Every March, Women’s History Month brings a familiar rhythm of celebration—panels, proclamations, and tributes to pioneers who shattered glass ceilings. Those stories matter. But if we are honest, the story of women in America cannot be told without confronting another truth: this nation has been built, quite literally, on the backs of Black women. From the earliest days of the republic, Black women’s labor has been both indispensable and invisible. Enslaved women worked fiel

America has rituals for the dead. We lower flags. We dim lights. We ask for moments of silence. In rare cases — former presidents, Rosa Parks — we place bodies beneath the Capitol dome and call it honor. So when congressional leaders declined to extend that honor to Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson, they cited precedent. Precedent is tidy. Procedural. It is also how exclusion dresses itself in neutrality. But here is the truth: the Capitol Rotunda is too small for Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Frederick Douglass did not know the day he was born. Like many enslaved people, he was denied even the dignity of documentation. Birth dates were approximations. Family lines were severed. Identity existed in property ledgers, not in public record. His mother, Harriet Bailey, called him her “little Valentine,” and Douglass later chose February 14 as his birthday — an act of self-definition in a country that refused to define him as fully human. That act matters. Douglass unde

Labor economists like me mark our calendars for the first Friday of each month, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases The Employment Situation. In February, that report did not arrive on schedule. According to BLS, a partial government shutdown temporarily suspended data processing and dissemination, delaying the January jobs report. Many economists have built careers around these numbers, and we are right to rely on them. But moments like this also remind us that labo