The woman who cleans our home, a Mexican mother and wife whom I’ll call Maria, told me that early on in the pandemic, most of her clients asked her to stop coming to work for an indefinite period. When I heard that almost all of them had also stopped paying her, I thought, “How selfish! Didn’t they know that her income was critical to the life of her family?” I was fairly certain that most of them, like myself, could still well afford to pay her.
Then I realized that I’d never paid Maria when we went on vacation or canceled one of her scheduled days. I too hadn’t made the connection between her income and my scheduling decisions. I thought I differed from the white employers who treat Black, Indigenous and other people of color in disrespectful and demeaning ways, but I was wrong. I was one of them. Even though I felt close to Maria and always enjoyed our conversations, I realized I had been completely unaware of some of the ways I was treating her.
I am a white, Jewish woman of European ancestry in her 70s. Growing up, my family’s home was cleaned each week by Bernice, an African American woman in her 50s who took the task of cleaning and ordering our home very seriously. Bernice and my mother took care of all the chores and I was not required to contribute in any way, not even bed-making or washing dinner dishes. Most of my friends also had women of color cleaning their homes. I got the message that household chores were menial and could be contracted to someone else who most likely would be a woman of color.
Luckily, I had roommates after leaving home who taught me how to do my share of the cleaning. For many years I cleaned, but it always felt like drudgery. At some point, when I felt we could afford to, I hired someone to clean for us and over the decades I have employed six different women as domestic workers. While I appreciated their labor, I often felt awkward as they entered my home in such intimate ways, scrubbing toilets, seeing what we ate (and wasted) in the refrigerator, and sometimes even washing our underwear. I felt exposed and vulnerable. I was embarrassed by my wealth and privilege and questioned how I had been given so many more opportunities and resources than these women. How could I earn far more sitting in a chair than they made doing back-breaking work? My confusion was compounded by an underlying belief that I, a professional woman, was somehow more deserving than those who did menial work.
It was here in West Marin, living in the same community with Soledad Gomez, who cleaned our home and business, where I was able to untangle some of my complicated and contradictory feelings. Through my talks with Soledad, I came to understand how racism, xenophobia and imperialism shaped our different circumstances and roles. I began to look at the cultural messages I had received all my life about the value of “women’s” work and of women of color more broadly.
In recent years, I have come to believe that acknowledging race and class privilege is of utmost importance. This has led me to explore how whiteness, class privilege and race influence my interactions with Maria. I was humbled to discover that although I cared about and respected her, at times I viewed her only as “my” housecleaner, there to accommodate my needs. I came to see this centering of my own needs as a part of how white supremacy operates in me. I’d been living as if Maria dropped in from the sky with her vacuum, cleaned our house and flew back into the sky. This fantasy allowed me to minimize the challenging and complex reality of her life, even though she has told me of her busy life raising kids, taking care of family and dealing with clients. And all these demands made more challenging because she is an immigrant. Once I started considering her needs, I learned that she has over 20 cleaning jobs, including short-term rentals with constantly changing schedules. She shared about the work required to run her small business, including the time it takes to travel to her jobs and how she files self-employment taxes, communicates with clients and manages scheduling. She explained that composing texts in English, even though she speaks fluently, takes precious extra time from her own household chores and dinner prep for her family. I also newly considered the money she spends on gas, equipment and supplies.
As white people, we often see our relationships with people we pay, especially service providers, as solely transactional. We want what we want when we want it, we want the best deal, and we feel no sense of loyalty or attachment. These exchanges not only cause harm to the other person, they also erode our true interdependence and prevent us from forming reciprocal relationships that consider our mutual well-being. In a racist society like ours, none of us escapes the internalized narrative of white superiority. I am full of gratitude for my ongoing relationship with Maria, and for all the women who have cleaned my homes and have helped me see and untangle the ways I treat those of different races as other and less than.
Almost all of us in West Marin who hire others to clean are white people of wealth. Those we hire are primarily Latinx, from Mexico or Guatemala, and many are First Nations people. Given the inequities of race, class and power, it falls to white people to examine our actions. I ask you to consider more deeply how you treat those who provide services in your home, in your garden and in our community.
Kate Levinson is a psychotherapist and author. She lives in Inverness.