Did Y’all see that piece in yesterday’s Washington Post under the headline, “Four Black women. Nine degrees. Not one steady paycheck?”
Deep sigh.
The article tells the story of four Black women from Arkansas who did exactly what their elders likely told them to do if they wanted to achieve security, respectability, and access: “stay in school,” “get your degree,” “go as high as you can go.”
And so they did.
These women earned their degrees and built their résumés. They applied, interviewed, hustled, pivoted, recalibrated, and yet they are still struggling to find work in Trump’s America. But this isn’t just a sad story about four aspirational Black women being locked out of the labor market. It is the latest article in a growing genre of stories about Black women doing everything “right” and still being economically punished.
The warning signs began showing up before the big narrative pieces like this latest one caught up. In May 2025, The Washington Informer reported that more than 106,000 Black women lost jobs in April alone. This was the steepest job loss of any demographic group that month as Black women’s unemployment rate jumped from 5.1 percent to 6.1 percent. The 19th warned that rising unemployment among Black women was a broader economic warning sign, not some isolated labor-market hiccup.
Then by June the numbers started getting harder to ignore. Axios reported that the jobless rate for Black women had been creeping higher all year. The article pointed to federal workforce reductions, attacks on DEI, and the disproportionate presence of Black women in public-sector jobs. By August, WABE reported that more than 300,000 Black women had left the workforce, connecting the exodus to federal layoffs, budget cuts, and DEI rollbacks. The Week noted the same pattern by writing that Black women were being pushed out of the workforce en masse, with inflation, student-loan burdens, biased hiring systems, and anti-DEI politics compounding the damage.
By fall 2025, this was no longer a statistical blip. Time warned that rising unemployment among Black women was a bad sign for the broader economy, noting that Black women’s unemployment had climbed sharply while other groups saw far less movement. The Guardian reported on how Black women were being hit hard by Trump-era layoffs and firings, especially in the public sector, where government jobs have historically provided Black women with a more stable foothold into middle-class life. Essence reported that more than 300,000 Black women had lost their jobs that year, and the NAACP said it was no accident.
By the end of 2025 and into 2026, policymakers and researchers were finally naming the crisis. Congressional Black women lawmakers urged the Department of Labor to address Black women’s unemployment. In February 2026, the Economic Policy Institute found that Black women suffered large employment losses in 2025, especially among college graduates and public-sector workers, with their employment rate falling to 55.7 percent. And now, the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 617,000 Black women age 20 and older were unemployed as of May.
That is the backdrop for The Washington Post story about those four Black women in Arkansas with nine degrees and no steady paycheck.
The article is powerful because it shows what the numbers feel like inside actual lives of women who hide their master’s degrees in closets, tailor their résumés for jobs paying $16.61 an hour, remove credentials from applications, substitute teach, drive Uber, lean on parents, and wonder whether pursuing higher education was ever worth it.
But it also belongs to a larger pattern. Since last year, the press has been telling versions of the same story. Black women are not being “DEI’d” into opportunity. They are being pushed out, priced out, ghosted, laid off, and politically discarded while racists insist they are stealing jobs from white people. In other words, college-educated Black workers, and Black women in particular, are being hit hard by unemployment at the very moment that anti-DEI hysteria has convinced millions of Americans that Black people are being handed opportunities we did not earn.
Please, somebody, make it make sense!
Tell me something, how can Black women be the alleged beneficiaries of some massive diversity giveaway while also facing such punishing employment precarity How are Black women supposedly skipping the line while standing outside the building with student loans, polished résumés, multiple degrees, and rejection emails? How are we the beneficiaries of some imaginary racial jobs program when women with master’s degrees are applying for part-time work, hiding credentials from employers, and wondering whether all that education was worth the debt? The math ain’t mathing and the lie is not lying well.
This is the absurdity at the heart of the DEI panic. White resentment has invented a fantasy economy where Black women are being airlifted into jobs we do not deserve, while the actual economy is pushing overqualified Black women out of the workforce, out of government jobs, out of professional pathways, and out of the middle-class stability we were told education would secure.
So which is it?
Are Black women taking everybody’s jobs, or are hundreds of thousands of Black women out of work? Because both cannot be true, unless the point was never truth in the first place.
And of course it wasn’t. “DEI hire” isn’t some kind of labor-market analysis. It’s a racial insult and a way to make Black achievement look counterfeit, and our presence look like theft. Just like affirmative action. It allowed people who had never once worried about nepotism, legacy admissions, good-old-boy networks, golf-course hiring, cousin contracts, fraternity pipelines, or mediocre white men failing upward to suddenly discover a deep passion for “merit.”
These are the same loud-mouthed people who can look at generations of white men inheriting jobs, wealth, land, admissions slots, political offices, board seats, book deals, bank loans, and benefit of the doubt without blinking suddenly need a forensic audit when a Black woman gets a cubicle and some damn dental insurance.
The DEI lie not only does political work, it also does emotional work for racists wh who want to protect the myth of white merit. If a white person does not get the job, DEI lets them believe they were cheated instead of forcing them to confront competition, mediocrity, bad luck, changing industries, or the fact that capitalism does not love them back. It lets them believe: “I didn’t lose because the system is brutal. I lost because an unqualified Black person was handed my place.” That story is comforting because it turns disappointment into grievance and grievance into moral superiority.
The DEI lie convinces white people that Black people are their competitors instead of their co-victims under capitalism. It convinces them that any interruption of white advantage is oppression.
And that’s why these stories in the WashPo matter because they expose the scam. The anti-DEI movement has never been grounded in any serious evidence about labor markets, qualifications, or fairness. It has been a racial backlash masquerading as concern for standards. The phrase “DEI hire” functions as a way to make Black achievement suspicious before it can even be assessed. It casts every Black woman who enters a workplace, earns a promotion, receives an appointment, or occupies a position of authority as someone whose presence must be explained, justified, and doubted.
This is the trap Black women have been placed in for generations. We are told education is the path out. We are told credentials will protect us. We are told excellence will make us undeniable. So we take on the loans, earn the degrees, learn the professional codes, build the portfolios, absorb the insults, and perform competence at a level that would exhaust most people. Yet even when we do everything right, we remain vulnerable to the same old racial scripts. If we succeed, it is called favoritism. If we struggle, it is called personal failure. If we are hired, we are treated as evidence that standards have fallen. If we are unemployed, nobody who screamed about DEI is willing to admit that the entire accusation was fraudulent from the beginning.
All this said, the WashPo piece still leaves some burning questions unanswered. For me, the biggest one is: What role did anti-DEI politics play in making Black women newly disposable?
Now, the article gets close. It mentions Trump encouraging White men to file workplace discrimination complaints, DOGE cuts, agencies stopping race data collection, the elimination “equity” language, shutting down health-equity work, and a Black unemployment gap that widened fast. But it does not fully say what those facts add up to: anti-DEI is not just rhetoric. It is an employment regime, policy, budget cutting, data suppression, office closures, and making Black women’s jobs politically vulnerable and then pretending the outcome is some race-neutral boolshit.
Another weakness is that the article relies heavily on the “education failed them” frame without interrogating who sold Black women the credential gospel and who profits from it.
These four women have nine degrees among them, and the piece shows them wondering whether another degree, even a doctorate, might help. But we should be asking: how many institutions have extracted tuition, labor, hope, and debt from Black women while offering no real protection from racialized labor exclusion? Higher education is presented as a broken promise, but the article could have gone harder on universities, student-loan systems, professional credentialing, résumé sorting, and the myth that Black women can educate their way out of anti-Blackness.
The piece also does not push hard enough on employer behavior. Who exactly is rejecting these women? What do the applicant pools look like? Are automated screening systems filtering them out? Are hiring managers treating master’s degrees as a liability for Black women but a sign of ambition for others? Why are job postings staying up after positions are filled? Why are applicants being summoned to interviews for one job and then offered a completely different, worse job? The airport interview scene is outrageous: women came for a customer-service job, were told it was filled, then were pitched ramp-agent work with unpredictable hours. That deserved more scrutiny, because it sounds less like a normal hiring process and more like bait-and-switch labor desperation.
The other missing question is historical: What happens when the federal government stops being a ladder for Black mobility and becomes a weapon against it? The article mentions that after Truman integrated the federal workforce, government employment became a dependable pathway to the Black middle class. That is a huge historical point but the piece could have developed it more. This is not just about women losing jobs in Arkansas. It is about the state dismantling one of the few employment sectors where Black people, especially Black women, had a foothold into stability.
So the next time somebody comes out of their face and calls a Black woman a “DEI hire,” ask them where all these stolen jobs are. Ask them why the résumés keep getting rejected. Ask them why the degrees are being hidden. Ask them why the interviews lead nowhere. Ask them why women with master’s degrees are applying for part-time jobs, driving Uber, substitute teaching, moving back in with parents, and still being told they are the ones with the unfair advantage.
Because that is the lie at the center of this whole anti-DEI crusade. Black women are accused of receiving special treatment in the same labor market that treats us as disposable. We are told we are unqualified when we are overeducated, overworked, underpaid, and unemployed. We are blamed for taking jobs we cannot even get.
So ask the real question and don’t let them wriggle away from it: If Black women are supposedly DEIs stealing all the jobs, why are more than 600,000 still out of work?
Answer me that.
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THIS CONTENT IS WRITTEN IN THE AUTHOR’S PERSONAL CAPACITY. ANY OPINIONS EXPRESSED ARE THE AUTHOR’S OWN AND SHOULD NOT BE ATTRIBUTED TO HOWARD UNIVERSITY OR MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY.
