It follows from the previous discussion that to address the unequal distribution of care responsibilities among men and women also requires addressing the unequal distribution of care duties among racial and ethnic groups. That is, as long as the gender division of care remains intact, it would be in the short-term financial interests of white women to support or overlook the racial division of care. Because it guarantees that the dirtiest and most undesirable care work will be performed by someone else, namely minority women. For example. There's a great deal talked today about providing more public services to help employed mothers in the areas of child and eldercare. Yet, Glenwood suggests that we need to ask who will provide these additional services and who is most likely to benefit from them. The historical records suggests that such services will be provided by minority or immigrant women, but it will be primarily white women who will benefit from those services. Likewise, consider this and recent years, public officials have tried to reduce welfare costs by passing laws that require women on public assistance to work. The most famous of these laws being the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, that required all women to get off welfare and find a job within two years regardless of their health skills or family's situation. Now, you might think that this will create an opportunity to improve the employment situation of all women. That is, white working women could hire women on welfare to get the services they need. In doing so, help women on welfare, many of whom are minorities get off public assistance. However, a problem arises when you consider that the types of service employees that white working women would hire to help out at home, like nannies, maids, housekeepers, etc, are typically paid poverty level wages. So white working women have little financial incentive to raise the wages of their maids, etc, to a level where they could get out of poverty and support their families because if they did, many white working women simply could no longer afford their services. Another important dilemma is what Sau- Ling Wong calls the problem of diverted mothering. To begin to understand this issue, I would like to show this trailer for the movie Driving Miss Daisy. As Sau-Ling Wong notes, Driving Miss Daisy was one of several movies produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s that depicts minorities acting as caregivers to whites. Other movies of this type include Clara's Heart, Ghost, A Long Walk Home, Grand Canyon, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and Passion Fish. Wong argues that the reason why these movies were so popular at the time is that the country was undergoing significant demographic changes. Soon whites would no longer be a majority. These films are lake anxieties among some whites that minorities might seek revenge for past injustices when they became the majority. What is also interesting about these films is that they speak to how whites have been and will continue to be dependent on the care of minorities. At the same time, they fail to question the privileged status of whites. In particular, they are careful to avoid addressing what one calls diverted mothering, or the fact that in caring for whites families, minorities have less time to care for their own. Instead, these movies emphasize the benefits of this arrangement for whites or the recipients of care. For instance, although Hoke Colburn in Driving Miss Daisy is a man, he is a very motherly figure in that he is incredibly patient with and goes to great links to care for the peevish Miss Daisy. However, is not until the very end of the movie that we learn Hoke has a family of his own, including a daughter and granddaughter, but we are told virtually nothing about how he managed to raise his family while continually having to look after Miss Daisy. Here are some more recent movies in which minorities care for whites. This is the trailer to the film, The Help. Some claim that such movies are just feel good experiences for whites that perpetuate racial reconciliation fantasies. What do you think?
