Who Counts?
- A WEEKLY NOTE FROM LEAH DAUGHTRY -
Black
Lady
News
What matters this week.
For the women who move the world.
Issue No. 024
Friday, October 9, 2026
A NOTE FROM LEAH
The word of the week: Counted.
Every story in this issue comes back to the same question. Who gets counted, and who decides?
Start with the jobs report. In September, the unemployment rate for Black women jumped from 5.6% to 6.8% in a single month, while the people in charge keep calling this full employment. Domestic workers know this story by heart. They are so hard to count that the best estimate of how many Black women do this work runs from 57,000 to 160,000, and when the New Deal wrote labor protections into law, it wrote them out. Even the party that needs us most had to be reminded. Until this week, there were no Black candidates on the DCCC’s Red to Blue list.
But that’s never the whole story. Black women in Congress pushed, and on Monday Pearson and Chris Jones were added. A hospital system in St. Louis counted its own numbers, found its own bias, and fixed it. We Dream in Black has spent ten years organizing the women nobody bothered to count. And our Legend, Dr. Opal Lee, turned 100 this week. She gathered more than a million signatures, until this country had no choice but to count Juneteenth.
That’s the throughline. Nobody has ever handed us an accurate count. We take it ourselves, and then we make it matter. That work costs something, which is why I’m grateful to Regina Wallace-Jones for this week’s Five. She leads under more pressure than most of us will ever see, and she sent us how she keeps herself whole.
So here’s my ask. Election Day is November 3, and the surest way to be counted is to be on the rolls with a plan. Check your registration (go to www.vote.org), know your state’s deadline to request a mail ballot, vote early if your state allows, and if you’re voting in person, take a sister with you.
They can miscount us, but they cannot ignore us when we show up.
THE HEADLINE
They called it full employment. Ask her.
Three weeks ago the Fed chair stood at a podium and said the job market was basically at full employment. Then came September. Employers added 29,000 jobs. The national unemployment rate rose to 4.2%. And August, the month that made everybody exhale, got revised down to 133,000.
Here is the line underneath it. The unemployment rate for Black women jumped from 5.6% to 6.8% in a single month. Black unemployment overall went from 6% to 7%, the fastest one-month rise since the spring of 2020. Over the same month, unemployment fell for white, Hispanic and Asian workers. The entire rise in the national rate came from Black workers.
Economists caution that the Black numbers come from a small sample and swing month to month. Fair. But look at what moved. In September, the share of Black women 20 and older working or looking for work jumped from 60.6% to 61.9%. More of us came back looking, and too many of us did not find work. The jobs that carried so many of us into the middle class, in government and in education, are the jobs being cut.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley is pressing the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to treat Black unemployment as the warning it is. She is right to. Black women are the early warning, not the afterthought. When the economy cools, we feel the draft before anyone else feels the chill.
“Full employment” depends on who you count. Count us.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; CEPR; Joint Center; CNN; Office of Rep. Ayanna Pressley
THE PROFILE
We Dream in Black
Ten years of Black domestic workers organizing for themselves.
Domestic work in this country was built on the backs of Black women. Enslaved women raised other people’s children and kept other people’s houses. After freedom, their daughters and granddaughters did the same work for wages that barely deserved the name. And when the New Deal finally wrote labor protections into law, domestic workers were left out.
Black women organized anyway. In 1968, Dorothy Bolden founded the National Domestic Workers Union of America in Atlanta.
Ten years ago, the National Domestic Workers Alliance built We Dream in Black to carry that work forward. WeDiB is the organizing home for Black, Afro-Latina and Afro-descendant nannies, house cleaners and caregivers. It started in Georgia, at NDWA’s first chapter. Bolden’s state.
NDWA estimates that somewhere between 57,000 and 160,000 Black women do domestic work in private homes or through agencies. The size of that range tells you something. This is work that has always been hard to count, and that is part of how it has stayed easy to exploit.
The wins are concrete. In New York, WeDiB members helped bring domestic workers under the state’s paid sick leave and paid family leave laws, and their legal clinics have recovered more than $500,000 in stolen wages since 2016. Members train to negotiate their own pay and keep themselves safe on the job. Their organizing agenda says it plainly in one word: Unbossed.
Last night in New York, NDWA marked the decade with the people who built it: WeDiB’s local organizers, alongside the alliance’s leadership.
The women who have always held this country’s homes together are writing the next ten years themselves.
National Domestic Workers Alliance; New York State Senate Resolution J2279
Graphic courtesy of the National Domestic Workers Alliance / We Dream in Black.
THE FIVE
Curated by Regina Wallace-Jones, President & CEO, ActBlue
Regina Wallace-Jones runs the platform that moves the money behind Democratic campaigns, and she has spent this year doing it under heavy scrutiny. We asked her for The Five. She sent us how she stays whole.
Pressure Is Real. So Is the Practice.
Five Ways I Protect My Health While Leading Through the Fire
01 I take my health seriously and advocate for myself.
Black women are often praised for our ability to push through. But endurance is not the same as wellness. I pay attention when something feels different, seek answers, ask questions and follow through. I respect medical expertise while remembering that my observations matter. My health deserves attention before it becomes a crisis.
02 I begin each day by getting in touch with myself.
Every morning, I meditate in a hot sauna. It is my time to be still, turn inward and connect with myself before the demands of the day begin. This spiritual practice gives me space to listen to what I am feeling and what I need. Before I give my attention to everyone else, I give some to myself.
03 I make movement a daily practice.
I recently added a daily workout that includes strength training. It is a deliberate investment in my strength, energy and ability to keep doing the things I love. Amid travel, work and family responsibilities, I aim for consistency. Making time to strengthen my body is one way I honor everything I ask it to carry.
04 I make room for connection, care and joy.
On Sundays, my husband and I take a walk, followed by breakfast and a pedicure. It is simple, but it gives us time together and gives me something restorative to look forward to. These small rituals remind me that a full life needs room for pleasure, closeness and care, even during demanding seasons.
05 I build support around me.
I seek counsel from trusted peers, professionals, family and people who can tell me the truth. I also pay attention to the systems around me and where I may be carrying too much. Protecting my well-being means asking for help, sharing responsibility and building support before I reach a breaking point.
I cannot always control the pressure, but I can refuse to disappear inside it. These practices help me keep leading, loving and serving, and stay connected to the person I am along the way.
Photo courtesy of Regina Wallace-Jones.
THE LEGENDS
Dr. Opal Lee
The Grandmother of Juneteenth
Dr. Opal Lee turned 100 on Wednesday. When she was 12, a white mob burned her family’s Fort Worth home on June 19, 1939. Juneteenth itself. She could have let that date stay a wound. She made it her life’s work instead.
A retired teacher and counselor, she spent decades walking, petitioning and teaching anyone who would listen. At 89, she set out on foot from Fort Worth for Washington. She gathered more than a million signatures, and in 2021 she stood beside the president as Juneteenth became a federal holiday. In 2024, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
On her birthday, Fort Worth cleared the ground for the National Juneteenth Museum, the house her life built. She is the first living woman in this series, and that is the point. Legends are not only the women before us. Some of them are still here, still telling us the work is not finished.
CBS News; USA Today; Britannica; CultureMap Fort Worth
THE WIN
Commander Watkins.
NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins lifted off from Cape Canaveral on Oct. 1 as commander of SpaceX Crew-13. With that launch, she became the first Black woman to lead a crew to orbit.
It is her second trip to the International Space Station. In 2022 she became the first Black woman to serve on a long-duration station mission. She is a geologist who worked on NASA’s Curiosity rover mission to Mars, and she is now set to spend six months in orbit.
The trip itself set a U.S. speed record: about eight hours from launch to the station, the quickest American flight there yet. From orbit, she called her crew four of the luckiest humans on or off the planet. The luck is ours.
AP; PBS NewsHour; USA Today
Photo: NASA.
THE WATCH
What we are watching next.
Alito is thinking about it. Justice Samuel Alito, 76, told CBS News he thought about retiring after last term and will reconsider every year. His book came out Tuesday. The timing is the story. An exit while Republicans hold the Senate hands President Trump a fourth seat. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to flip the Senate in November, and some say that if they do, they would block any Trump nominee the way Mitch McConnell did in 2016. It has reopened the reform fight. Supporters of term limits and a bigger court say lifetime seats invite this kind of timing game. Alito, on Fox News Sunday, called those proposals a concerted effort to intimidate the court. This is the justice who wrote Dobbs. Whoever holds his seat will rule on our lives for a generation. That runs through the Senate, and the Senate runs through November.
CBS News; Fox News Sunday; NBC News; Politico
Now he likes mail ballots. On Oct. 3, President Trump told Republicans to vote early, absentee or by mail. These are the same methods he called a “Nation Destroying SCAM” after the Supreme Court blocked his mail-ballot restrictions last month. He votes by mail himself. He is still pushing the SAVE America Act to tighten mail voting rules. Read it as a turnout play, not a change of heart. The rules we vote under are still being fought over in court and in Congress. Make your plan now: know your state’s deadline to request a mail ballot, and use it.
CNN; Newsweek; Truth Social
A hospital system fixed its own bias. WashU Medicine and BJC HealthCare in St. Louis looked at their own numbers and found Black pregnant patients were drug-tested 42% of the time, compared with 25% of white patients, and reported to Child Protective Services three times as often (9% vs. 3%). They rewrote the policy around clinical criteria and built it into the health record. Testing fell 90%. CPS reports fell 80%. Babies stayed safe: no rise in preterm births, NICU admissions, withdrawal diagnoses or readmissions. It just won the Joint Commission’s 2026 Bernard J. Tyson Award for healthcare equity. Now watch whether other systems follow. If you are expecting, it is fair to ask your hospital: who gets tested, and why?
Joint Commission; Kaiser Permanente
Red to Blue, after the pushback. On Monday, the DCCC added six candidates to Red to Blue, its program that steers money and staff to House races it thinks it can flip. Two are Black candidates in the South: state Rep. Justin Pearson in Tennessee’s 9th District and Dr. Chris Jones, a nuclear engineer and Baptist minister, in Arkansas’s 2nd. Until then, there were no Black candidates on the list at all, even after it grew to 40 last month. Black women in Congress pushed. CBC Chair Yvette Clarke took it to DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene, and Rep. Ayanna Pressley called Pearson exactly the kind of candidate the party should invest in. Both seats went for Trump by double digits in 2024. Pearson’s district is brand new: Tennessee’s May redraw erased the state’s only majority-Black district and split Memphis three ways. The designation is the door. Now watch whether the money walks through it before Nov. 3.
Axios; DCCC; Tennessee Lookout; AP
ONE THING TO HEAR
The Brown Girls Guide to Politics is back.
A’shanti F. Gholar’s award-winning podcast returns Wednesday, Oct. 14, with Season 12, What the 2026 Midterms Decide, now produced independently under The BGG Media.
Ashley Shelton of the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice opens the season on protecting voting rights. After the election, Karen Finney, co-host of The Prep Session, joins the finale to break down which women won, what the new maps produced, and how to lead the conversation at the family dinners and holiday tables ahead.
For years, this has been where Black women and women of color go for political information they can trust. Put it in your Wednesday rotation.
Listen to the trailer and subscribe ->
Graphic courtesy of The BGG Media.
Stay rooted.
- LD
Black Lady News is a weekly curation by Leah Daughtry.
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