In the years since the Great Recession, falling foreclosure and unemployment rates have been used to measure the recovery from the economic crisis. Dara Z. Strolovitch rejects these supposedly objective indicators, arguing that these gauges ignore the enduring struggles of marginalized peoples. Furthermore, she challenges the notion of an economic “crisis” as reinforcing norms about who should be succeeding in the economy

Strolovitch, Dara Z.

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blogs.lse.ac.uk http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2013/11/15/mancession-hecovery/Ostensibly objective categories of economic “crisis” and“recovery” reflect and reinforce ongoing racialized andgendered economic disparitiesIn the years since the Great Recession, falling foreclosure and unemployment rates have beenused to measure the recovery from the economic crisis. Dara Z. Strolovitch rejects thesesupposedly objective indicators, arguing that these gauges ignore the enduring struggles ofmarginalized peoples. Furthermore, she challenges the notion of an economic “crisis” asreinforcing norms about who should be succeeding in the economy.We typically take as given that the official and unofficial measures that political elites use toidentify things like recessions and depressions are valid and objective indicators of economiccrises (defined here as bad things that are framed as potential crossroads worthy of national attention or asemergencies that demand swift and decisive action to avert disaster). Examining the recent “Great Recession”and foreclosure crisis, however, highlights the ways in which these indicators can also serve to normalize theongoing hard times faced by members of marginalized groups. In particular, it reveals the extent to which the verynotion of “economic crisis” is a construct that relies on assumptions and practices that reect, reproduce, andconstitute prevailing attitudes and normative expectations about racialized and gendered labor and economicinequalities.The Mortgage Meltdown, or When Does a Crisis Begin?The constructedness of crisis is well-illustrated by the recent mortgage meltdown. In the fourth quarter of 2007,when the foreclosure crisis was widely recognized as being underway, the Mortgage Bankers Associationestimated that 3.6 percent of all loans were seriously delinquent (that is, more than 90 days late) or in foreclosure,and that an additional 0.9 percent were entering foreclosure. Longer-term data demonstrate, however, thatforeclosure rates among people of color, immigrants, low-income people, and female-headed households were atsimilar or higher levels well before the crisis was said to have begun. For example, a 2002 study commissionedby the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that the foreclosure rates for African American,American Indian, and Latino homeowners in 1996 were 4.8 percent, 4.4 percent, and 5.4 percent respectively,while rates were 2.9 percent for whites and 3.7 percent for Asian Americans.As we might expect, the sharp increase in foreclosures that began in 2007 took a disproportionate toll on AfricansAmericans and Latinos, particularly on those who owned homes in majority-minority neighborhoods . Foreclosurerates during that period were higher and increased more steeply in census tracts in such neighborhoods (definedin the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University as census tracts in which over 50 percent ofresidents are members of racialized minorities) compared to mixed (defined in the report as census areas with10–50 percent minority residents) and white (defined as less than 10 percent minority) tracts, even after controllingfor average income. Moreover, rates in moderate-income majority-minority neighborhoods approached those inlow-income white neighborhoods, and foreclosure rates in high-income minority neighborhoods exceeded rates inmoderate-income white neighborhoods.These disparities are themselves troubling reminders about the ways in which the material effects of crises candisproportionately harm members of marginalized groups. However, it is the indicators that were regarded as theharbingers of the crisis that are most germane. In particular, the high foreclosure rates documented among somegroups as early as 1996 did not suffice to constitute a crisis. Rather, those disparities were construed as perhapsunfortunate, but unremarkable and predictable—even acceptable—results of patterns of racially-segregatedhousing, discrimination on the part of lenders, and lower average incomes among women and people of color. Inother words, these ongoing economic problems and disparities were normalized, construed not as crises but asexplanations and justifications for higher interest rates. It was not until foreclosure rates among middle-class whiteCredit: Jacob Anikulapo (Creative Commons BY NC SA)male-breadwinner households reached levels typical of those in minority communities and among female-headedhouseholds of all races andethnicities that a foreclosurecrisis was said to have begun.From Mancession to HecoveryIf the example of the mortgagecrisis illuminates the roles ofpersistent racialized andgendered inequalities indetermining when crises begin,the case of the Great Recessionillustrates that these inequalitiesalso mark the criteria used toindicate that an economic crisishas ended and that we havereturned to “normal” or even goodeconomic times.As many readers know, inDecember 2007, the American economy entered a recession that would eventually be marked by the highestunemployment rates of any recession since 1982. Soon after this “Great Recession” began, economists notedthat unemployment among men seemed to be rising more quickly than unemployment among women. In May2009, for example, male unemployment was reported to have reached 10.5 percent (up from 5 percent in 2007),while female unemployment was said to have increased to only 8 percent (from 4.8 percent in 2007).It did not take long before political observers coined the phrase “mancession” to characterize this phenomenon,and several years of debate, speculation, and hand wringing about the gap’s origins, effects, and meaningensued. Analysts pointed out that the disparity was, in part, a function of declines in industries such asconstruction, which remain dominated by men and which had been hard-hit by the collapse in the housing market.Others noted that while the unemployment rate for women was lower than the one for men, women’s rates ofunemployment were not actually declining but remained, in fact, remarkably high. Women also to endureinequalities that had affected them long before the recession had begun: they remained concentrated in lower-paying service positions, average wages for white men remained higher than those for white women, and whitemen with high school diplomas continued to earn about as much as white women with college degrees.While observers and analysts noted these disparities, there was scant acknowledgement of the fact that women’slower rates of unemployment were at least in part an artifact of long-standing norms about women’s paid labor,whereby the proportion of women in the labor force was — and remains — far lower than the analogous of men.Lawrence Mishel and his colleagues estimate for example, that before the recession in 2007, 90.9 percent of menbetween the ages of 25 and 54 were in the labor force, compared to only 75.4 percent of women in this samegroup. So among all those in the paid labor force, it was true that a greater proportion of men were unemployedcompared to the proportion of women. But even when the gap in male and female unemployment rates was at itspeak, a greater proportion of American men than American women were employed . The absolute value of thenumber of men working also remained higher than the number of women, those men continued to earn more thantheir female counterparts, and they also continued to hold better jobs than more highly-educated women. Yet as inthe case of the mortgage crisis, it was not these long-term structural inequities that constituted the situation as acrisis, rather, it was the suggestion that gendered norms were being challenged and gendered disparities possiblynarrowing or reversing that was deemed the problem worthy of attention. In other words, the crisis was that whitemen were increasingly relegated to economic conditions previously and unceremoniously reserved for womenand people of color.Fast forward to September 19, 2010, when the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau ofEconomic Research (NBER) met by conference call and determined that the “Great Recession” that had begun inCredit: bbcworldservice (Creative Commons BY NC)December 2007 had ended in June 2009. While the NBER Committee was careful to note that its members “didnot conclude that economic conditions since that month have been favorable or that the economy has returned tooperating at normal capacity,” they did aver that the American economy was recovering from the longestrecession since the Second World War.Several months later, a March2011 report from the Bureau ofLabor Statistics (BLS) found thatapproximately 90 percent of thejobs that had been created in thepreceding year, during the NBER-declared “recovery,” had gone tomen. In other words, what theNBER had called a recovery hadbeen, up to that point, whatjournalists came to call a“hecovery,” with benefits goingprimarily to men. Moreover,because cuts in public sectoremployment (which accounts fora disproportionate share of jobsheld by women and AfricanAmericans) continued well afterthe recovery was said to havebegun, by some indicators bothwomen and people of color fared worse after the economic crisis of the Great Recession had “officially” ended.Read in tandem, the NBER and BLS reports demonstrate how gendered norms and the expectation that womenwill always participate in the labor force at lower rates than men mark ideas about both the depth and gravity ofthe crisis of the Great Recession as well as the indicators that it was over. It is only in such a context that anupturn in which 90 percent of the jobs created went to (mostly white) men could be construed as a “recovery” fromthe Great Recession. And while the NBER was careful to issue the caveat that the economy had not “returned tooperating at normal capacity,” even as, or perhaps because, women and people of color fared worse, the notionthat the economy had entered a recovery was not questioned, and these racialized and gendered realities were atonce subsumed, made invisible, and neutralized by this ofcial end to crisis. Indeed, that the disproportionatebenets of the recovery went to white male workers was — and has long been — one of the conditions that, toborrow from Austin Sarat and Javier Lezaun, “make our sense of normalcy possible.”This article is a version of the paper “Of Mancessions and Hecoveries: Race, Gender, and the PoliticalConstruction of Economic Crises and Recoveries,” published in Perspectives on Politics.  The article will be openaccess until 21 December.Please read our comments policy before commenting. Note:  This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of USApp– American Politics and Policy, norof the London School of Economics.Shortened URL for this post: http://bit.ly/18wFE37_________________________________About the author  Dara Z. Strolovitch – Princeton UniversityDara Z. Strolovitch is an associate professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies and affiliated facultyin the Department of Politics at Princeton University. She is a scholar of American politics whoseinterdisciplinary research explores the politics of marginalization, interest groups and socialmovements, and the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality.She is the author ofnumerous articles and book chapters and of Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender inInterest Group Politics, (University of Chicago Press, 2007).CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 2014 LSE USAPP

Ostensibly objective categories of economic “crisis” and “recovery” reflect and reinforce on going racialized and gendered economic disparities

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