Bluesky

Elections have consequences—and they are, unfailingly, most profoundly visited upon Black women. Donald Trump’s reelection has had the consequence of Black women being pushed out of their workplaces at astonishing rates. Between February and July of last year, Black women lost 319,000 jobs in both the private and public sectors, driven largely by mass layoffs in education, healthcare, and housing. During that same period, white women gained 142,000 jobs, Hispanic women 176,000 jobs, and white men—wait for it!—picked up 365,000 jobs. In February, Black women’s unemployment rate stood at 5.4 percent, but that figure had soared to 6.7 percent by August. In September, the most recent snapshot available because of the shutdown, yet another 0.8 percent of Black women lost their jobs—while just 0.2 percent of white women suffered the same fate that month. All in all, according to the gender economist Katica Roy, roughly 600,000 Black women have been “economically sidelined” since February—which was, not coincidentally, this president’s first full month in office.

This has failed to set off alarm bells in a country that has never cared much about the well-being of Black women. Perhaps that’s why concerned policymakers and economists so often take such pains to emphasize that Black women’s economic distress is a bellwether for everyone else—to underline that their fates, and even their humanity, are connected to the nation’s in the hopes that the country might finally care. And it’s not just that racism and sexism make Black women the first to be let go when the economy stalls—it’s also that Black women power the economy in ways this country often refuses to acknowledge. Nearly 70 percent of Black mothers are the breadwinners in their homes, though they’re paid just 34, 44, or 52 cents of every dollar paid to Asian, white, or Black breadwinner dads, respectively. So when they lose jobs en masse, families are left financially vulnerable and local economies are weakened. Nationally, the cost has already surpassed $37 billion in lost GDP.

But it’s disingenuous to suggest that Black women are merely hit the hardest during economic slumps when, in fact, they’ve been targeted for harm by a right wing that is openly committed to undoing their progress. This country has—again—chosen to meet gender and racial advancement with aggressive rollbacks, including dismantling institutions that have provided Black women with financial security and career advancement. It’s not a coincidence that the first move of the Trump administration, in partnership with Elon Musk’s DOGE, was to vilify and hollow out the civil service—long an engine of Black middle-class stability—where Black women make up 12 percent of staffers, double their portion of the overall workforce. A National Women’s Law Center study found that women and people of color made up the majority of the workforce in the agencies that sustained the deepest cuts. The Department of Education, with a workforce of 28 percent Black women, lost 46 percent of its staff. The Department of Justice and the Department of Energy, both of which are about 70 percent white? Cut by just 1 percent and 13 percent, respectively, according to a ProPublica analysis.

The Trump administration has also made a show of pushing out high-profile Black women leaders, including Carla Hayden at the Library of Congress, Gwynne Wilcox at the National Labor Relations Board, and the ongoing effort to oust Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve. Peggy Carr has described her abrupt dismissal after 35 years of climbing the ranks at the Department of Education as a “tragedy” both personal and professional. “It was like I was being taken out like the trash,” Carr told The New York Times of being escorted out of the building by a security guard, “the only difference is I was being taken out the front door rather than the back door.”

Those public-sector layoffs have been accompanied by attacks on private-sector diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, or DEI. NPR reports that roles in DEI plummeted from 20,000 in 2023 to 17,500 in April 2025. Companies too numerous to name have hastily retreated from DEI efforts they had boasted about earlier, and not because they are mandated to, since Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders cannot overturn civil-rights laws or dictate the hiring practices of private businesses. A New York Times investigation found that the number of S&P 500 companies that include DEI language in their financial filings is down 60 percent since 2024. And for the first time since 2017, the majority of new directors hired at S&P 500 companies this year were white men.

Black women have long worked at rates higher than other American women, including as recently as 2024. But even in the best of times, intertwined sexism and anti-Black racism, or misogynoir, consign them to the most precarious jobs in the least recession-proof sectors. Across industries, they are paid less than white men with the same—and even, in some comparisons, lower—levels of education; are least likely of all women to be promoted; and leave college burdened with the most student-loan debt. Now Trump has launched what Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) rightly calls a campaign of “discriminate harm” against them. History vividly illustrates what the consequences will be. After economic downturns in the early 1980s, the Great Recession of the aughts, and the Covid pandemic, Black women were the last to recover financially. But this time, the Trump administration has scrubbed race-based employment data from government websites—preemptively erasing evidence of the harms it’s inflicting.

When Black women voted against this regime, they were fighting for their lives at the ballot box, knowing they’d be the first to bear the brunt of its damages—and fully aware they wouldn’t be the last. It was, of course, not enough to stop a country unwilling to heed their warnings. So once again we’re trapped, forced to inhale the noxious fumes no one else notices are poisoning us all.