Pub Date : 2019-04-02DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0012
Cati Coe
This coda describes a care worker undergoing a foreclosure on her house and retiring to live in Ghana. To the care worker, this loss is symbolic of her work not bearing fruit, and of the unfairness of the American legal system. Mortgages may be appropriate for workers in a stable job, but home health workers’ monthly income fluctuates because of the precarity of their work schedules.
{"title":"Interlude","authors":"Cati Coe","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"This coda describes a care worker undergoing a foreclosure on her house and retiring to live in Ghana. To the care worker, this loss is symbolic of her work not bearing fruit, and of the unfairness of the American legal system. Mortgages may be appropriate for workers in a stable job, but home health workers’ monthly income fluctuates because of the precarity of their work schedules.","PeriodicalId":365894,"journal":{"name":"The New American Servitude","volume":"110 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125267630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-02DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0002
Cati Coe
Eating together and sharing food is often taken as a sign of community—as in rituals of communion, and it was often a site of conflict. This coda explores care workers’ and patients’ reflections on eating and food—from the smells of “African cooking,” to the joys of patients accepting African foods and kosher dietary restrictions—as meditations on belonging and incorporation by patients and care workers alike.
{"title":"Interlude","authors":"Cati Coe","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Eating together and sharing food is often taken as a sign of community—as in rituals of communion, and it was often a site of conflict. This coda explores care workers’ and patients’ reflections on eating and food—from the smells of “African cooking,” to the joys of patients accepting African foods and kosher dietary restrictions—as meditations on belonging and incorporation by patients and care workers alike.","PeriodicalId":365894,"journal":{"name":"The New American Servitude","volume":"28 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121706366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-02DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0005
Cati Coe
Most of the African research participants in northern New Jersey and the Washington DC metropolitan area told stories of deliberate humiliation or diminishment in which their place of origin or Blackness was used against them. Through these interactions and stories about these interactions, African care workers were becoming familiar with American racial categories, in which they were Black, mixed in with stereotypes about Africans as non-human and about immigrants stealing jobs from citizens. These insults incorporated them into American racial categories as “Blacks” and “people of color,” social categories of person that made little sense in their home countries. As a result, African care workers were becoming more sensitive to the experiences of African-Americans. Care workers take stories of racism to be paradigmatic of their experiences in the United States.
{"title":"Stories of Servitude","authors":"Cati Coe","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Most of the African research participants in northern New Jersey and the Washington DC metropolitan area told stories of deliberate humiliation or diminishment in which their place of origin or Blackness was used against them. Through these interactions and stories about these interactions, African care workers were becoming familiar with American racial categories, in which they were Black, mixed in with stereotypes about Africans as non-human and about immigrants stealing jobs from citizens. These insults incorporated them into American racial categories as “Blacks” and “people of color,” social categories of person that made little sense in their home countries. As a result, African care workers were becoming more sensitive to the experiences of African-Americans. Care workers take stories of racism to be paradigmatic of their experiences in the United States.","PeriodicalId":365894,"journal":{"name":"The New American Servitude","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122270889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-02DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0003
Cati Coe
Home care is a portal to the American economy for African migrants, but it is one in which they are racialized as African and Black. When Africans come to the United States, they encounter a racialized employment market, in which their Blackness and immigrant status plays a major role in how they are perceived. Because they are desperate for work to support their families, they are valued by agency staff as dedicated and hard-working, patient and respectful. Africans also highlight these qualities when they seek employment. However, their cultural capital as “African” is not considered valuable by patients, who often express a preference for “white” or “American” care workers. This chapter analyzes the ways that care workers are recognized and positioned within the care labor market, and how this recognition makes African care workers vulnerable to exploitation and humiliation.
{"title":"“Anyone Who Is Not African”","authors":"Cati Coe","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Home care is a portal to the American economy for African migrants, but it is one in which they are racialized as African and Black. When Africans come to the United States, they encounter a racialized employment market, in which their Blackness and immigrant status plays a major role in how they are perceived. Because they are desperate for work to support their families, they are valued by agency staff as dedicated and hard-working, patient and respectful. Africans also highlight these qualities when they seek employment. However, their cultural capital as “African” is not considered valuable by patients, who often express a preference for “white” or “American” care workers. This chapter analyzes the ways that care workers are recognized and positioned within the care labor market, and how this recognition makes African care workers vulnerable to exploitation and humiliation.","PeriodicalId":365894,"journal":{"name":"The New American Servitude","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127992529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-02DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0007
Cati Coe
This chapter explores how some patients adopt their care workers temporarily and to a certain extent, to acknowledge the intimacy generated through care. Techniques of connection with African care workers entail what Bourdieu called practical kinship, which can easily be denied and revoked when the kin relationship is no longer needed. Major financial gifts or support are given to care workers which approximate but are not equivalent to inheritance. Both care workers and patients use kin terms like “younger brother” (said seriously) or “second wife” (said jokingly). Practical kinship is subject to the acknowledgment of others in the patients’ and care workers’ social networks, including official kin and fellow residents of the continuing care community. Death is particularly significant because it marks the end of the practical need for the care worker and because the official kin of patients can deny the kinship of the care worker to their parent.
{"title":"Making and Breaking Practical Kinship","authors":"Cati Coe","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores how some patients adopt their care workers temporarily and to a certain extent, to acknowledge the intimacy generated through care. Techniques of connection with African care workers entail what Bourdieu called practical kinship, which can easily be denied and revoked when the kin relationship is no longer needed. Major financial gifts or support are given to care workers which approximate but are not equivalent to inheritance. Both care workers and patients use kin terms like “younger brother” (said seriously) or “second wife” (said jokingly). Practical kinship is subject to the acknowledgment of others in the patients’ and care workers’ social networks, including official kin and fellow residents of the continuing care community. Death is particularly significant because it marks the end of the practical need for the care worker and because the official kin of patients can deny the kinship of the care worker to their parent.","PeriodicalId":365894,"journal":{"name":"The New American Servitude","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127304745","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-04-02DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0011
Cati Coe
This chapter examines how workplace conditions and benefits shape care workers’ national belonging. It discusses the home care field, including its historically unregulated character due to its categorization as domestic service. Agencies are currently responding to new regulations regarding overtime and health insurance, which have had contradictory effects on workers. It also discusses the amount of profit agencies are making from care workers. Care workers feel that they are denied reciprocities to which they are entitled through their labor. This is thus a complicated sense of belonging, in which they belong enough to feel entitled to reward, but not enough belonging to feel that they can work in unison against this system. Many, instead, decide that this state of affairs confirms that they belong in their home countries rather than in the United States. It is there that they imagine that they will reap the rewards of their labor and attain a dignity that is denied in the United States.
{"title":"A Lack of Reciprocity","authors":"Cati Coe","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines how workplace conditions and benefits shape care workers’ national belonging. It discusses the home care field, including its historically unregulated character due to its categorization as domestic service. Agencies are currently responding to new regulations regarding overtime and health insurance, which have had contradictory effects on workers. It also discusses the amount of profit agencies are making from care workers. Care workers feel that they are denied reciprocities to which they are entitled through their labor. This is thus a complicated sense of belonging, in which they belong enough to feel entitled to reward, but not enough belonging to feel that they can work in unison against this system. Many, instead, decide that this state of affairs confirms that they belong in their home countries rather than in the United States. It is there that they imagine that they will reap the rewards of their labor and attain a dignity that is denied in the United States.","PeriodicalId":365894,"journal":{"name":"The New American Servitude","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131373883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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