Mass federal layoffs and an increasingly hostile work environment were top of mind for many of the panelists and speakers at Clark Atlanta University’s third annual Black Women and Public Policy in the South Symposium.
For three days this week, Clark’s W.E.B. DuBois Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy led panel discussions and hosted lectures on the current political situation for Black people in America and across the diaspora.
In her keynote address, Alicia Garza, civil rights activist and co-founder of Black Lives Matter, urged the room of students, researchers, and professors to recognize that Black women are central to political power in the country.
“Government inefficiency was the gendered and racialized reason given to fire thousands of [government employees],” Garza said. “The federal government got whiter almost overnight.”
Between January and August last year, Black women lost 251,000 jobs across all sectors, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Black women made up 54.7% of all women who lost jobs in that period despite only representing 14.1% of the female workforce.
“College-educated Black women and Black women in the public sector are facing the bulk of employment cuts,” Garza said. In response, she called on Black people to organize.
“The common features found in successful resistance movements throughout history, many were designed by us,” she said.
Journalist and political commentator Tiffany Cross, who experienced a high-profile layoff from MSNBC in 2022, spoke candidly with Nykia Greene-Young, the DuBois Center’s domestic policy coordinator about the role the media has played in blaming Black men and women for the country’s political and economic problems.
“No part of the failure of this democracy will be laid at the feet of Black people,” she said.
Cross, a Clark Atlanta alum, advised young people to engage with Black history and politics. She also asked the audience to lead with love in the Black community and not to give in to gender divisions, a sentiment echoed by the global political scientists who spoke about gender disparities in the African labor force.
The panelists, led by Rebecca Yemo, the DuBois Center’s global policy coordinator, discussed how women’s lack of social and political power on the continent can be directly traced to ideas of gender division introduced by colonial powers.
As a way to discuss the overall state for African women in the labor force, panelists discussed how women in Kenya’s fishing industry face widespread discrimination and are shut out from many leadership positions on local governing bodies that regulate the industry.
“Institutions need to be wholly redesigned around equitable values,” said Margaret Gatonye, a researcher in the department of conflict resolution, human security and global governance at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
In her keynote address, Garza stressed that success for Black people locally and globally will not happen on its own while recognizing that there is an uphill ahead.
“We won’t snap back without active involvement and organization,” she said. “Don’t let people off the hook — but we are also competing against an empire.”
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