I Labor, Therefore I Am

Black Women, Work, and the Labor of Being Seen

October 26, 2025

White male philosophers have long tied existence to either thought or production. René Descartes declared, I think, therefore I am, grounding being in reason (Descartes 1996 [1641]). Max Stirner later suggested, I labor, therefore I am, linking identity to material work and transformation (Stirner 1995 [1844]). Yet neither of these views included women like my mother, grandmothers, or myself. Georg Hegel described selfhood as emerging through recognition, through one subject being seen by another as human, but for Black women, recognition has too often been withheld (Hegel 1977 [1807]). The self, reflected back, is not a being, but an object.

Across creative and intellectual spaces, this pattern of erasure and minimization persists. This issue was central at the 1981 Conference on Black Working Women in the United States, where panelist Aileen Malveaux lamented the systemic exclusion in economics, remarking that Black women are "sort of footnoted as being statistically insignificant and therefore ignored" (Center for the Study, Education and Advancement of Women 1982). Even this highly accomplished, interdisciplinary group was still grappling with the core issue of being acknowledged and valued. This paper argues that Black women’s creative and intellectual labor fundamentally challenges Western definitions of selfhood and value. By reading the history of work and its cultural legacies through their exclusion, I show that existence is not proven by thought or production alone, but through the continuous act of creative self-definition in a world that refuses recognition.

Before entering this class, I viewed “work” as something one did for survival and “labor” as the effort poured into that work. In my family, the two were inseparable, evidence of endurance rather than fulfillment. This course defines labor as “the energy Black women have put forth in the distinct spheres of the human ecosystem: creative, intellectual, domestic, reproductive, and spiritual” (Crittenden 2025). This broader definition reframes labor from a transactional exchange into a living process of survival and authorship. To labor, in this sense, is to sustain and to build; it is to craft meaning in environments that deny your presence. When applied to Black women’s lives, labor becomes both a burden and a claim to being, an assertion of existence that neither Descartes’ thinking mind nor Stirner’s working body ever accounted for.

If definition determines meaning, value determines worth. Who decides what kinds of labor are rewarded, recorded, or remembered? During the mid-twentieth century, the landscape of work for Black women was shaped by limited opportunity and systemic exclusion. As Sharon Harley documented in Black Women Work, there was a divide even within the Black community of what was considered virtuous work, causing discrimination between domestic work outside the home, home makers, and professional work (Center for the Study, Education and Advancement of Women 1982). Even when Black women were educated or trained for higher positions, racial and gender hierarchies confined them to what was considered “women’s work,” or not working at all.

The Moynihan Report of 1965 reinforced this hierarchy by defining Black women primarily through the lens of family pathology rather than economic exploitation (Moynihan 1965). It relied on observations “about” Black women rather than voices “from” them, converting lived experience into sociological data. This pattern of erasure, being described, studied, and categorized without agency, extends beyond economics into creative and intellectual life. Just as the state counted the labor of Black women’s bodies while ignoring the labor of their minds, American cultural institutions celebrated the products of culture without acknowledging the Black women who shaped them (Davis 1983). To be counted, then, is not simply to appear in statistics or archives. It is to have one’s work recognized as labor, one’s thought acknowledged as intellect, and one’s creativity valued as contribution. The absence of such recognition constitutes a kind of historical silence, an accounting that measures productivity but not presence.

If the systems that measure labor have failed to count Black women accurately, then recognition must begin with self-definition. The act of naming is both intellectual and political, it is how Black women claim authorship over their existence. Moya Bailey describes Misogynoir as “the uniquely co-constitutive racialized and sexist violence that befalls Black women as a result of their simultaneous and interlocking oppression at the intersection of racial and gender marginalization” (Bailey 2021). By giving that violence a name, Bailey transformed what had been individual pain into shared knowledge. Brittney Cooper extends this lineage by insisting that Black women’s thinking, our theorizing about our lives, is itself a form of labor (Cooper 2017). She calls attention to the intellectual and emotional work that precedes every creative or professional act, labor that has long been dismissed because it originates in Black women’s lived experience rather than institutional validation. This reclamation of recognition is collective. The 1981 Black Women and Work conference marked a turning point, gathering scholars, activists, and artists who demanded that Black women’s experiences be treated as sites of theory rather than data to be interpreted by others. Within this framework, recognition becomes an act of liberation: to be known on one’s own terms, not through the lens of sociological observation or economic need, but through the authority of lived expertise. In the archives of art and academia, this shift represents more than inclusion; it represents authorship.

Recognition demands that we look again at whose signatures appear on the pages of history, whose names are attached to ideas, and who remains footnoted. For me, it is the bridge between seeing and doing, the moment when acknowledgment turns into agency. Recognition is a beginning, not an end. Agency emerges when knowledge of self becomes practice, when the act of naming turns into the act of making. Personal experiences taught me to see labor differently, not as confinement but as apprenticeship in discipline, communication, and craft.

Agency, in this sense, is the point at which doing and knowing converge. It is the power to define one’s own labor and to transform that definition into evidence of being. This agency is materially reflected in the lives of Black women artists and scholars, such as Alma Thomas, the first fine arts graduate of Howard University, and Samella Lewis, the first African American woman to receive her PhD in art history (Dig 2025); (Art 2025). Both used creative labor to assert agency within systems that dismissed them. If existence has been defined through thought and production, then Black women’s labor demands a new definition; one grounded in care, creativity, and authorship. To labor is not merely to survive; it is to insist on being seen and valued in a world that benefits from our invisibility. The work of Black women, from domestic spaces to studios and classrooms, shows that labor is both an act of creation and a demand for recognition.

The stakes are not simply historical, they are ongoing. What changes when we acknowledge that labor includes the intellectual and emotional energy that Black women contribute to every sphere of life? What possibilities emerge when we count that work, cite it, and preserve it? Recognition, value, and visibility are not abstract ideals but the conditions for justice in the record of human labor. To honor them is to complete the equation that Descartes and Stirner began, to say not only I think or I labor, but I create, therefore I am.