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Black women have traditionally occupied a unique position in the American economic structure – at the very bottom. The year 1920 is a unique historical moment to examine how this came to be. Economic prosperity immediately following World War I, the first wave of Black migration, and accelerating industrialization created occupational opportunities that could have enabled Black women to escape working poverty, as the majority of Black men did, but they were actively constrained. Historical narratives have extensively described Black women’s occupational restriction across regions to dirty work, such as domestic service, but not often in conjunction with a comparison to the expanding opportunities of Black men and White women. While intersectionality studies have honed in on the unique place of Black women, little attention has been devoted to this from a historical vantage point. This chapter examines the role that race, gender, and place played in shaping the experience of working poverty and integrates a consideration of queuing theory and Black population size to examine how variations might shape racial outcomes in the labor market in 1920.

We critique existing literature on the rise of precarious work because of its inattention to the historical organization of work by race and gender. We use intersectional theory to develop a racial–gender lens on precarious work, asking how do race, gender, and educational attainment shape exposure to insecure work. Historically, Blacks pursued education to mitigate against labor market discrimination with uneven success. Education has traditionally protected against exposure to precarious employment, but this association has weakened in recent years and the persistence of differential returns to human capital suggests that the relationship between education and insecure work may be racially contingent. We assess risk of exposure to precarious nonstandard work for racial and gender groups from 1979 to 2015 using data drawn from the CPS-MORG. We find that education is not equally protective across demographic groups and over time, contributing to inequality in access to stable, standard employment.

The Internet is a site of particularly potent discourses demonizing undocumented immigrants (Bloch, 2014; Flores-Yeffal, Vidales, & Plemons, 2011; Sohoni, 2006). Anti-immigrant discourses have long constructed Latina immigrant mothers as bearing “anchor babies” and burdens to the state. Representing a distinct case of non-citizen reproduction, online news sources began reporting on Chinese maternity tourism in 2011. This form of maternity tourism allegedly involves wealthy tourists visiting the United States to give birth to their children on US soil. In this chapter, I analyze online comments in response to Chinese maternity tourism. I ask, how do online commenters make sense of Chinese maternity tourism? I find that online commenters overwhelmingly demonize Chinese maternity tourism by including this practice into broader debates about “anchor babies” and the reforming of birthright citizenship. Some commenters also use race-specific tropes and malleable claims about class to construct the children of Chinese maternity tourists as a paradoxical asset or threat to the country, often comparing them to the children of undocumented Latina mothers. When commenters employ Asian-specific stereotypes, some commenters offer a racialized conditional acceptance of maternity tourism, revealing that while citizenship is policed among the citizenry, it can also be expanded precariously and problematically.