I received a bit of pushback for referring to the current domestic work industry as an Auction Block.

And because I have so much time on my hands, due to the industry’s very well-engineered refusal to let me work in peace, and because I like being right, I called on an ancestor to be sure.

The throughline is this:

Stop confusing the person you have historically decided is beneath you with the person whose labor you actually depend upon.

I keep coming back to Miss Marvel Cooke.

And I don’t want to go full history lesson, but Marvel was a Black journalist who went undercover as a domestic worker in 1950 to report on the women who gathered on Bronx street corners looking for household work. Her five-part series (which you can find below) exposed how employers could inspect, bargain down, exploit, and discard domestic workers while the women themselves had little protection or power.

Seventy-six years later, I’m still asking the same questions Marvel was asking:

Who protects the people doing the caregiving? Who gets to decide what their labor is worth? And what happens when the people whose labor keeps everything moving are treated as though they are disposable?

The women she interviewed already knew.

“They all get as much as they can out of your hide and try not to pay you if they can get away with it.”

That was 1950.

And somehow, here we are.

Different city. Different clothes. Agencies instead of street corners. Résumés instead of paper bags.

But the question remains the same: Who’s doing the work, who’s setting its value, and who gets to decide that the person doing it is worth less?

I said this recently when I sat down with Dr. Daniels: If caregivers stop, none of this shit moves.

And Black women have been some of America's most exploited caregivers for generations.

Our labor. Our care. Our babies. Other people's children. Our households. Other people's households. Our culture. Our creativity. Our bodies. Our time.

Everything keeps moving because somebody keeps doing the work.

You can see it in domestic labor.

You can see it in culture.

Hell, we watched it in real time during COVID. Take Black creators out of the machinery of popular culture and suddenly people who have been consuming Black creativity for years don't quite know what to do with themselves- remember Megan The Stallion's "Thot Shit" tiktok fiasco?

Nothing moves without the people you've decided are beneath you.

That's the fucking contradiction.

And maybe that's why Cooke still feels so current.

Because the problem was never that these women didn't understand their value.

They understood it perfectly.

The problem was that the people benefiting from their labor didn't want to pay for it- felt entitled to it, entitled to extracting from others.

What is honored stops haunting.

What is denied returns as crisis.