Friday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report on January employment included more bad news about Black and Latina women in the workforce, writes Jamila Michener, associate professor of government and co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity, in a Washington Post op-ed.
“In January, the unemployment rate was 8.5 percent for Black women, 8.8 percent for Latina women and 5.1 percent for White women. Even as a pandemic economy challenges women from all racial groups, these unemployment rates underscore important racial inequities,” Michener writes in the piece with co-author Margaret Teresa Brower. “The U.S. government can alleviate that acute economic distress, our research suggests, if it advances policies that explicitly account for Latina and Black women’s specific vulnerabilities.”
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.