http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/us...in&oref=slogin
Last month, Jennifer Freeman sat in a Chicago coffee bar, counting her blessings and considering her problem. She had a husband with an M.B.A. degree, two children and a job offer that would let her dig out the education degree she had stashed away during years of playdates and potty training.
But she could not accept the job. After weeks of searching, Ms. Freeman, who is African-American, still could not find a nanny for her son, 5, and daughter, 3. Agency after agency told her they had no one to send to her South Side home.
As more blacks move up the economic ladder, one fixture — some would say necessity — of the upper-middle-class income bracket often eludes them. Like hailing a cab in Midtown Manhattan, searching for a nanny can be an exasperating, humiliating exercise for many blacks, the kind of ordeal that makes them wonder aloud what year it is.
“We’ve attained whatever level society says is successful, we’re included at work, but when we need the support for our children and we can afford it, why do we get treated this way?” asked Tanisha Jackson, an African-American mother of three in a Washington suburb, who searched on and off for five years before hiring a nanny. “It’s a slap in the face.”
Numerous black parents successfully employ nannies, and many sitters say they pay no regard to race. But interviews with dozens of nannies and agencies that employ them in Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Houston turned up many nannies — often of African-American or Caribbean descent themselves — who avoid working for families of those backgrounds. Their reasons included accusations of low pay and extra work, fears that employers would look down at them, and suspicion that any neighborhood inhabited by blacks had to be unsafe.
The result is that many black parents do not have the same child care options as their colleagues and neighbors. They must settle for illegal immigrants or non-English speakers instead of more experienced or credentialed nannies, rely on day care or scale back their professional aspirations to spend more time at home.
“Very rarely will an African-American woman work for an African-American boss,” said Pat Cascio, the owner of Morningside Nannies in Houston and the president of the International Nanny Association.
Many of the African-American nannies who make up 40 percent of her work force fear that people of their own color will be “uppity and demanding,” said Ms. Cascio, who is white. After interviews, she said, those nannies “will call us and say, ‘Why didn’t you tell me’ ” the family is black?
In several cities, nanny agencies decline to serve certain geographic areas — not because of redlining, these agencies say, but because the nannies, who decide which jobs to take, do not want to work there. “I can’t service everyone,” said Maria Christopoulos-Katris, owner of Nanny Boutique, an agency that turned down Ms. Freeman’s request, even though it claims to cater to the city of Chicago. “I don’t discriminate.”
Ms. Freeman finally found a friend, another black mother, to watch her children.
Similarly, Ms. Jackson was told by some of the best-known nanny agencies in Washington that they did not serve Prince George’s County, Md., a largely black area bordering the District of Columbia.
“We have problems getting people to certain areas because of logistics,” said Barbara Kline, the owner of White House Nannies, which Ms. Jackson contacted. “I’m always worried people will interpret it the wrong way.” She added, “Nannies like to go where other nannies go or where their previous jobs were.” Ms. Jackson noted that White House Nannies served other suburbs, and that a bus stopped just minutes from her house.
Agencies represent only a small slice of nannies; most work through informal arrangements, further out of reach of civil rights and labor laws. (Because so many nannies are illegal, no one can say with certainty how many work in this country, let alone work for black families.)
In visits, telephone calls and e-mail exchanges across the country, nannies of all colors spoke of parents in sweeping ethnic generalizations: the Jews this, the Indians that. Viola Waszkiewicz, a white sitter in Chicago, has cared for black children, but explained that many fellow Eastern European nannies would not.
“We come here, and we watch TV and the news, and all we see is black people who got hurt, got murdered,” she said. Most of the nannies she knows “think all black people are bad,” she said. “They’re afraid to go to black neighborhoods.”
Pamela Potischman, a social worker in Brooklyn who specializes in parent-nanny relationships, said, “You rely on what’s familiar, so you’re going to rely on these vast generalizations to be self-protective.” She added, “The nannies talk, and they say, ‘This is what’s O.K. and what to watch out for.’ ”
This summer, Tomasina and Eric Boone of Brooklyn sought a nanny for their baby girl because their jobs — she is the advertising beauty director for Essence magazine, he is a lawyer at Milbank Tweed — require evening hours. After a Manhattan agency did not return Ms. Boone’s call, they searched on their own, and sat through one stomach-curdling interview after another.
One sitter, a Caribbean woman living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, asked about the “colored” people in the Boones’ neighborhood, Clinton Hill. A Russian sitter said enthusiastically that although she had never cared for a black child, she could in this case, because little Emerie Boone, now 7 months old, was light-skinned. All sitters expressed surprise that a black couple could afford a four-story brownstone.
“There were points where I got so frustrated that I picked up my child and I said, ‘Tomasina will show you out,’ ” said Mr. Boone, who is African-American and serves on the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The Boones now use day care. It is inconvenient — the center closes at 6, often forcing Mr. Boone to race to Brooklyn and then back to his Midtown office. But “there is no way we’re doing the whole nanny thing again,” said Ms. Boone, who is African-American and Puerto Rican.
Mr. Boone said, “To have someone refer to other black people as ‘colored,’ what does that teach your child about race?”
Like Ms. Freeman in Chicago and Ms. Jackson in Maryland, the Boones worry that nanny troubles could limit their professional advancement. In earlier generations, Ms. Jackson said, “We were the nannies.” Now, blacks “want to have it all,” working and raising children. “But to have it all you need help,” she said.
And that means qualified help. “How can you do a background check when someone doesn’t have a driver’s license?” Ms. Jackson said. “I’m not going to take this nanny just because she’s the only one I can get.”
In an exception to the usual stroller parade of black sitters with white children, some white nannies do care for black children — and experience slights because of it. Margaret Kop, a Polish sitter in Chicago, said that on a recent playground visit, “one of the other nannies asked me, ‘Where did you find that monkey?’ ” On the way home, Ms. Kop cried, stung by the insult to the child she loved.
Some black sitters, both Caribbean and African-American, said they flat out refused to work for families of those backgrounds, accusing them of demanding more and paying less.
“It seems like our own color looks down on us and takes advantage of us,” said Pansy Scott, a Jamaican immigrant in Brooklyn, basing her conclusions on working for a single black family years ago. Ai-Jen Poo, lead organizer for Domestic Workers United, a labor group, said, “Domestic employees are at the whim of their employers,” good or bad. “If they happen to run into an employer who for whatever reason is not respecting their rights,” she said, they may draw wildly broad conclusions.
The problem may be as much about class as race, said Kimberly McClain DaCosta, a Harvard sociologist who is researching how blacks care for family members. For nannies, working for an employer of the same background or skin color “highlights their lower economic status,” she said, but “the fact that their employers are black just makes that more intense.”
Many black families say they seek only a sitter who is reliable and loving. But some do have race-based preferences themselves. African-American professionals, who constantly battle the stereotype that blacks do not speak proper English, sometimes hesitate to hire Caribbean nannies who speak with lilting accents or island patois, said Cameron L. Macdonald, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
These parents want their children “socialized into what it’s like to be black in a racist society, but they also want their children to be socialized into being middle class. That’s hard for one person to do,” said Ms. Macdonald, who is white.
Ms. DaCosta is an African-American parent herself. She and her husband, who is Caribbean, have successfully employed several nannies for their three children. Still, the hiring process has been tricky. They preferred a black sitter, who would instantly understand matters like how to do their daughter’s hair. At one point, Ms. DaCosta scouted playgrounds, so she could spy on nannies’ skin color as well as behavior; another time, she placed a race-neutral ad, and hid by the window as the prospective nannies drove up, sighing with relief when a black one appeared.
Ms. DaCosta and her husband now use au pairs, checking the photos on their applications and announcing their own race at the start of the phone interview. “We don’t want any surprises,” she said.
Middle/upper class blacks snubbed by nannies. Welcome back to the 50's!
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