homeownership in reach for some Black families, but a lack of investment in civil rights enforcement and structural disparities in the economy have contributed to the lackluster improvements in homeownership rates. Though Black women in particular have been buying homes at increased rates, their unique and compounding experiences of student loan debt, likelihood of working a low-wage job, and difficulty accessing loans can make it a difficult endeavor.
Though higher education and homeownership are crucial pathways to upward mobility, the Trump Administration is using its power to make it even more difficult for Black Americans to achieve them. Trump’s economic policies are making housing increasingly unaffordable; at the same time, he is using executive actions to unravel key tools for fighting discrimination in housing through the Fair Housing Act and overseeing legislation that will increase wealth and income inequality. The Trump Administration has also engaged in sustained, unprecedented attacks on higher education institutions, pulling federal funding, utilizing its power to cancel programs intended to promote diversity and influence curricula, and making student loan debt even more punishing than it already is for millions of borrowers, including Black women who experience a disproportionate amount of debt.
4. Pursuing Economic Policies that Create Hardship for Parents and Families, Ignore Caregiving Challenges and Increase the Cost of Living
The Trump Administration’s policy direction has paid far too little attention to the challenges facing families, especially related to parenting and caregiving – and Black women are especially impacted. Black women experience the compounding impacts of structural racism and sexism through discrimination, the wage gap, occupational segregation in lower-wage work, and other systemic disparities in the economy, even in good economic times. And in economic downturns and recessions, Black households tend to fare worst, with higher rates of unemployment, larger decreases in wealth, and slower economic recoveries than their white counterparts. During the Great Recession, for example, Black women experienced the highest job loss amongst groups of women and saw their wealth, largely accumulated through homeownership, depleted by the mortgage crisis.
President Trump has focused on steep spending cuts to the social safety net, tax policies to enrich business, and erratic trade policies, none of which offer comprehensive investments in families or support their security. Economists predict this approach will weaken the American economy and already, workers are experiencing a slower labor market with lower job growth than expected as well as increased prices, with threats of even higher prices to come.
Increased living costs are especially likely to squeeze Black families, who tend to budget a higher percentage of their spending towards necessary goods that are vulnerable to inflation such as food and energy. Trump’s policies are also increasing prices for parents, many of whom are already financially stretched by the difficult economic trade-offs required in a country where raising children is expensive.
In recent months, Black women have experienced an increase in their unemployment rates, losing hundreds of thousands of jobs to the Trump economy while also losing vital protections in the workplace and beyond. And concerningly, mothers with young children have been leaving the workforce consistently each month this year, pointing to more troubling trends ahead in part due to the lack of access to strong work-family and caregiving supports like paid leave and childcare. Taken together, it is clear that the President’s economic agenda is making it more difficult for families to achieve economic security, not easier. For Black women, who are more likely to be key breadwinners for their families than other groups of women, a dual crisis of increased living costs and limited job opportunities could be catastrophic to their sustained economic mobility.
5. Devaluing the Contributions of Black Workers
The Administration’s tactic of devaluing the contributions of Black workers is central to its strategy of rationalizing the retrenchment of policies designed to break down barriers to economic participation. This narrative has often featured belittling and demeaning comments about Black women and Black men in different jobs at all levels, frequently disparaging them as “diversity” or “DEI” hires who are unqualified, incompetent, and unskilled. It has deemed the qualifications of Black workers irrelevant or improbable and has perpetuated the stereotype that any Black person elevated into predominantly white or male spaces are undeserving of such a role. In doing so, the Administration has sought to create a climate of skepticism about the value, skills, and overall contributions of Black workers and about the obstacles that continue to undermine Black workers’ full economic participation. The result is that Black workers are viewed as liabilities or undesirable, a perception that would make it more difficult for them to secure jobs and move up the career ladder. The added combination of race and gender bias has only exacerbated these problems for Black women, contributing to longstanding pay disparities and occupational segregation.
Conclusion
From his extreme tax budget and tax bill to hundreds of executive orders and regulatory actions couched in divisive rhetoric, the Trump Administration is making it clear that the foundations of economic stability for millions of Americans are, in fact, very fragile. For Black families – and Black women in particular – President Trump’s targeting of key pathways to the middle-class is a serious threat to their economic well-being. This Administration’s actions are also a reminder that economic progress is in constant need of nurturing. Policymakers looking to advance a forward-looking vision of prosperity and a truly inclusive economy must prioritize policies that support a strong Black middle class and economic security and opportunity for all.
