It is no accident that Black women are being disproportionately affected by Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce. In the past 120 days, approximately 300,000 Black women have been forced out of the workforce in tech, finance, healthcare, DEI, and the federal government. In January 2025, Black women comprised 12 percent of the federal workforce, nearly twice the national average. Tragically, Dr. Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a Federal Reserve Governor, received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Unsurprisingly, she’s now on the chopping block. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley has rightly pointed out that Black women’s employment is a “key metric of the health of the US economy while urging Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to ensure the highest level of employment for all workers, especially Black women, since the latest job report indicated a high unemployment rate.
But this economic pain seems part of the plan. Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and an author of Project 2025, said he wants to inflict “trauma” on the federal workforce, destroy the elitist “regime” that he believes has long stifled conservatives, and shake the very foundations of American government, which he believes has been captured by an “administrative state.”
The irony is that just a hundred years ago, Black women were forced to work. On a recent trip to South Carolina, where it was 100 degrees with nearly matching humidity, I thought about my ancestors who were kidnapped and enslaved and worked on plantations for centuries in that effing heat. Even after abolition, I came across a Greenville News article from October 1918, stating “Negro Women To Be Put To Work.” During World War I, Black women were stay-at-home moms while their husbands served. This was unacceptable to white families who needed housekeepers and nannies for their families. The city council enacted an ordinance demanding that Black women become employed, go to jail, or pay fines.
Black women have always worked from the plantation fields to the big house, not by choice, but by law. In the last hundred years, Black women have embraced work, with the highest participation in America’s workforce, especially in service jobs, regardless of their marital status or as mothers without the intentional protection of women’s rights laws, such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963. The 1964 Civil Rights Act helped implement an Executive Order requiring federal agencies to ensure non-discriminatory hiring practices. The public sector has traditionally offered some of the most equitable career opportunities for skilled and highly educated Black women. From 2009 to 2010, Black women received the highest percentage of undergraduate and graduate degrees compared to other racial and ethnic groups. Additionally, college degrees and passing the civil service exam, a merit-based hiring process, qualify them for their positions. Interestingly, after Black women pass the Litmus test and exhibit accomplishments, they’re still ballotized and contested.
Now, executive orders seek to end DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and replace it with anti-discrimination policies, focusing on equal opportunities and addressing reverse discrimination. Since slave labor was free until 1865, meritocracy is disingenuous since it was not considered during slavery.
Sadly, Black women losing their jobs is a story resembling domestic violence. The abuser exerts his power and control while gaslighting his victims in the disguise of protecting civil rights and merit-based opportunity, but wants to relegate Black women to economic instability. Along with these directives, Black women are being erased from histories and museums, erasing Black women’s labor history and the reasons why civil rights laws exist.
Economic assault has always forced Black women to carve out their own opportunities. For example, two Black women founded the first Black venture capital (VC) firm, Fearless Fund, to invest $27 million in grants for small businesses owned by women of color (WOC), as Black women historically received less than one percent of the $288 billion in VC funding. The Fearless Fund wasn’t met with applause for its business strategy, but rather with a lawsuit filed by the American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER) for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1866 by discriminating against grant recipients based on their race and ethnicity. It is alarming that Black women remain invisible during fair competition, but visible when they invest in themselves.
Thus, the lower court’s ruling in favor of the Fearless Fund grant program was reversed by the appeals court, which ruled it guilty of race-based exclusion, or DEI. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reminded us in the National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association, there are no fixed rules. This is similar to the arbitrary jurisprudence of Calvinball.
The manufactured crisis of reverse discrimination has been politicized to blame Black women for it. They are, however, the bedrock of America’s workforce and have contributed significantly to global economic development. The US should be embracing its hardest, most dependable workers, not sidelining them.
About the Author: Adrienne N. Spiers is CEO of Lapis Analytic Consulting, a Public Voices Fellow on Domestic Violence and Economic Security with The OpEd Project and author of Roaring Resilience: Finding Grit in the Lion’s Den.
