UN-Professional

Theories Behind the Labor Pains Project Give Context for New Department of Education Policy

Last week, the Department of Education codified what this country has implied for centuries: care work is not a profession; it is servitude. Under the new federal guidelines, degrees in nursing, social work, and education—fields dominated by women and essential to our collective survival—have been stripped of their ‘professional’ status for loan eligibility. This bureaucratic reclassification is not just a change in financial policy; it is a modern articulation of an old ‘legal fiction.’ Just as the 3/5ths Compromise once legislated the value of a Black life to protect capital, this new policy legislates the value of our labor to protect the deficit. By labeling the very work that heals, teaches, and sustains our communities as ‘non-professional,’ the State is explicitly stating that the labor of the ‘matriarch’ is a natural resource to be extracted, not a skill to be compensated. Labor Pains exists to challenge exactly this kind of erasure—to prove that our care is the marrow of this nation, even when the law refuses to call it professional.

In March, when I was still trying to figure out what this project was really about, I blogged about the “cruel contradiction” of the Black Matriarch—how Black women were tasked with holding up communities while being legally dehumanized. Reading that now, I see an artist-historian deeply immersed in the “what.”

As a performing artist, I was focused on creating an immersive performance experience. As an independent researcher exploring the field of public history, it was—and is—important to me that the audience is moved emotionally and ethically into action through the accurate presentation of historical information. I didn’t know how to make that point without it coming off as rage, whining, or wallowing (feelings that are totally legitimate, but not helpful for policy change).

But over the last few months, through the Labor Pains archival research and the development of the Myth & Marrow pop-up exhibit and performance, I’ve moved on from the “what” to examining the “how” and the “why.”

We need more than the presentation of American history; we need frameworks to dismantle the systems that keep this labor invisible. Through my current narrative literature review, I am working to correct our lens so we can focus on the disconnect between our purported values and our very real practices.

Back in March, I cited Christina Accomando’s work on the legal fictions of slavery. Accomando’s interpretation of law was inherently critical, but Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the lens that helps me trace that thread to the present. Presented in Cheryl Harris’ landmark article “Whiteness as Property” (1993), CRT challenges us to see that the exploitation of Black women isn’t an aberration of American law; it is foundational to it.

Harris argues that the law creates “Whiteness” not just as a racial identity, but as a protected asset—a “status property” that yields economic returns like jobs, loans, and safety. If Whiteness is a property that accumulates value, Blackness is legally constructed as the absence of that property. The “deficit of care” Black women receive is the result of the State protecting the property interest of Whiteness. In the Labor Pains oral histories, we hear the echoes of this in modern workplace policies.

We often talk about the wage gap as a glitch in the system. Stratification Economics teaches us it is a feature, not a bug. It posits that discrimination is rational for the dominant group because it maintains their relative status. When we layer this with Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), we realize the resources to support Black women’s labor—to fund care, to fund art, to fund rest—have always existed. The poverty we see isn’t a lack of money; it’s a lack of values.

Labor Pains documents the physical toll of an economy that refuses to acknowledge certain labor. Harriet Tubman’s fight for a pension—finally granted in 1899, 34 years after the end of the Civil War—exemplifies the United States Government’s active decision to render labor performed by Black women as “noncompeting,” ensuring they would not be compensated at levels comparable to their white male counterparts.

If Stratification Economics and CRT explain the pain in Black women’s labor, Womanism and Black Feminist Theory explains the labor of the care economy. Grounded in Alice Walker’s definition of womanism, my approach refuses to separate the Black woman from her community. Despite cultural discrimination and systemic barriers, Black women have resisted through grassroots community work that improves the lives of all within their reach.

Black women’s clubs in Albany, NY, and Oakland, CA, demonstrate a deep desire to live dignified, meaningful lives in America despite embedded racial, gender, sexual, and economic violence. We are not just fighting for “rights”; we are fighting for “wholeness.” This is the heartbeat of Myth & Marrow. We aren’t just staging trauma; we are staging the womanist act of gathering, mapping our scars, and healing them together.

The timing for the Labor Pains Project could not be more perfect. According to Wall Street Journal almost 600,000 Black women have exited the Labor force in 2025 alone, this is a substantial loss economically- individually and nationally. As we move toward the Myth & Marrow performance in June 2026, these four lenses—Stratification Economics, MMT, CRT, and Womanism—are the compass. They guide us from simply observing the invisible labor to demanding a world where that labor is honored, compensated, and celebrated. I am not sure just how yet, but I am willing to put in the work with any other Black woman that wants to join me.