oct.
Serving the Domestic
How do we deal with sociological trauma in the design-services industry?
Sociological trauma is a form of collective psychological trauma that moves beyond the effects of an individual psychological event and roots itself within collective memory. It is how pain, destruction, and fear are shared and passed down across social groups and oftentimes entire societies. This form of trauma does not require the individual experiencing its effects to be directly part of the original events, but because the effects exist in collective memory, the sentiments associated with the event traverse time and space. This, unfortunately, creates an opportunity for the reconstruction of all of the feelings associated with the traumatic event to persist beyond those who directly experienced this event; thus, psychological damage is woven into social history through collective memory. Niambi Michele Carter discusses collective memory and trauma in her text American While Black, where she discusses how collective historical memory shapes contemporary racial consciousness. She further explains how historical progress does not necessarily indicate the disappearance of racial hierarchy, but rather evokes memories of Jim Crow and segregation that inform interpretations of present-day inequalities.
About a year ago, I had an unsettling experience grappling with sociological trauma in the workplace. I traveled to a job site on the Upper East Side to discuss fabric samples with a client, and I was required to announce my arrival at the front desk. My arrival was expected; the client approved me to proceed upstairs, but the method by which I did so was beyond their knowledge or control. Because of the nature of my work, as a service to the home, it was requested that I exit the front entry of the building and proceed around to the back to then enter through the service entrance. From there, I would be directed to my destination by way of the service elevator… in service of service.
The functionality of the service elevator makes complete sense to me, and why it exists. I also understand the nature of the Manhattan residential building lobby aesthetic, but the feelings of shame and discrimination that rose up in me that day were not all my own, but part of a distinctly American history that I had never directly experienced, but somehow was already all too familiar with. It was in that moment that I was reminded that I, in fact, am a Black woman working in a service industry – one that is extremely tied to the domestic – and no matter how degreed or accomplished I was, there was a deep reckoning that needed to take place with my personal history and my social racial history.
That was the longest elevator ride of my life. Somehow I felt as though I was reliving Jim Crow in the same moment that I was re-evaluating how much progress I really have made as a Black female grandchild to two Black grandmothers who were part of the Great Migration, moving north for better work and opportunity… spending their lives in service to wealthy white elites… spending their lives in service elevators and tunnels and back entrances doing necessary work that demanded to be unseen.
The reality of the situation is that there was nothing directly racially prejudiced about this situation. It is important to note that this is a building policy and, to my knowledge, not a moment of racial discrimination by the desk attendant, as my white male co-worker has had to make the same journey in the past. The difference here is distinctly the evocation of the effects of collective trauma, and that is part of the problem. A building policy can pass through the walls of collective memory without anyone intending for it to do so, and the design-services industry, a field built around the domestic, has not reckoned with that.
The intersections of race and gender in domestic and design services still require contemporary conversation. Angela Davis eloquently dissects the role of female domestic labor in relation to race and class in her final chapter of Women, Race, and Class. She writes:
The unorthodox feminine qualities of assertiveness and self-reliance—for which Black women have been frequently praised but more often rebuked—are reflections of their labor and their struggles outside the home…
The structural separation of the public economy of capitalism and the private economy of the home has been continually reinforced by the obstinate primitiveness of household labor…
The shortage, if not absence, of public discussion about the feasibility of transforming housework into a social possibility bears witness to the blinding powers of bourgeois ideology. It is not even the case that women’s domestic role has received no attention at all. On the contrary, the contemporary women’s movement has represented housework as an essential ingredient of women’s oppression…
The abolition of housework as the private responsibility of individual women is clearly a strategic goal of women’s liberation.
I turn to Davis because, according to Data USA, about 88 percent of private household workers in 2024 were women, compared with 12 percent men, and about 59 percent of workers in specialized design services were women, compared with 41 percent men. The two fields are not the same, but the overlap in who does this work, and where the work takes place, is hard to ignore. It raises the question: Who is riding in these service elevators? How many of us are reckoning with collective trauma in the workplace? And most importantly to this conversation, how in 2026 are we as a collective dealing with sociological trauma in the design-services industry? Because if a single elevator ride could affect me this strongly, whatever we are doing is probably not enough.
Until next month,
stay BAD.d
Written by Keren Dillard-Taylor