History Suggests Michelle Obama and Simone Biles Were Right to Clap Back at Trump on ‘Black Jobs’

Donald Trump produced an enormous and now months-long backlash during his June debate with President Joe Biden by referencing “Black jobs.” Some took offense, while many others pounced at the opportunity to make memes, jokes, and jabs against the former President. Two big clap-backs at Trump came first during the Paris Olympics when multiple gold medal gymnast Simone Biles tweeted “I love my black job,” and then during last week’s Democratic National Convention when former First Lady Michelle Obama asked “Who’s going to tell [Trump] that the job he’s currently seeking might be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”

Biles and Obama were pushing back against an unspoken message conveyed by the phrase — the idea that only certain jobs are appropriate for Black Americans, specifically menial, more physical, and less glamorous ones. And history illuminates why their interpretation — that the descriptor “Black jobs” is loaded with a veiled, racially charged message — is correct. The term has its roots in centuries-long attempts by white Americans to define a racialized hierarchy of labor, one that supported a white supremacist worldview. 

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Americans developed new categories and conceptions of work. Not coincidentally, these developments corresponded with the rise of capitalism and chattel slavery. As capitalism emerged across the Atlantic World in the 1700s, Americans increasingly regarded work that produced monetary profit or wages as more valuable than that which didn’t. 

This evolution had as much to do with gender as race: it redefined housework as an extension of a woman’s inherent feminine nature rather than the actual labor that it was. Cleaning, cooking, laundering for the family—if it didn’t produce money, was it even really work? American husbands were increasingly laboring outside the home, bringing home wages. That was work.

But there was a second, later piece of this transformation. Over the 18th and 19th centuries, Americans subdivided work into two separate categories. Mental and manual labor became not only separate, but qualitatively different, with work of the mind seen as superior to that of the body. American philosopher and religious leader Alonzo Potter wrote in 1840 that “by far the most productive labour of all is that of the mind.” He went further, noting that mental labor, unlike manual, “is not susceptible of compulsion.”

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Potter was arguing that only physical labor could be forced upon another — a defining factor of enslavement. Potter was a northerner and an abolitionist, yet pro-slavery southerners took this idea to an extreme: enslaved people, which by the antebellum era signified Black people, were inherently suited for physical labor.

While enslavers thought of their work (the “business” of slavery) as being of the highest order, they argued that slave labor was inferior and even brutish. The work of enslavers was labor of the mind, suitable for white elites, while physical labor was ideally carried out by enslaved people. Dating back to the first European encounters with Africans, whites had believed that Black bodies were naturally meant for manual labor. Yet, as race-based slavery developed and intensified in the Americas, the perception grew and hardened.

By the end of the antebellum era, Joseph A. Turner—a Georgia enslaver and newspaper printer—proclaimed that the work of slaves was “menial service—for so far as real labor is concerned, I myself work harder than any negro on my plantation.” So anathema was physical labor for Southern white men and women that former First Lady Dolley Madison wrote that she was willing to let her enslaved housemaid Sukey “steal from me, to keep from labour myself.”

As much as Southern white men and women wanted to avoid manual labor, they also were wary of Black people engaging in a "higher" order of labor. Their fear was that doing even artisanal work—blacksmithing, coopering, carpentry—required both physical strength and mental acuity and therefore tapped into imagination and innovation. If workers could imagine a new design or process, could they also imagine a life outside of slavery?

It seemed no accident that Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner—who led or were alleged to have led slave revolts in 1800, 1822, and 1831—had all practiced carpentry. In the name of safety, by 1858, the city of Savannah, Ga., had barred free Black individuals from most skilled trades. This wouldn’t stop plantation owners from exploiting the labor of enslaved artisans, but defining work in more narrow terms could placate white fears of Black rebellion and freedom. 

At the same time Savannah sought greater safety by legislating a racialized hierarchy of labor, the pro-slavery firebrand and South Carolina enslaver James Henry Hammond brought this southern belief to a national stage. In an 1858 speech to Congress, he argued that Black people were innately fit for the punishing work demanded by monocrop production. Hammond claimed that their work was essential — though only because it was important and valuable to those for whom they performed it. Black labor provided a stable base that enabled white people to do the work of the mind, of building governments and economies and societies: “Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.”

In this same speech where he famously declared, “Cotton is king,” Hammond proclaimed that Black people must remain at the bottom of society to provide a foundation for (white) American society to flourish. “[Y]ou might as well attempt to build a house in the air” without “this mud-sill.” In Hammond’s view, Black bodies must forever provide physical labor and thus forever remain in the mudsill, unable to ascend because of white Americans’ need of them at the bottom.

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Hammond died in 1864 while the Civil War waged around him, and thousands of Black southerners fled the forced labor required of them on plantations. Slavery ceased to legally exist within a year of Hammond’s death, but in many ways, the essence of his mudsill theory lived on. 

Black men continued in agricultural labor for decades after emancipation; while some were able to purchase land, most found themselves caught in inequitable labor systems, like sharecropping, that replaced slavery while keeping Black freedpeople trapped in cycles of poverty. In the late 19th century, the vast majority of working Black women — more than 90% — were employed in domestic work, many of them still toiling in the houses of and for the benefit of white families. 

Segregation infiltrated the job market at every level; by 1913, Black federal employees found themselves relegated to menial positions. But Black activists like A. Phillip Randolph fought back, successfully pressuring the government into integrating the defense industries and military in the 1940s. 

They didn’t stop with the federal government. The Civil Rights Movement focused not only on securing civil liberties but on this quest for better employment. High unemployment was an issue, but so were the types of jobs available to Black Americans: they remained limited to low-wage, menial occupations with few opportunities for upward mobility. Civil Rights activists demanded that more jobs be opened to all, a call they took to the streets. Often forgotten today, the seminal 1963 March on Washington was “for Jobs and Freedom.” 

And yet occupational segregation remains today, fueling the racial wealth gap that continues to grow in the U.S. 

When white people invoke “Black jobs,” therefore, a history of pernicious racialized hierarchies lurks behind it. Some conservatives rolled their eyes at the uproar over Trump’s “Black jobs” comment, brushing it aside as another example of “media deception and liberal race-baiting.” They claimed that Trump simply meant what he said: “Black jobs” are just jobs held by Black individuals.

Yet, history suggests that Michelle Obama, Simone Biles, and so many others were right to push back. The mudsill theory is deeply ingrained, and the recent controversy over “Black jobs” shows it isn’t going away. As long as the concept of “Black jobs” exists — one that associates unskilled, manual labor with people of color — so too will the racial hierarchy underpinning it, which places white Americans above all others.

Whitney Nell Stewart is author of This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) and an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.