Woohoo, new ⁦ @DissentMag⁩ issue just dropped. I join some great thinkers with a piece on the hustle economy.

I have to thank @moiragweigel for the invitation to a Radcliffe workshop that pushed me into gear on a draft of what had been just disjointed ideas. They’re still not totally jointed but that push got it on paper. Then @royal_t14 and Filene’s supported the project.

And, my collaborator @lanalana helped to further shape the ideas and approach to thinking about fin tech as social relations.

AND, a shout out to @datasociety for supporting the next phases of that project on mapping those social relations in Black women’s micro-entrepreneurship

A bit more: When I was interviewing students for LowerEd, I kept coming back to the Black women, obvi. They were the canaries in the coal-mine and they were the most emotionally invested in the *identity* and idea of economic uplift of all the students I spoke with.

This is very consistent with research that shows Black people, generally, internalize the messages of economic uplift as much as any other group but have significantly fewer structural opportunities to achieve them+

Black women are more likely than are Black men to translate those messages into educational aspirations + credential seeking. We usually just think and talk about college credentials but more broadly Black women aggressively pursue certifications of all kids.

My FAVORITE example of this is the achievement wall in my hair salon:

Over and over again, these women told me that if their for-profit degree did not pay off in increased job opportunities or earnings that they would just go into business for themselves. I wondered how that was going for them and what that looked like.

We know from literature that Black owned firms are overwhelmingly single person operations with very small revenue caps. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/minority_women_entrepreneurs_building_skills_barr.pdf

By structural consequence, Black women are probably not just small business owners but micro business owners. Micro-entrepreneurship immediately strikes me as one of those metaphors that is obscuring shifting social and economic relations

The term would have you think that micro-entrepreneurship is new. But if Black women have always been small cap single employee firms, what's so new about it? Well technology is new or the shift to born-digital entrepreneurial activity that happens in, on & thru platform capture

(Whenever I see a new word for pre-existing social relations? I know some shit is going down.)

That shift doesn't seem entirely captured in the "gig economy" metaphor; there is a historical gap to my mind. That gap came together for me in reading Fraser and Bhattacharya and @asociologist et al on racial capitalism + economic sociology of race https://academic.oup.com/ser/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ser/mwz054/5681457

I thought that "hustling" was a way to think about what Bhattacharya calls the sediments of racial capitalism in modern economic relations in a way that gig economy doesn't fully capture.

Like, there is a reason that some groups of people exit the labor market and absorb risk that outstrips their group and individual resources that contours what is "entrepreneurship" versus what is hustling.

Once I had that mental placeholder, I have started doing my approach to these kind of macro question which is always to get small. Get small, get grounded and find the material thing. I started with hair.

Black women's engagement with hair -- its culture but also its business -- captures a slice of economic life at the intersection of racial capitalism and platform capture and economic precarity. And so that's what I've been working on.

I should say: the smallest slice of economic life with the richest meaning-making that centers Black women's schemas and humanity because why not.

From the metaphor to the margins and back again, my dude.

Best abstract I never wrote (which might be causal): https://twitter.com/katforrester/status/1313177406501531649

(I don't write good proposals or abstracts.)