Inclusion Tax: The Cost of Marginalized Identities at Work

• In Event: 3147 - Intersections of Race, Gender, and Class in School, Work, and the Home

Abstract

In this article, the inclusion tax refers to the unspoken, unrecognized, requisite costs borne by professional people of color (PPOCs) seeking entry to restricted spaces in the US cultural, corporate and socioeconomic milieu. Historically, black women’s efforts to make in-roads within the nation’s white patriarchal system have been frustrated by a hydra of entrenched systemic gendered racism (Wingfield 2008) and class tensions; reinforced, rationalized, and systematized by centuries of white racial framing (Feagin 2013) intended to lock them out of competition with white males and into permanent positions of social and economic subordination (Wingfield and Chavez 2020). This legacy has placed black women in a uniquely marginalized position with respect to the gamut of invisible labor required of PPOC to penetrate the elusive and often hostile gates of American institutions—even, remarkably enough, in comparison with black males. Within circles and scholarship pertaining to Americans of color, it is fairly well known that, regardless of gender, the inclusion tax levied against black and brown Americans who pursue an upwardly mobile middle-class (Bonacich 1989; Wingfield 2008; Wingfield and Chavez 2020) life typically demands twice the effort for half the reward (DeSante 2013)…where successful. Less frequently examined is the extent to which contemporary iterations of racist and misogynist mechanisms/stereotypes routinely shape the experience of those rare PPOCs who have managed to surmount the bevy of obstacles erected at the entrance to elite white patriarchal institutions. The purpose of this research is to map the topography that exists just beyond those gates by analyzing the experiences of the individuals who have traversed it. The added labor expended (Moore 2008) by black female lawyers and other sidelined classes of workers proves fatal in part because it is distinct and invisible to the white patriarchal structure that could potentially sympathize with, if not alleviate entirely its various components.

Author

• Tsedale Mekete Melaku, CUNY-Graduate Center