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INTRODUCTION

What Do the Words “Politics” and the “Political” Mean?

Politics and the political are ideas shaping almost every area of our lives.^* Traditional definitions of politics and the political were originally limited to interactions between the public and government institutions, bureaucracies, politicians, policymaking, and electoral politics more generally.¹ However, this missed the presence of politics and the political throughout daily Black life.² Because of that dissonance, for decades Black scholars, writers, artists, and others have published work pushing the boundaries of traditional understandings of politics and the political (ideas, concepts, definitions, theories, frameworks, etc.).³ Across academic disciplines and mainstream book publishing are books about Black people with the word “politics” or “political” in the titles.⁴ Books about the politics of Black spirituality, the political work of hip-hop music, the politics of survival, and the politics of rioting.⁵ However, when politics and the political are discussed among the public, the media, politicians and bureaucrats, the academy and mainstream writers, does everyone mean the same thing?^† What do the words politics and political mean? In the literal sense?

I am interested in examining the words, concepts, definitions, and theories used to understand the politics of poor Black people living in the United States.^* Specifically, I continue the work of Black feminist and Black politics scholars in further developing understandings of politics and the political capable of recognizing the political power of marginalized Black women.⁶ With that in mind, I am concerned with a central question: What concepts and theories are capable of recognizing and documenting the political engagement and political identity development of marginalized Black women living in poverty within the United States? I argue that, to fully understand how marginalized Black women living below the poverty line gain sociopolitical power, studies must extend and sometimes reimagine existing theories on the politics of Black marginalized communities.

There is no such thing as politics or the political without power.⁷ I argue that “politics” and “political” are the words used to describe the distribution of power and resources among people, nations, geographies, and groups.⁸ Politics is a concept used to understand who and which communities have power.⁹ Yet for Black women living below the poverty line, especially Black women who are the beneficiaries of U.S. government policies (e.g. welfare, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, public housing, etc.), amassing any amount of social, political, or cultural power is a difficult task.¹⁰ However, this is not the same as saying they have no access to sociopolitical power whatsoever.¹¹ Originally, traditional definitions of politics and the political were often too narrow to accurately recognize and document the political identities and political engagement of poor Black people living within the United States.^† As a result, more writing and research will continued to be needed in order to further the work of documenting and understanding a sociopolitical community with firm sociopolitical genealogies dating back to the enslavement period.¹²

In Redefining the Political, I used past scholarship and original ethnographic data to make two contributions. First, I developed the Black feminist definitional criterion (BFDC), a rubric students, scholars, activists, and policymakers can use to identify traditional and nontraditional politics and political engagement as they occur in everyday life.^* The Black feminist definitional criterion for extrasystemic politics understands everyday habits, speech, and patterns as being a part of the broader makeup of individual political identity. Second, I created an alternative framework used to recognize and document political identity, the political possible-self (PPS). The PPS is made up of two concepts: (1) belonging to a sociopolitical community and (2) political imagination. I discuss several respondent case studies throughout the book to demonstrate why studying individual political imagination and belonging to local sociopolitical community is central to the study of politics. Ultimately, Redefining the Political argues that belonging and political imagination are two key factors in accurately recognizing and documenting the politics of Black marginalized communities.

To begin, I collected original ethnographic data and thirty-one in-depth interviews over the course of a year in Chicago, in collaboration with Black women who were residents (past and present) of Altgeld Gardens, a Chicago public housing development.^† I documented how belonging and political imagination were used to create moments of collective sociopolitical power among their community in a public housing development on the far south side of Chicago. Through this research I found Black women living below the poverty line in the United States who developed a subversive extrasystemic politics.¹³ However, I do not use this research to make a causal argument. I cannot and would not claim that the cases examined in this book are applicable to all Black women or to all Black communities within the United States more generally. However, the cases do provide important insight into the sociopolitical lives of marginalized Black communities within the United States.¹⁴ I hope the insights garnered here will be useful to other marginalized communities struggling for language to describe their unique sociopolitical contexts, communities, and power. I use Redefining the Political to create tools aimed at recognizing and documenting the politics and political identities of Black women living below the poverty line.

The Origins of a Political Language Problem

Race, ethnicity, and politics scholars have noted that existing theories and concepts designed to explain or describe the political engagement of people living in the United States (e.g., words like “politics,” “alienation,” “efficacy,” “cynicism,” “trust,” and “freedom”) do not completely or accurately capture the politics of Black people living in poverty nationwide.¹⁵ Mainstream large-N surveys and polls (organized around more traditional definitions of politics and the political) can miss the political engagement of Black women living in poverty.¹⁶ As Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver argue, “existing models of American Politics provide little theorizing to make legible the perceptions and experiences voiced by marginalized Black communities across the United States.”¹⁷ Black feminist political scientists Zenzele Isoke and Evelyn Simien argued that traditional definitions of politics and the political frequently miss the politics of marginalized Black women. Likely because those frameworks were originally designed to study the political engagement of middle-class white Americans living in the United States.¹⁸ Out of necessity, race, ethnicity, and politics and Black feminist scholars expanded their conceptual and theoretical frameworks of politics and the political with an eye toward understanding the under-studied and the nontraditional political engagement of marginalized Black communities.¹⁹

Scholars like Gary King, Ronald Schmidt, and Jane Junn have argued that key concepts and terminology used within mainstream U.S. politics research (e.g., efficacy, cynicism, and alienation) were developed within a specific social, political, cultural, and spatial context, a white American context.²⁰ Evelyn Simien, Nikol Alexander-Floyd, and Julia Jordan-Zachery noted that the mainstream U.S. public sphere has imposed political language [originating from white patriarchal, heteronormative Western thought], onto electoral politics, the study of government more broadly understood, and the arts and sciences.²¹ Subsequently, Western political language and theory are mapped onto every community whose culture is examined within the academy.²² This includes the politics of Black communities living below the poverty line. In Redefining the Political, I argue that dominant mainstream approaches to the study of politics and the political are insufficient when used as a singular paradigm through which scholars seek to understand the sociopolitical worlds of marginalized Black women.

Why Focus on Black Women Living in Poverty in the United States?

During the in-depth interviews in their homes, respondents frequently discussed extrasystemic political engagement throughout their sociopolitical community. Some of the nontraditional (extrasystemic) political engagement described to me included, but was not limited to, protesting oppressive institutions within their communities, filling in the gaps left behind by public housing authority policies of benign neglect, subverting the formal rules and structures of public meetings to be heard by Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) executives, organizing art shows and community meals, volunteering at local public schools, and holding meetings to increase the political confidence of public housing tenants by educating them on navigating government bureaucracies.²³

While the crossroads between race and gender has had a significant influence on the development of politics within Black communities, the intersection of race, gender, and class can also predetermine who can access particular forms of politics.²⁴

Today, systemic racism, sexism, and classism make it difficult, challenging, and nearly impossible for Black mothers—especially low- and zero-income Black mothers—to survive. Yet they do; yet we do. Poor Black women have often been erased from public and academic discussions of politics. Even when Black women are lauded for “saving America” through voting or framed as an influential voting bloc in Brazil, the discussion addresses Black women in general and places little focus on poor Black women.²⁵

As a result of frequently being locked out of more mainstream Black politics, historically the Black working class and Black poor also engaged in extrasystemic political engagement (e.g., rioting, creating meal programs, providing low-cost childcare, gossiping, storytelling, rumor spreading, creating music, being loud on the bus, participating in rent strikes, or simply refusing to show up to an underpaid backbreaking job).²⁶ Given the U.S. government’s history of intrusion on and exploitation of Black women, documenting the political genealogies of Black women who have pushed back against government power is critically important.²⁷

Black women constituted the majority of the tenants who showed up for tenants’ meetings, protests, and CHA Board meetings while I was in the field from 2011 through 2012. Similarly, scholars frequently find that adult Black women make up a large proportion of on-the-ground grassroots labor throughout Black political work across the United States.²⁸ Additionally, consistent with my own findings, feminist historians have noted that marginalized Black women found creative and nontraditional means to subvert oppressive power structures generation after generation.²⁹ Because of their habitually ignored political past, present, and future, it is critical that scholars of politics continue to develop tools and frameworks capable of accurately recognizing and documenting the politics and political worldview of Black women living below the poverty line.³⁰

Staggering levels of poverty plague Black communities throughout the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2020 “the Black population had the highest poverty rate (19.5%),” despite accounting for approximately 12.4 percent of the total U.S. population.³¹ According to the National Partnership for Women and Families, in 2022 nearly 80 percent of “Black mothers [were] key breadwinners for their families . . . and nearly 30% of family households headed by Black women in the United States, live[d] below the poverty level.”³² Similarly, in 2011 Black women made up most of the “heads of household” within CHA public housing. Black women made up the majority of the residents serviced by the CHA (84 percent) and also a significant portion of Chicago’s urban poor. In 2004, 39.5 percent of those serviced by welfare offices in Illinois were Black Americans—a reality that worsened after the Great Recession of 2008. U.S. social entitlements policy for people living in poverty has become critical for their survival, particularly in the COVID-19-endemic era.³³ Unfortunately, people who receive federal and local financial subsidies are closely surveilled by government bureaucracy.³⁴ They are required to regularly check in with their caseworkers (who can also randomly and without warning stop by for inspections of their home, children, or workplace).³⁵ Food insecurity, domestic violence, residential violence, exposure to state and law enforcement violence, joblessness, economic insecurity, and housing insecurity all function to make Black women living in poverty exceptionally vulnerable to the state.³⁶

Their unique vulnerability is a result of living in the United States, where anti-Blackness has been built into social entitlements and public housing policy for the poor.³⁷ However, their lack of protection from oppressive power(s) has made marginalized Black women uniquely informed about the nature of government power, how it functions, and how to fight back. Black feminist Mariame Kaba, whose political work focuses on Black liberation via abolition, made it plain when she said, “It is those closest to the problem who often have the answers.” Simply put, I focused my study on the community best positioned to accurately understand the nature of power, politics, and the political: in this case, Black women living below the poverty line.

An Overview of Chapter 1

Below I lay out the relevant principles of the radical Black feminist political theories which altogether represent the jumping-off point for Redefining the Political³⁸ I then discuss the origins of the project and my introduction to the Altgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes CHA public housing development on the far south side of Chicago. I spend the second part of this introductory chapter laying a path through the frameworks of the key concepts and theories developed in this book. Finally, I end with a brief overview of each chapter to come.

The Black Feminist Principles Organizing This Book

By allowing marginalized Black communities to speak for themselves, scholars, storytellers, and knowledge workers can provide an accurate description of Black sociopolitical life within communities living below the poverty line.³⁹

Black feminism . . . is a framework used in academic writing to offer a more complete analysis of racialized, classed, and gendered structures that shape Black women’s daily experiences. It is also a practical tool of self-empowerment that can be used by individuals and activists. Black feminists are aware of and struggle against the multiple oppressions Black women face and acknowledge how these oppressions are symbolized in stereotypes meant to dominate and oppress Black women.⁴⁰

This project builds on the work of scholars of quotidian politics, Black politics, Black feminist social scientists, and radical Black feminists who created theories and concepts designed to contribute to the study of marginalized Black populations and their politics.⁴¹ The concepts I propose and define in this book (e.g., sociopolitical tools, sociopolitical community, and extrasystemic politics) act as the hinges and screws of the mechanisms within both theoretical frameworks (the BFDC and the PPS). Ultimately, fully appreciating the politics of marginalized Black communities will in many ways require the union of the old and the new: language, theoretical frameworks, and conceptual tools.^* While I introduce theoretical frameworks and concepts within the pages of this book, beyond this project much has already been accomplished, and there is still much work to be done. Simply put, documenting the lived experiences of marginalized Black women is central not only to the work of this project but to the study of politics more broadly.⁴²

Terrion L. Williamson argued that for political or intellectual work to be Black feminist, it must first prioritize the voices of Black women and femmes and seek to root itself within the “politics of the everyday.”⁴³ Meaning, being a Black feminist requires the presence of Black women, girls, and femmes within the everyday of your life.

I define black feminist practice as a radical commitment to the significance of black female life and the humanity of all black peoples, regardless of whether the practitioner identifies with feminism as a formalized ideological commitment or holds some views that might ultimately be deemed antithetical to feminism itself. . . . Thus, what it means to take up “practice” here is to turn our attention to the “politics of the everyday.”⁴⁴

As a result of the Black feminist foundations of Williamson’s and Zenzele Isoke’s projects, they prioritized the collection of Black women’s sociopolitical stories and used those narratives to construct the theory of resistance politics and the politics of the everyday they described in their work.⁴⁵ It is their example and the example of the Black feminist writers and scholars who preceded them that illuminate this book.

What does it mean to have a radical Black feminist theoretical framework as the foundation of Redefining the Political? Political scientist Duchess Harris argues that Black feminism has three key components: “an understanding of intersectionality, a focus on community-centered politics, and an emphasis on the particular experiences of black women.”⁴⁶ I have taken those three components and created a set of subtle variations, which operate as the three radical Black feminist organizing principles of Redefining the Political’s methodology, theory, and analysis:⁴⁷ (1) the creation of a theoretical framework that will allow political practitioners to center Black women’s voices and allow respondents to speak for themselves, (2) a focus on community-centered politics, and (3) a politics wherein marginalized Black women constitute the vanguard center.⁴⁸

Because I chose to use radical Black feminist political theory and Black feminist methodology, when organizing the research design for this project, I focused on one community of Black women for twelve months.⁴⁹ As Black feminist political scientist Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour notes, Black feminist methods prioritize “[relying] primarily on the narratives of participants.”⁵⁰ I interviewed thirty-one Black women who were currently living or used to live in the Altgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes, a public housing development on the South Side of Chicago. Across the street from Altgeld Gardens are several abandoned steel mills. As a result, residents frequently complained about the chemicals emitted from the old mills and the illness they caused within the community. There have been lawsuits and generations of tenant activism attempting to fight back against the environmental racism foundational to Altgeld Gardens’ very existence.⁵¹

When I began this research, historic public housing developments (and their tenant sociopolitical communities) were being demolished across the city of Chicago via the Plan for Transformation housing policy.⁵² Given Altgeld’s long political history and its absence from the demolition list, it made sense to focus my research there.⁵³ The Altgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes public housing development is owned and managed by the CHA. Altgeld accommodates a little more than 1,900 row houses throughout the development (or what respondents called walk-up apartments, versus the high-rise apartments Chicago public housing was well known for).⁵⁴ In addition to conducting the in-depth interviews, I also observed how their community and neighborhood context informed resident extrasystemic politics and the development of political identity.

I center poor Black women in this study because they constitute the vanguard center within radical Black feminist political theory, what Deborah King calls “the hallmark of Black feminist thought.”⁵⁵ Literally, the “vanguard center” are the military troops who are front and center, leading the way into battle. In simpler terms, when Black feminists mention “the vanguard center,” they mean the people and the communities who live on the margins.⁵⁶ Black feminist social scientists argue Black women living below the poverty line often have the most lived experience and knowledge fighting and confronting oppression.⁵⁷ So it follows that the people with the most experience should be members of the leadership within any movements for liberation. In the words of Benita Roth, “the liberation of Black women—who were oppressed by the multiplicative systems of gender, race and class domination—would lead to the liberation of all.”⁵⁸ Generations of radical Black feminists have argued that, to achieve a fully robust sociopolitical freedom, we must first free the people with the most intersecting sites of oppression (intersectionality).⁵⁹ Scholar Benita Roth articulates this idea:

Black feminists constructed an ideology of liberation from racial, sexual, and class oppression, what I call at various points in this chapter a “vanguard center” approach to politics. Since Black women were at the intersection of oppressive structures, they reasoned that their liberation would mean the liberation of all people (Roth 1999a; Roth 1999b). This legacy of intersectional feminist theory—of analyzing and organizing against interlocking oppressions—would come to have a profound impact on feminist theory as a whole.⁶⁰

As Roth noted in the preceding vignette, Black feminist writers and Black feminist social scientists argue that when you liberate the most oppressed, you will liberate everyone.

At the vanguard center, marginalized Black people lead while being central to Black feminist organizing, as well as Black feminist political theory. Their breadth of experience, navigating multiple high-stigma sites of marginalization and liberating themselves whenever possible, means their lived sociopolitical experience is invaluable.⁶¹ Notably, Black women living below the poverty line in the United States have significant political experience, which needs to be reckoned with and taken seriously, intellectually, politically, and creatively.⁶²

Central to a radical Black feminist political theory is the idea that Black feminist intellectual and political work prioritizes the building and maintenance of intentional community with a shared set of political values.⁶³ In order to purposefully build Black feminist sociopolitical community, you must allow Black and brown people, of all backgrounds, to speak for themselves and to actively choose their own politics.⁶⁴ As Zora Neale Hurston modeled in her work, I argue that any radical Black feminist intellectual or political project must allow the Black people within it to speak for themselves, to choose for themselves, and to articulate their own politics for themselves, using whatever language, dialects, slangs, or creoles they desire.⁶⁵ With that in mind, one of the goals of this project is to build a theoretical framework which will (1) allow scholars to consistently recognize and accurately document the sociopolitical tools of marginalized Black communities and (2) provide a scaffolding that will guide political practitioners through centering the voices of respondents in their work.

The prioritization of Black women’s own words and style is the reason in-depth interviewing was a central component of Redefining the Political’s methodology.⁶⁶ It is also why, throughout the book, I avoided breaking respondent transcripts into small pieces. My goal was to allow each respondent enough room and to give the reader enough context for our conversation, to ensure each woman’s point of view was clear. To many an editor’s dismay, I repeatedly refused to list or add up respondent answers so they could be aggregated and displayed via various charts. Each respondent, each Black woman in this study, is an individual person with a distinct set of experiences and point of view. It was critical to me, as a Black feminist political theorist writing within a radical tradition, that their personhood remain clear throughout the book.⁶⁷

The Combahee River Collective were a formation of radical Black feminists who pushed for the sociopolitical liberation of all people. In their 1977 “Combahee River Collective Statement” Combahee noted, “even our Black women’s style of talking/testifying in Black language about what we have experienced has a resonance that is both cultural and political.”⁶⁸ In their statement, Combahee described a unique socio-political-cultural style of communication used within Black women’s public and private communities, meaningfully specific to how we move through the world and how we understand power.⁶⁹ This is not to say only Black folks can study Black folks or only Black women can study Black women. But it is to say a Black feminist theoretical framework demands that political practitioners allow marginalized groups, especially groups we are not a part of, to speak to, identify, describe, and participate in their own unique style of sociopolitical communication. A BFDC of politics and the political must be indifferent to whether political elites and scholars want to recognize the work as political.

Marginalized Black communities throughout the United States (and throughout the world) have developed extrasystemic politics, which as Lester Spence points out frequently go unrecognized within the mainstream public sphere, as well as the mainstream Black counterpublic:⁷⁰

Focusing solely on inter-racial inequality causes us to erase the inequality that exists within black communities . . . and this causes us to gloss over the fact that neoliberal ideas and policies are not simply produced and reproduced by whites to withhold resources from blacks. Black institutions and ideas have themselves been transformed. Black elected officials and civil rights leaders reproduce these ideas, participating in a remobilization project of sorts, one that consistently posits that the reason black people aren’t as successful as their white counterparts is because of a lack of hustle, is because they don’t quite have the work ethic necessary to succeed in the modern moment. A remobilization project that consistently posits that the greatest danger black people face is one posed by other black people, black people who are not only not productive but are in fact counter-productive. This remobilization project posits that there are two types of black people—black people who have the potential to be successful if they take advantage of their human capital, and black people who have no such potential.⁷¹

My hope is that the idea making within these pages will assist in pushing back against political gatekeeping, which can prevent marginalized Black communities who live and move outside of the social circles of the Black wealthy and Black middle class from accessing sociopolitical and financial support from their communities, as well as from foundations, organizations, and governments.⁷² By creating a BFDC for politics and the political, I hope to fully recognize and document the unique sociopolitical capacity, contributions, and political worldviews of marginalized Black communities.

Perhaps with an understanding of the sociopolitical power cultivated within marginalized Black communities, more people will be able to identify, connect with, and ultimately advocate for fights for liberation. I believe that, with a clearer understanding of the power each community can bring to the forefront, it is possible for marginalized Black populations to find comradery in their fights for freedom.⁷³ In that way, Black feminism within the social sciences can be used in service of its original mission, to help Black sociopolitical communities create a firm foundation for the building of sociopolitical power, self-sufficiency, and interdependence.⁷⁴

Origins of the Project

In April 2011 I conducted a two-month pilot study in the Altgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes, a public housing development on the far south side of Chicago, to assess if my proposed research was viable. The project went on to become a yearlong ethnography. Ultimately, my research at Altgeld Gardens became much larger than my dissertation could hold. Thirteen years later, I have finally finished creating a container (the book you are holding in your hands) capable of holding some, if not all, of the stories I listened to and learned from the women of Altgeld Gardens.

To build relationships with tenants living in Altgeld Gardens, I began by reaching out to residents who were local activists throughout the development. I contacted researchers and journalists from around Chicago who had previously published writing about the Altgeld Gardens development.⁷⁵ Journalists recommended I contact two women: Khadijah James, the Local Advisory Council (LAC) president of Altgeld Gardens, and Maxine “Max” Shaw, the president of a local community organization, Environmental Justice Organization (EJO).

Sociopolitical Education as the Key to Political Imagination

It was Ms. Shaw who introduced me to Regine Hunter. Both Regine and Ms. Shaw grew up in Altgeld Gardens. When I interviewed Regine in 2011, she had been living in Altgeld Gardens for forty-one years. When she was eight years old, she moved there with her mom and dad during the Great Migration.^*76 Because of their close community ties, Regine received a sociopolitical education from her community throughout the development.

A: What kind of activities do you participate in? Are you involved in any groups, volunteer work, or organizations?

R: No, most of the things I get involved with is like sometimes with Max Shaw, in her organization, you know. You know, they have meetings or things like that or flyers or things to get the word out to people and stuff like that. So I get involved with her like that. I try to do as much as I can. It’s hard right now because of my illnesses that I have, that I have a few things wrong with me. So that kind of slowed me down. That slows me down some, but I still be trying to push myself, you know. And like I said, with the LAC, I was trying to stay involved with that. But I’m trying to get back into that. I’m just trying to take care of myself right now, because I always was involved in the community in some kind of way.

A: How did you get involved? Why?

R: From growing up out here and working out here, and then we get flyers on different things and asking did people want to volunteer, and then I would volunteer, you know, because it’s my neighborhood, to try to keep it together. Try to make it safe and try to have something for these children to do. So I try to still put my finger out there, get on the phone, do as much as I can do. And then spread the word so the kids have something to do so they don’t just be bored so they get into trouble being bored. It’s nothing for them to do, so we try to, I try to put the word out there, send them up there, take them over there, you know. Yeah.

A: Do you find that more women or more men participate in the kind of activities you participate in? Why? Do you think more women are participating in these kinds of activities in society more generally?

R: Well, they middle age, like me. You might have some that are under my age group, you know. And that’s who participates. We still, as older ones, the oldest ones is more or less out here. We try to help the younger ones to help get something done out here, so these kids can have something to do. So you’ll have people come, we going to do this, or you going to get involved . . . it’s for the kids, so I try to get involved because it’s the kids, you know.

A: So you feel like you’re able to recruit a lot of different people to come and participate?

R: Yeah. ’Cuz it was somebody always recruiting us when we was kids. We always had an adult over us, and that’s how we grew up, with taking us to different developments, playing softball, and stuff like that. We always had someone over us, so we try to put it back in our community, you know.

A: Do you vote or participate in any political activities?

R: I vote. But I haven’t been participating. Like I say, with my illnesses I can’t really get around as much as I used to.

A: Why? Do you think this [voting] makes a difference?

R: You have a right to vote, you know. Equal opportunity, you know. I mean schooling, it’s a whole lot. Respect, everything, you know. This is America, so I feel like freedom. We have a right to vote. Everybody do.

A: Do you have those skills and knowledge to participate [in politics]?

R: No. No. They would kill me! [Laughs.] No. No, it’s a whole lot. I wouldn’t even want to go that route.

A: But what about the political work you do on the development? You don’t see that as political?

R: It is, but it’s not as deep. See, it’s not as deep. Now, I can understand, I can relate to that more better than being down there in them offices with them people. They use them big words that I don’t understand, and I’d be sitting up there dumbfounded, like wait a minute, what did he say, ’cuz all that I don’t understand.

A: How do you define politics? When I say the word “politics,” what do you think of?

R: Far as with the government and stuff, the world, what’s going on, like presidents and what’s going on in the world. That’s politics, dealing with them . . . government.

This conversation with Regine followed a consistent pattern I heard repeatedly across multiple interviews. Black women who were (objectively speaking) active in their communities volunteered, registered people to vote, and even served as poll workers. Yet when I asked the women I interviewed, “Do you consider yourself capable of participating in politics?” many of them said no. Regine said, “No. No. They would kill me! [Laughs.] No. No, it’s a whole lot. I wouldn’t even want to go that route.” I remember this interview with acute clarity because I was so surprised by her answer.

Regine Hunter was a woman who ran for block captain (an elected position), who spoke up and pushed back against city elected politicians regularly, who even led a protest outside the local grocery as part of a collaboration with another local activist group, Occupy the Hood.^*77 But the follow-up question I asked almost every respondent became critically important; “When I say the word ‘politics,’ what do you think I mean?” Once I analyzed all the data, I concluded that the word “politics” was consistently generating a different set of meanings among people living in Altgeld and throughout the city (as compared to the formalized definitions of “politics” and the “political” academics learn within the university context).⁷⁸ Early on, my research began to corroborate the findings of scholars who have uncovered cultural incomparability between more traditional political science survey questions and nonwhite, non-U.S.-born, and non-middle-class populations.⁷⁹

As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Black feminist social scientists, race and politics scholars, and political methodologists have found that this political language standard originates from white, patriarchal, heteronormative, and Western thought.⁸⁰ Political language developed within the U.S. academy and the broader U.S. culture has established political meaning and political power from its sheer pervasiveness throughout the public sphere. However, despite that power, words like “citizenship,” “cynicism,” and “efficacy” often fail to fully reflect the everyday sociopolitical lives of many marginalized Black communities living in the United States.⁸¹ Some of this language confusion is a function of cultural incomparability.^†82 Quite simply, diverse cultures understand, describe, and relate to their sociopolitical identities from diverse points of view, and as a result, the language marginalized communities use to describe their politics and political worldview can be different and distinct.⁸³

A Structural Lack of Access to Civics Education and the Structural Vulnerability of Poor Black Women

Quite a bit of the political language confusion however, is due to a structural lack of access to civics education within the United States.^*84 As Ray Acheson makes clear in Abolishing State Violence, people who are educated within the United States are frequently taught a limited sociopolitical toolkit.⁸⁵ In 2023, many students in U.S. public schools lacked a comprehensive civics education.⁸⁶ As of 2023, the state of Massachusetts is the only state requiring every student to complete a full year of civics instruction.⁸⁷ Access to civics education in the United States is inequitably distributed along the intersections of race, class, and ethnicity.⁸⁸ Students with access to civics classes are often limited to discussions of voting, protesting, letter writing, and making financial donations as legitimate and effective means of influencing politics.⁸⁹ Overall, as Acheson notes, the socialization around what counts as a “legitimate” political behavior is strong within the United States:

We are told and taught that this is the way the world is and there is no way to change it. Tweak it, maybe, but change it—not a chance. There’s an age-old saying that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism—well, that is also true for most when it comes to prisons, police, borders, nuclear bombs, or war. . . . This framing of the inevitability of it all, the disorientations, and the deceptions necessary to lull us into acceptance of the oppression of the majority. . . . From offshore detention . . . to erasing indigeneity and Native realities from U.S. history and current life. . . . What we can’t see, we won’t object to; what we don’t know, we can’t fight. “Certain images do not appear in the media,” explains philosopher Judith Butler, “certain names of the dead are not utterable, certain losses are not avowed as losses, and violence is derealized and diffused”⁹⁰

In the United States, political education has a narrow scope and is accessible to a limited few.⁹¹ As one example, Acheson notes that other countries in the Western world, such as New Zealand, Australia, or even Canada, provide some relatively superficial instruction within their public schools about the destruction of Indigenous North American peoples at the hands of European colonialists.⁹² But in the United States, the bloody and brutal genocide of Indigenous populations has been structurally excluded from the history books taught in U.S. public schools, as well as from the discipline of political science.⁹³ Students at public institutions are frequently denied the opportunity to learn about Black American history makers, slave revolts, the many attempts by Black enslaved people in the United States to escape bondage, Indigenous genocide, or Indigenous fights for sovereignty.⁹⁴

In short, people who live in the United States are rarely taught the tools to analyze what they are told about politics, power, culture, and sociopolitical change.⁹⁵ This is even truer for those who are Black, poor, and living in a community with low access to resources.⁹⁶ Marginalized Black communities are not taught the sociopolitical tools to imagine alternative political possibilities. As Lester Spence points out, housing segregation ensures that “Blacks are concentrated in poor neighborhoods, cities, and educational systems”; it makes sense that they might reject politics and the political altogether.⁹⁷ In doing so, they give-up on imagining an alternative world of their own making. Without political imagination, individuals and communities are unlikely to develop an active, let alone visible, political life.

“Reformism limits the horizon of political possibility to what is seen as achievable within the limits of existing institutional structures,” writes Dylan Rodríguez, whether in relation to electoral politics, racial capitalism, heteronormativity, the nation-state, or whatever. Not only does it limit our imaginations, reformism “defers, avoids, and even criminalizes peoples’ efforts to catalyze fundamental change to an existing order.” It makes it more difficult to achieve the real transformations we need in our societies—both because the act of reform legitimizes the overall system, but also because it takes away energy, resources, and people power from more meaningful changes.⁹⁸

When framed in such a clear and precise way, the many limitations placed on the capacity of CHA residents to develop and enact radical sociopolitical changes become abjectly clear. Spence argues the neoliberal turn created an environment where Black urban neighborhoods are increasingly stripped of their right to public aid and where meaningful aid is being replaced with more lectures about “personal responsibility.”⁹⁹ Ruthie Wilson Gilmore further contextualizes neoliberalism by arguing that organized abandonment is replacing the basic services promised by the social safety net in the United States.¹⁰⁰ The public schools serving Altgeld Gardens are regularly under probation by the Chicago Public Schools for poor performance.¹⁰¹ In 2010–2011 Altgeld had a 200 percent higher violence rate than the rest of the city.¹⁰² To add insult to injury, as journalist Debra Williams reported, Altgeld Gardens is “flanked on three sides by sanitary and hazardous waste landfills, manufacturing plants and shuttered steel mills, the area is now distinguished by poor air quality, with both adults and children suffering from above-average rates of respiratory ailments.”¹⁰³ When the system itself has never met the obligations it committed to in the development of public housing and welfare policy, how can residents take morality and respectability politics lecturing seriously?

As a singular example, Altgeld Gardens is a testament to just how much marginalized Black women living below the poverty line are expected to take on.¹⁰⁴ They were faced with unconscionable environmental racism, which left many children, adults, and elders with significant health issues, many respiratory in nature.¹⁰⁵ There was limited public transportation, and Altgeld tenants without a car were completely reliant on one bus that came in and out of the development.¹⁰⁶ They lived in a food desert, with little access to fresh groceries, let alone regular household goods. Altgeld Gardens public schools were in a constant state of neglect, and there were rarely any opportunities to earn a living wage.¹⁰⁷ It is no wonder these conditions, when taken altogether, seemingly result in marginalized Black communities who believe that the work of their local sociopolitical communities lacks political power or political meaning.

However, because of high tenant vulnerability to the bureaucratic policy changes via law enforcement and housing bureaucrats, it was urgent for residents at Altgeld Gardens to develop a sociopolitical curriculum for one another, as well as fast and effective neighborhood communication networks.¹⁰⁸ Incredibly, these conditions did not crush the sociopolitical spirit of every woman I interviewed. Instead, many developed unique sociopolitical tools and cocreated their own formulations of political identity to address their particular needs. Ironically, because they bore multiple intersecting sites of high-stigma marginalization, it seemed as though Black CHA residents were in many ways more politically adept than their wealthy white counterparts at navigating government bureaucracies.¹⁰⁹

If the organizing work in your community is routinely glossed over as having no meaningful political power (by your community, by the academy, by philanthropic funders, or by the state), you will either stop doing it or continue but consider yourself apolitical.¹¹⁰ The latter was something I saw repeatedly among respondents. Women would be involved in parent-teacher associations, church councils, flyer campaigns for local politicians, and other community-based work, but when I asked them if they considered themselves capable of participating in politics, some would consistently say no. Respondents would regularly use their standing in the community to advocate for themselves and others in front of various CHA and city power brokers. Yet they did not see themselves as political practitioners because their education on what counts as politics was too narrow. Civics education in the United States, alongside ongoing reinforcement via media, the academy, and other political power brokers (better known as the mainstream public sphere), routinely teaches U.S. citizens that the only legitimate forms of political engagement are voting and occasionally peaceful nonviolent protest.¹¹¹ As a result, some respondents believed that their community engagement and knowledge did not merit what they perceived as the formal designation of “political.”

The nontraditional function of Black sociopolitical tools and the extrasystemic politics of many marginalized groups are in no small part a direct result of oppressive structures and institutions built within the United States to create obstacles for Black communities who want to participate in any public, let alone explicitly political, sphere.¹¹² Thus, Black people throughout the diaspora, as well as Indigenous and Latinx communities throughout the United States, have had to adopt at least a few extrasystemic sociopolitical tools to access the power needed to shift and change their communities in the way they imagine and desire.¹¹³ As political scientist Michael Hanchard reminds us, Black people globally have at times had to use sociocultural, religious, and home-based nontraditional sociopolitical tools (extrasystemic politics) to enter broader political conversations about which communities get what.¹¹⁴

Conceptual Frameworks Created via Black Feminist Political Theory

Rather than trying to create one-size-fits-all theoretical frameworks in the name of “objectivity,” political practitioners can focus on developing more flexible and sophisticated theoretical frameworks that can be remixed in several ways to ensure maximum cultural and contextual applicability.¹¹⁵ In Redefining the Political, I have developed two such theories, the political possible-self (PPS), a holistic framework designed to help political practitioners recognize and place value in the language everyday people use to describe their politics and political identities. The second theoretical framework is the Black feminist definitional criterion of politics and the political (BFDC), designed to facilitate the recognition of traditional, extrasystemic, and subversive sociopolitical tools.

It is unlikely that both frameworks will apply to everyone; no political concept or theoretical framework can (or should) capture 100 percent of the total range of human sociopolitical expression.¹¹⁶ However, the PPS, as well as the BFDC of politics and the political, take politics research an important step closer to a broader understanding of U.S. politics and political engagement. I would like to create an opportunity for political practitioners to systematically ask themselves if their political language choices represent the political language(s) used by the communities they are researching, polling, embedded in, or doing outreach to.

The goal of the BFDC of politics and the political is to help students of politics recognize the search for liberation in all its many forms. After all, at its core, politics is a subjectively creative enterprise.¹¹⁷ Most importantly, when political practitioners can recognize the political realities or even possibilities in students, community members, neighbors, children, friends, respondents, researchers, and others, the practitioner can ask questions that encourage people to describe their politics and political empowerment in their own words, from their unique socio-cultural-political point of view.

Political Practitioners

I use the term “political practitioner” to describe anyone engaged in any form of politics or anyone who uses sociopolitical tools. In alignment with Black feminist methodology, the research within Redefining the Political is organized around the necessity of allowing respondents to speak for themselves.^* Interestingly, many respondents did not self-define as scholars, activists, politicians, or organizers. Even respondents who ran for office occasionally described themselves as nonpolitical. These included respondents who ran for elected office within the Altgeld Gardens development and respondents who ran for citywide elected resident positions on CHA committees charged with serving all the CHA housing developments. Many respondents who volunteered for electoral campaigns (mayor, senator, or alderman) did not consider themselves “political,” and they did not identify as electoral organizers. Even respondents who participated in the Occupy movement, ran their own nonprofits, or ran Altgeld cleanup campaigns did not consistently consider themselves “political.” More directly, some respondents did not culturally identify with my word choice. They reported “white people” immediately coming to mind when I asked them what they thought of when I said the word “politics.” On a more complicated level, many respondents associated “politics,” “political work,” “activism,” and similar language with dishonesty, lying, and a disdain for poor Black people.

However, Altgeld Gardens residents and CHA street-level bureaucrats were engaged in politics and political work. But they also had differing ideas about how to categorize, recognize, or describe their work to people outside of their community. As a result, I ultimately settled on “political practitioner” as a catch-all term for a variety of people doing various kinds of socio-political-cultural work.^* If a person engages in politics or political work, as understood via the BFDC of politics and the political, then I refer to them as a political practitioner. I also use the term “political practitioners” for anyone engaged in the work of developing political ideology (e.g., political theorists). Political practitioners include, but are not limited to, political scholars, pollsters, data scientists, activists, organizers, nonprofit organizations, executive directors, foundations, program officers, institutional review board directors, get-out-the-vote campaigners, political educators, protestors, rioters, journalists, writers, artists, and anyone else engaged in sociopolitical work of any kind.

Extrasystemic Politics

“Extrasystemic politics” describes methods of political engagement that function outside of traditional government institutions, bureaucracies, and electoral or even protest politics in the United States.¹¹⁸ In other words, “extrasystemic politics” describes sociopolitical power developed outside of mainstream public spheres. The phrase is literal; in simpler language it can be broken down to “extra,” “in addition to,” or “outside of” systems, or “the system.” In this case, it is a form of politics operating outside of the system for “correct” or “traditional,” “respectable” politics, as defined by U.S.-based systems of power.¹¹⁹

At the beginning of this chapter, I initially used the phrase “nontraditional politics” to get at this idea for accessibilities sake. Via the work of scholars who developed conceptualizations of quotidian politics and nontraditional politics, I developed the conceptual framework for extrasystemic politics.¹²⁰ The concept of extrasystemic politics refers to sociopolitical tools used outside of what are considered formal government institutions, organizations, elections, lobbyists, or politicians.^*121 In short, it can be any politics or sociopolitical tools that function outside of traditional political structures. Extrasystemic politics can also include activities like riots, quilting, breakfast programs for people without housing, or a potluck in the home of a community member.¹²² Philosopher Sally Scholz contends that if oppressed people are to engage in sociopolitical resistance, someone must teach them how.¹²³ Black women who live in poverty in the United States regularly engage in sociopolitical resistance by educating one another about extrasystemic politics.¹²⁴

Political theorists interested in quotidian politics have done important work recognizing the extrasystemic politics of marginalized Black communities living in poverty. As political scientist Michael Hanchard noted, his “explication of quotidian politics serves as a corrective to political and cultural analysis that reduces all politics to the state or macroeconomic factors.”¹²⁵ In other words, politics is about more than direct engagement with government and government institutions. Hanchard’s quotidian definition of the political is central to the extrasystemic definition of politics I propose. In short, Hanchard argued that politics is “the art of the possible, for opportunities and the lack of opportunities in a given situation or dynamic.”¹²⁶ Simply, politics is about the push to change what is into something else. It is also important to note what Hanchard distinguished as nonpolitical. In short, “non-political acts are behaviors that are not generative of political community.”¹²⁷ This is why drive-by shootings and gunplay within neighborhoods are not political. While they may be moments of rebellion or deviance in the strictest sense, in reality, this particular sort of violence causes a “breakdown of political community not its affirmation or creation.”¹²⁸

James C. Scott, Michael Hanchard, and Robin D. G. Kelley (1994) emphasized that struggles over identity, dignity and fun, also constitute formations of political communities that not only matter but also have influence and power within broader political conversations.¹²⁹ Ultimately, I am not dismissive of traditional formulations of politics, but I am aiming toward the continuation of the work of the aforementioned scholars in the expansion of what we understand as politics. It is critical that we consider politics, at least in part, as the negotiation of power in what is currently understood as public and private space. Michele Berger argued that the political work of Black women to “create and re-create a sense of community” resulted in “labor [that] overlaps and often resists easy public or private distinctions.”¹³⁰ Black feminist scholars have asserted, time and time again, that a comprehensive definition of politics must push back on the desire of sociopolitical elites to draw firm lines separating the public and private spheres. Instead, they have argued that much of Black women’s political work at the very least begins in their homes or in other spaces often designated as private (e.g., hair salons, churches, or drug treatment centers).

Extrasystemic politics are a politics defined by what is culturally considered deviant, subversive, or quotidian.¹³¹ Other sociopolitical tools of extrasystemic politics include but are not limited to protesting oppressive institutions (or organizations) within communities, organizing art shows and community meals, organizing neighborhood cleanups, planting thorny roses around a walk-up public housing building, and holding educational meetings to increase the political confidence of public housing tenants by providing instruction on how to efficiently navigate institutional bureaucracies.¹³² Extrasystemic politics can also manifest within traditional politics when political practitioners approach activities like voting or attending a city council meeting in subversive ways.¹³³ Ultimately, to engage in an extrasystemic political strategy, you need sociopolitical tools to bring that strategy into existence.

Sociopolitical Tools

I use the term “sociopolitical tools,” rather than “political engagement,” because the concept of sociopolitical tools has more breadth and flexibility. “Sociopolitical tools” can include traditional political engagement behaviors like voting, but significantly, it can also include political behaviors, political dynamics, political ideologies, or political strategies that historically have been excluded by traditional definitions of “politics” and “the political.”¹³⁴ In short, sociopolitical tools can include any method or strategy meant to subvert or push back against power structures, institutions, bureaucrats, or representatives, acting as an oppressive force in the life of an individual or the lives of a sociopolitical community.¹³⁵ For example, imagine that a political group decided they wanted to cocreate political power via a grassroots, extrasystemic, arts-based campaign. Various activist-artists could use poetry, painting, or writing as their sociopolitical tool of choice.

As I will explain later in the chapter, the capacity for political imagination is needed within all political practitioners, including scholars of politics. Without it, the study of politics can become too tightly wound up around ultranarrow definitions of power: who is powerful, what makes up politics, and what are “legitimate” forms of political engagement or political strategies. The concept of sociopolitical tools uses language to break the political practitioner out of tried-and-true ideas about what constitutes “real” political engagement. The concept of sociopolitical tools encourages the consideration of a potentially vast number of behaviors that could count as tools in our extrasystemic kits. When I spoke with the respondents who participated in this research project, most, if not all, of them learned their sociopolitical tools from other Black women. From their neighbors, their mothers, friends, or play aunties, the social networks within the Altgeld local sociopolitical communities were incredibly effective at informal information dissemination.

Sociopolitical Community

I was regularly blown away by the effectiveness and efficiency of the neighborhood communication networks within the Altgeld sociopolitical community. However, residents did not feel that it was anything special. In some ways, the inability of respondents to see their work as political reflects their inability to see their relational work as meaningful, let alone powerful. As I will flesh out more thoroughly later in the book, in the simplest sense, power is the ability to compel others to act.^* In the same vein, the more power held by members within a sociopolitical community, the greater the community’s capacity to compel other groups to act.¹³⁶ Black women who could not recognize power within their daily lives were less likely to recognize themselves as members within a greater sociopolitical community. While a full understanding of the politics of recognition is critically important for Black communities in the United States who want to successfully fight against systems of power, it is important to remember that recognition is only one step on a broader staircase of the politics within those communities.¹³⁷ The sociopolitical community is the container marginalized Black communities in the United States use to develop extrasystemic power and subversive sociopolitical tools.¹³⁸ Notably, some sociopolitical tools are only passed down via Black oral traditions within local Black sociopolitical communities.¹³⁹

The framework of sociopolitical community builds upon a diverse set of scholarship that interrogates political community as a sociopolitical concept.¹⁴⁰ Sociopolitical tools are birthed in the home and developed within the spatial context of residential neighborhoods.¹⁴¹ A person’s interpersonal relationships in their home and neighborhood spatial qualities like basic building maintenance (e.g., heat, access to water and electricity, and clean public throughways), state violence, physical health, poverty, domestic abuse, environmental racism, residential violence, and access to public space all play a role in whether an individual learns and develops a firm and clear politics.¹⁴² This matters not only because the materiality of residential spaces (e.g., the CHA’s neglect of the public housing infrastructure and the surrounding ecological space) gives birth to a specific set of sociopolitical tools among residents but also because residential spaces circumscribe the behavioral boundaries of members within the sociopolitical community.¹⁴³

My data showed that the logics of politics are deeply tied to the relational bonds within sociopolitical communities, as other feminist and Black feminist scholars have shown before.¹⁴⁴ A sense of belonging is critical to understanding an individual’s political identity.¹⁴⁵ To what extent does the individual feel they belong to their neighborhood? To their city? And to their nation? Because of the stigma and the lack of access tied to being a Black public housing resident, many respondents in the CHA understood their sense of belonging within the space of a couple of neighborhood blocks.¹⁴⁶ As public housing scholars have shown, the activism in public housing is often geographically limited because of residential violence, gang activity, limited time and resources, and state monitoring.¹⁴⁷

Structures, institutions, spatial context, social norms, and culture collectively create the politics of the people living in a given sociopolitical community.¹⁴⁸ The more restrictions citizens have on their ability or capacity to move from one place to another, the more unique and specific their sociopolitical community (and its sociopolitical tools) will be.¹⁴⁹ Chantal Mouffe was correct when she argued that the concept of the “free individual” (as understood in the contemporary Western world) is only possible within the United States because of the specificity of U.S. sociopolitical history.¹⁵⁰ Similarly, nation-states and the populations who live within them end up developing their own unique understandings of justice, as well as sociopolitical community. Hanchard defines political community, in part, as follows:

The creation of political community necessarily entails more than recognizing a problem or phenomena, such as racism. It encompasses the combination of ideas, peoples, and practices mobilized in response to a set of circumstances that involves other political communities, peoples, and institution.¹⁵¹

Building on Hanchard’s ideas about political community, I use the concept of “sociopolitical community” to describe a voluntary grouping of people who profess a sense of sociopolitical loyalty to one another. Specifically, sociopolitical communities are made up of people who intentionally, conspicuously, consistently, and publicly attest to their mutual linked-fate.¹⁵² In the cases I analyze within this book, the shared identity that linked the respondents’ fates was the residential public housing development they lived in, Altgeld’s neighborhood, and the surrounding community, as well as their shared race and class identities. In short, membership within a sociopolitical community requires members to understand their social identity, neighborhood, workplace, or circumstances (for example) as more than a descriptive identifier.¹⁵³ A sociopolitical community understands a shared reality as a shared political destiny.¹⁵⁴

Central to the interventions of Black feminisms within the social sciences is an understanding that politics is rooted in local community.¹⁵⁵ It is through interpersonal relationships, specifically those relationships rooted within larger communities (residential communities, communities made up of political party members, digital communities, etc.), that Black women navigate the social and political impact of marginalization(s) throughout their lives.¹⁵⁶ For some Black women living in poverty within the United States, their sociopolitical isolation created an environment where few places within the public sphere welcome and encourage their social, cultural, or political contributions.¹⁵⁷ As a result, scholars of public housing politics, as well as Black feminist social science scholars, have noted that community building, home building, being in home-adjacent spaces, and belonging are all central to the politics of many Black women within the United States.¹⁵⁸ Black feminist political theory provides a framework through which we can better understand how politics and sociopolitical tools come together in the lives of Black sociopolitical communities within the United States.¹⁵⁹

Mainstream feminists and Black feminist scholars have argued that residential spaces shape political behavior and identity.¹⁶⁰ Research has also shown that friendship is an important site of political identity formation.¹⁶¹ Similarly, social networks shape political beliefs and engagement.¹⁶² However, consider the following: if individuals are approved to live in public housing, they can be placed anywhere in Chicago upon submission of their application to the local housing authority. Given trends in Chicago public housing policy over the last twenty years (e.g., mass demolitions of public housing high-rises), many CHA residents are being placed in developments that isolate them from friends, family, and job opportunities.¹⁶³ As a result of the CHA’s Plan for Transformation, the sociopolitical communities of those receiving public assistance are being tremendously—and forcefully—transformed.¹⁶⁴ A process that continues to this day.

Theoretical Framework: Black Feminist Definitional Criterion of Politics and the Political

The pervasive forces of state and residential violence in the lives of Black women living below the poverty line requires close attention to the means through which marginalized Black populations create political power.^* It is critical to consider politics as the negotiation of power within what is frequently divided into public space and private space. Political scientist Michele Berger argues that the political work of Black women to “create and re-create a sense of community” often results in “labor [which] overlaps and often resists easy public or private distinctions.”¹⁶⁵ Black feminist scholars like historian Rhonda Y. Williams have asserted that a comprehensive reframing of politics and the political pushes back on the desire of sociopolitical elites to draw firm lines separating public and private spheres:

Although poor people and black women had to contend with onerous and intrusive regulations as public assistance recipients, numerous low-income black women did receive a political education through their engagement with the welfare system. The federal government’s subsidy of low-rent housing implied a right to decent living conditions for U.S. citizens. From the beginning, this implied right highlighted poor people’s low citizenship status and politicized groups of tenants. For poor women, in particular, subsidized housing created a sense that the previously private sphere of home had become public and political space.¹⁶⁶

Black feminists have found that much of Black women’s political work begins in the home, home-adjacent spaces, or other spaces typically designated as private (like hair salons, churches, or drug treatment centers).¹⁶⁷ Therefore, it is critical that a definitional criterion of politics and the political be broad enough to capture extrasystemic politics and sociopolitical tools, even when they do not fit neatly into categories of “public” versus “private.”¹⁶⁸ To create a set of conceptual categories capable of capturing the breadth of politics and the political described here, we must understand politics and the political as expressions of the individuals’ and the community’s relationship to power. After all, sociopolitical possibilities are only created when power, of one sort or another, directs effort and resources toward doing so.

Iris Marion Young pointed out that power, at its root, is relational. Specifically, she said, “Power consists in a relationship between the exerciser and others through which he or she communicates intentions and meets with their acquiescence.”¹⁶⁹ In short, for Young, power is the ability to get others to meet your demands. She said, “Politics must be conceived as a relationship of strangers who do not understand one another in a subjective and immediate sense, relating across time and distance.”¹⁷⁰ Young was particularly focused on the aspect of politics that requires one group to have the power to extract their demands from another group. Similarly, Michael Hanchard focused his definition of quotidian politics on the art of the possible; he understands politics as the capacity to create “opportunities” or to limit “opportunities, in a situation or a dynamic.”¹⁷¹ I argue that the political starts one step before Hanchard’s window of opportunity is opened or closed. The work of the political begins when the work to imagine [or limit] the possibilities within the window of opportunity is initiated. The political includes the work to imagine what is possible or what can possibly be limited. I argue that a BFDC of the political understands the political as the work of imagining, and then creating (or limiting) possibilities, within or around the substantive reality of the world.

As I mentioned early on in the chapter, my framing of the political is flexible enough to capture demands for material resources, as well as action. Besides incorporating what is understood as traditional political engagement, the definitional criterion for the political must be capable of capturing what Rhonda Williams names as “activism at the point of consumption—that is, around housing, food, clothing, and daily life in community spaces.”¹⁷² But this BFDC of the political must also be able to hold what Berger terms “purposive action”:

One definition of political activity for our purposes is purposive action, which helps to create and define a self or group identity, which then allows for individuals and groups to redress perceived injustices and grievances. This definition helps to open up new spaces between the public and private realms, where many of the activities of the women fall. Thus, the definitions of community work . . . combine with the idea of informal politics.¹⁷³

In attempting to expand how the political is understood more broadly, it is important not to fall into the trap of limiting struggles with power, an inevitable aspect of the political, to distributive politics. Besides purposive action and activism at the point of consumption, a politics of recognition is central to understanding what orients Black women’s relationship to the political, particularly in the U.S. context: the demand to be recognized as a full citizen, or even person, within the public and private spheres, who has all the rights every other citizen has.¹⁷⁴ My focus on substantive politics allows for the spectrum of the political to be captured conceptually.

Like Young, I understand the political as the effort to achieve compliance from a specified target via negotiation, force, persuasion, education, traditional politics, or extrasystemic behaviors and actions.¹⁷⁵ The political is the work of imagining and ultimately creating (or limiting) possibilities, in the service of a goal—for example, working with nongovernmental organizations to bring global attention to issues of perceived public injustice as part of the work of cognitive liberation.¹⁷⁶ This framing of the political provides a breadth and flexibility allowing political practitioners to capture institutional, bureaucratic, cultural, and community-based politics. Young argues that politics does, can, and should concern all aspect of sociocultural life.

Politics in this sense concerns all aspects of institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings where they are potentially subject to collective evaluation and decision making. When people say a rule or practice or cultural meaning is wrong and should be changed, they are usually making a claim about social justice. This is a wider understanding of the meaning of politics than that common among most philosophers and policymakers, who identify politics as the activities of government or formal interest group organizations.¹⁷⁷

But amid the enlarging of the conceptual understanding of extrasystemic politics and sociopolitical tools, requires clear boundaries and criteria around what is political and what is nonpolitical are of the utmost importance.

Cathy J. Cohen argues that analytic precision is needed when considering the dividing line between the political and nonpolitical.¹⁷⁸ Without precision, at best I risk creating a set of interesting intellectual ideas for scholars to debate. At worst, I create a messy, repetitive set of criteria lacking the intellectual and sociopolitical weight needed to meaningfully add to a Black feminist conception of the Black sociopolitical world. What I do not want is to end up with a set of terms so convoluted that everything and anything is political.

While an act of defiance can be misinterpreted as having political intent and a direct challenge to the distribution of power and may result in the actual redistribution of power, I would contend that the initial act was not one of resistance. Thus, understanding the distinction between deviance, defiant acts, and acts of resistance lies in recognizing the perspective or intent of the individual. It is my emphasis on understanding intent as it relates to the agency of marginal individuals where I believe I part ways with Kelley and Scott.¹⁷⁹

Cohen is right in arguing that there are important differences to be found in the distinctions between “deviance, defiance, and resistance.” However, I disagree with her emphasis on intent as the core mechanism through which political practitioners differentiate between behaviors intended to increase individual agency, versus those meant to increase political resistance. Cohen codes “intent [as] marking politicized resistance.”¹⁸⁰ While I understand why some argue that political intent is required to make acts political, intent is a misnomer.

Scholars do not use intent as a barometer for coding traditional political activities are coded as political or not; there is simply an assumption that activities like voting are political for everyone. We code the intent of our neighbors when they go out to vote as political, instead of presuming that their intent is social (for example, maybe they want to spend time with their neighbors or signal social sophistication to their coworkers). Similarly, individuals can collectively engage in several extrasystemic sociopolitical tools effectively considered political, regardless of what the participants’ intent might have been. The most obvious example of this is rioting. While the individuals who are participating in a riot might report their behavior to be about expressing anger, many argue that rioting has important sociopolitical implications across the United States.¹⁸¹

If I assess rioting using the Black feminist criteria of the political (the work of imagining and then creating [or limiting] possibilities within or around the substantive reality of the world around you), rioting comfortably meets those requirements. Duchess Harris reminds us that “a focus on community-centered politics” is central to Black feminist theoretical frameworks.¹⁸² A BFDC of politics and the political does not allow for a politics centrally concerned with meeting the needs of a singular person. A secondary requirement is critical to the creation of such a criterion: the acts, ideas, or set of behaviors named as “politics” are rooted in the effort of two or more people attempting to use power to create (or limit) possibilities via acts or behaviors in service of a sociopolitical goal.

Returning to the example of the riot, there is no such thing as a one-person riot and there is no such thing as a riot without power. Rioters typically target economic centers, because under capitalism, businesses and institutions are where power rests in the United States.¹⁸³ Ultimately, the theoretical requirements for a Black feminist framework of politics and the political facilitate enough precision to allow for an effective assessment of which political behaviors legitimately constitute politics and the political, while not depending on an understanding of the state of mind of the people engaged in the behaviors in question. Particularly, given intent is not a bar set for assessing whether traditional political behaviors are “political.”

I ground my BFDC of “politics” and the “political” in the following requirements: First, the acts, ideas, or set of behaviors named as “politics” are rooted in the effort of two or more people attempting to use power to create (or limit) possibilities via acts or behaviors in service of a sociopolitical goal. Specifically, this is the set of behaviors people engage in together to have possibilities created (or limited) by (or for) their targets. Second, the persons, groups, or tools named as “political” are engaging in work to achieve (or limit) substantive possibilities (via power) within or for their targets.¹⁸⁴ In short, a BFDC of politics and the political understands these concepts as centered on imagining, achieving, creating, or limiting possibilities (be they distributive, purposive, sociocultural, policy related, symbolic, consumption based, or recognition based) and engaging in various forms of relational power dynamics. Using this criterion, “politics” is not about a singular individual, and the “political” requires power. “Politics” requires the effort of multiple people, given that politics is “fundamentally relational” and cannot be accomplished in isolation.

As I’ve argued throughout this chapter, Black feminist social scientist understandings of politics and the political are centered within the community and on behalf of the community.¹⁸⁵ Another useful example of this point is politically oriented parenting. Activist mothering can be an important form of politics.¹⁸⁶ If activist mothering is done by one person in an isolated silo, it should be understood as deviance and not necessarily politics.¹⁸⁷ But, when a group of mothers engages in the work of activist mothering collectively, then their activist mothering becomes the work of politics, and the mothers engaged in that resistance work (as well as the mothering itself) become political.

It is important to remember that whether the mothers intended to act within a group context is not the central mechanism. It is also not important whether the mothers intended to become political. Instead, I argue, it is shifted behavior, en masse, that matters most. Thus, meeting the principal requirement of the political—the work of imagining and then creating (or limiting) possibilities within or around the substantive reality of the world around you. In this example, a group of mothers became political practitioners via their resistance work. Activist mothering, accomplished by a collective of people with shared political values, become an important form of politics within their local sociopolitical community. Ultimately, these political practitioners transform their parenting (an attempt to raise children mindful of principles of liberation and a just society) into an important sociopolitical tool.

Theoretical Framework: Political Possible-Self

The theoretical frameworks developed in Redefining the Political have two primary functions: first, reframing how politics and the political are understood, and second, expanding everyday understandings of political identity via the PPS. The PPS framework helps provide clarity around the politics an individual develops within the context of their sociopolitical community. Consistent with the research of Kevin Fox Gotham and Krista Brumley, I argue that knowledge of a sociopolitical community (and its spatial context) is required to understand how multiple divergent political needs grow within cities, states, and nations.^*188

The theory of the PPS refers to the extent an individual feels they belong (or do not belong) to their sociopolitical community and the extent to which they believe change—for themselves or their sociopolitical communities—is possible. Thus, the concept of the PPS is closely linked to individual and group political imagination. The BFDC understands politics as the acts, ideas, or set of behaviors rooted in the effort of two or more people attempting to use power to create (or limit) possibilities via acts or behaviors in service of a sociopolitical goal. In short, politics is about developing the political imagination and political power to shift individual or group circumstances. Robin D. G. Kelley clarifies this idea:

Politics is not separate from lived experience or the imaginary world of what is possible; to the contrary, politics is about these things. Politics compromises the numerous battles to roll back constraints and exercise some power over, or create some space within, the institutions and social relationships that dominate our lives.¹⁸⁹

Focusing on whether an individual believes change is possible allows us to better understand—and recognize—the political behaviors of a broader subset of the population.

Ultimately, a sociopolitical community is defined by the political imaginations of the people within it. Political theorist Clarissa Rile Hayward notes that Black people in the United States who live below the poverty line have a political imagination like most U.S. residents. It is a political imagination consumed with and in some ways defined by the concepts of homeownership and a sense of belonging to a particular neighborhood, sociopolitical community, or country.¹⁹⁰ The public housing residents I interviewed were particularly concerned with their ability, or inability, to access stability, housing, adequate food, adequate education, and adequate health care.¹⁹¹ When these necessities are absent from sociopolitical communities, they become politics at the point of consumption.¹⁹²

Public housing, via the stigmas it attaches to residents, the spatial realities, and the lived experience it creates for its residents, can shape the individual PPS of anyone who lives or works there. Identifying the mechanisms through which sociopolitical community and spatial realities could shape the PPS was central to this project. One could imagine that some residents feel so ignored and mistreated by the government or street-level bureaucrats, their PPS does not allow them to imagine the possibility of change, let alone the possibility of interpersonal relationships. However, one could also imagine residents who are highly motivated by the conditions of their lived experience and develop a PPS with a political imagination fueled by a desire for change.¹⁹³

An individual’s residential neighborhood is formative in the development of their politics and the sociopolitical tools they find most useful.¹⁹⁴ The concept of the possible-self is based on social psychology literature that examines how individuals envision their future. The possible-self literature argues that how people imagine their future and what they believe themselves capable of ultimately determine what behavior they will engage in, in the present moment.¹⁹⁵ I theorize the PPS as a framework for understanding how the individual imagines their sociopolitical possibilities. This possible-self can influence whether a young person will go to school, whether an ill person will take their medications, and ultimately, as I will argue, whether an individual will develop a sense of politics or any sociopolitical tools.

The PPS can allow for several possibilities in terms of understanding the political identity of an individual. The concept of the PPS is not totalized and allows for agency. There is room for a broad range of sociopolitical reactions to sociopolitical communities and the residential spaces they occupy. This theory does not suggest that residential spaces are the only factor shaping the PPS. However, spatial realities play a large enough part in the development of the PPS to require meaningful examination by empiricists and theorists.¹⁹⁶

The PPS and Sociopolitical Tools

Now that I have fully explained how politics and the political are understood within the context of Redefining the Political, I will further flesh out my framework for understanding political identity. The PPS encapsulates two concepts: (1) a sense of belonging to a sociopolitical community and (2) political imagination. “PPS” is an umbrella term meant to facilitate an understanding of the spectrum of political identity resulting in individual politics. Given the centrality of political imagination to the PPS, I will briefly define it. Political imagination is the aspect of the PPS that envisions political possibilities. It is the part of the individual capable of imagining success in running for block captain or a sense of purpose when protesting CHA policy. In short, it is the future-oriented aspect of the PPS.

The extent to which an individual feels they belong to a particular space, time, people, and place seems to be a significant indicator of their connection to politics. Individuals who feel socially and politically isolated frequently withdraw from their local sociopolitical community and rarely visibly engage politically, civically, or socially.¹⁹⁷ An increasing sense of isolation from a residential space likely creates a set of behaviors often referred to as sociopolitical “alienation.”¹⁹⁸ “Physical community” designates the residential spaces where people own, rent, or occupy homes, apartments, rooms, shelters, or outdoor spaces.^* The theoretical framework of the PPS helps political practitioners understand the connection between the spatial realities within a given residential neighborhood, the extent an individual feels they belong to a sociopolitical community, and political imagination. Figure 1.1 shows a matrix representation of the PPS and its associated domain areas (alienated, visionary, community, and liberatory). The individual PPS is constantly moving and evolving; it is not static. The PPS matrix helps pinpoint the PPS of any one person or group of people.

Figure 1.1Political Possible-Self Matrix

Individuals with a high sense of belonging to one or more sociopolitical communities can imagine a future where they can create or limit political possibilities, and they generally have a more liberatory PPS. The liberatory PPS helps to explain how an individual could be described by survey data as simultaneously highly efficacious, highly cynical, and highly politically engaged. People with visible sociopolitical tools can imagine their sociopolitical world changing for the better, while being critical of it. The most meaningful aspect of the PPS framework is its understanding that the politics of any person or community of people can shift and change over time via a process of sociopolitical education.

Figure 1.2PPS Development When Accessing Sociopolitical Education

Figure 1.3PPS Development When Losing Access to Sociopolitical Education

Changes in the Individual PPS over Time

Individuals (or groups of people) can move around the PPS matrix over the course of their lifetime. Being connected to a sociopolitical community provides individuals with the impetus and motivation to be part of whatever political possibilities they can collaboratively imagine, create, or limit. Respondents with high levels of belonging frequently had neighbors or friends with visible sociopolitical tools. As Figure 1.2 demonstrates, receiving political education from sociopolitical community members allowed an individual (or group of people) to move up, diagonally, or across the PPS matrix.

In contrast, becoming increasingly alienated or isolated from sociopolitical community seemed to result in an individual (or group) gradually losing access to political education and sociopolitical resources from the local sociopolitical community. Losing access to political education and sociopolitical resources could also cause an individual (or group) to move down, diagonally, or across the PPS matrix.

Respondents who did not feel they belonged to any sociopolitical community, and who could not imagine or create any sociopolitical possibilities, generally had nonvisible sociopolitical tools. A person who cannot imagine any sociopolitical possibilities has no reason to be active within their sociopolitical community even if they describe themselves as highly efficacious or politically capable. The disconnect facilitated via sociopolitical isolation adds another level of detachment from the political. In short, those who were disconnected from their local sociopolitical communities tended to be focused solely on escaping those communities. In subsequent chapters, I delve more deeply into the PPS visual matrix and ways individuals can move from domain to domain over the course of their lifetime.

Book Organization

Part I Overview

In Redefining the Political, I am concerned with a central question: What political concepts and theories are capable of recognizing and accurately documenting the political engagement and political identity development within marginalized Black communities in the United States?

Chapter 1

I developed the BFDC of politics and the political to help political practitioners recognize the unique features of sociopolitical life within Black marginalized communities. These criteria can also operate as a rubric or checklist to identify extrasystemic and traditional politics and political engagement. I also developed the PPS as an alternative measure of individual political identity—a theoretical framework informed by Black feminist political theory, as well as the politics and sociopolitical tools of the least of us.¹⁹⁹ In this introductory chapter, I explain why the lived experiences of Black women who live below the poverty line are central not only to the work of this project but to the study of politics more broadly.²⁰⁰

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 explains my theoretical and conceptual contribution to the expansion of “commonsense” understandings of political identity, the PPS. I outline the theoretical foundation of the PPS and flesh out the mechanisms supporting it. I go on to show the applications of the PPS via respondent vignettes. Black feminist social scientists and writers have consistently argued that community is a central and defining feature of Black sociopolitical life throughout the United States. A clear understanding of respondents’ spatial context and sociopolitical community is foundational to this theoretical framework.

Chapter 3

In this chapter, I flesh out how and why sociopolitical community, the public sphere, and spatial context function as key conceptual mechanisms within the BFDC of politics and the political and the PPS. I go on to describe the methodological process behind my ethnographic, interview, and observational data. At the end of Chapter 3, I provide a brief history of Black women’s organizing within public housing and the impact of neoliberalism on the sociopolitical work of Black marginalized communities more broadly.

Part II: Overview

In Part II, I discuss what the PPS looked like in the context of the Altgeld Gardens’ sociopolitical community. I use each of these cases, not as empirical evidence, but as case studies that illustrate the theoretical frameworks developed in this book. Each chapter will focus on a particular axis of the PPS matrix.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4 focuses on the axis of political imagination and on the roles pleasure, intellect, and alienation play in understanding the individual PPS. I argue that political imagination absent interpersonal relationships connecting the individual to their residential sociopolitical community seemed to result in an individual politics disassociated from the public sphere and the local sociopolitical community. Among the women I interviewed at Altgeld Gardens people who landed on the more imaginative end of the PPS spectrum seemed to experience social isolation or alienation. However, the same respondents tended to have higher levels of creativity or intellect, which appeared to fuel a curious and at times even visionary internal political life. This disassociated internal political life seemed to deal almost exclusively in the realm of words, beauty, alienation, and ideas.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5 discusses the belonging axis and explores in depth the centrality of interpersonal relationships to individual sociopolitical development. Throughout my research on the politics of Black marginalized communities, one truth consistently came to the forefront in discussions about political identity: it begins in the local residential community. To be invested in national or even city politics, people need to feel like they belong to a residential neighborhood, or a group of people living in their local community. Without a sense of belonging, some people may haphazardly note that, yes, they feel like an American or a Chicagoan, but it rarely seems to result in visible sociopolitical tools. In Chapter 6, I consider the role of public housing as a Black enclave public sphere, a sociopolitical community where many respondents felt they could belong. My analysis considers Nina Eliasoph’s work in Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life and builds on it through an assessment of the intersections of marginalized identities and their impact on a sense of belonging to the local sociopolitical community. Specifically, this chapter focuses on the y axis of the PPS matrix, the representation of individual sociopolitical belonging.

Chapter 6

In this chapter, I walk through what this work of Black feminist political theory adds to politics research and its understanding of the sociopolitical lives of Black women living below the poverty line. I also review the eight key findings of Redefining the Political. Last, I briefly discuss what this work adds to the study of Black politics and Black feminist political theory and describe the work I am leaving for future scholars to accomplish.

Conclusion

What if we separate understandings of politics from ideas about formal governance altogether? Can communities take part in politics without engaging government or its subsidiaries? Some political scientists have persuasively argued that economic buy-cotts and political consumerism are important sociopolitical tools.²⁰¹ Others have considered the role social media plays in the development of political identity and political communication.²⁰² Anthropologist James C. Scott and historian Robin D. G. Kelley, among others, have documented marginalized communities who engage in rent strikes, gas strikes, the destruction of private and public property, and takeovers of public property. They argue that political practitioners should take these sociopolitical tools seriously.²⁰³

In a similar vein, political scientist Diane Wong has argued that everyday “shop talk” in neighborhoods like Chinatown in Manhattan is “how women . . . [politically] strategize around gentrification.”²⁰⁴ Scholars like Wong and Zenzele Isoke have pushed political science to think about how politics manifest in everyday life, particularly in urban neighborhoods, on street corners, and in the home.²⁰⁵ They argue that “the daily face-to-face conversations people have with each other are essential to understanding the development of political thought.”²⁰⁶ Ultimately, the key to capturing the politics, sociopolitical tools, and PPS within residential neighborhoods, cultural institutions, community spaces, and marginalized populations is making space within politics research for frameworks of politics and the political decentered from government and state institutions.

Like the Black feminist and Black politics scholarship preceding it, Redefining the Political is invested in recognizing and accurately documenting the sociopolitical worlds of Black marginalized communities. Using Black feminist political theory, I have developed concepts and theories to help scholars seek out respondents as experts in their sociopolitical context and socio-political-cultural point of view. Using the words and experiences of Black women living below the poverty line in Chicago public housing, I build on the work of Black feminist political theorists and continue the legacy of nontraditional definitions of politics and the political.²⁰⁷ In interdisciplinary conversations, several studies on nontraditional political engagement center on cultural exchanges (dance, hip-hop, etc.). While arts and culture are a valuable and important component of the Black sociopolitical world, they are not the totality of extrasystemic political activism. I suggest that the interpersonal, at both the individual and community levels, is a fruitful place to find nontraditional political contributions that are expansive, beautiful, meaningful, and powerful.²⁰⁸

* Ideas can also be understood as concepts. I will use both words interchangeably throughout the book.

† I italicize a word when I am using it a theoretical/conceptual framework (instead of using the word’s standard definitional meaning—e.g., politics, the state, or citizenship).

* Throughout this book I will use the words “ideas” and “concepts” interchangeably. If you understand what an idea is, you understand what a concept is. “Theory” is a word academics use to describe the process of defining and understanding ideas, structures, and processes. When I mention political power, in this sentence, I mean sociopolitical power, better understood as power-over the social, political, and cultural spheres of influence (Cudd, Analyzing Oppression).

† When I refer to an individual as a marginalized Black person, marginalized Black woman, or something similar, I am referring to someone with multiple sites of high-stigma intersectional identity. In this case, I describe Black communities living below the poverty line as marginalized Black communities.

This is what political scientist Cathy J. Cohen calls “secondary marginalization” or “advanced marginalization” (Cohen, Boundaries of Blackness).

Cathy J. Cohen defines secondary marginalization as the oppression and exclusion experienced by people with multiple sites of marginalization. Specifically, when marginalized identity groups stigmatize more marginal group members. In other words, secondary marginalization is usually referring to the oppressive experiences of people with multiple sites of high-stigma identity. In this manuscript, I describe Black communities living below the poverty line as marginalized Black communities. Secondarily marginalized populations, like Black women living in Chicago public housing, are consistently targeted via government, bureaucratic, and residential violence because of the stigma attached to their intersecting sites of marginalization.

* Redefining the Political focuses on the expansion of public understandings of politics and the political. I do this by focusing the research in this book on extrasystemic approaches to the political.

Throughout the book, the terms “quotidian politics” and “nontraditional politics” will be used interchangeably, in service of developing a conceptual framework of extrasystemic politics. In short, extrasystemic politics is political power developed outside of mainstream public spheres. For a detailed definition of extrasystemic politics, please see pages 24–26.

† I collected qualitative data at the Altgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes development in Chicago Housing Authority public housing. It is one large development of approximately 1,900 apartments. I will refer to it throughout the book as Altgeld, Altgeld Gardens, Altgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes, and similar names.

* Scholars of race, ethnicity, and politics have continued to point out characteristics unique to the political engagement and political identity formation of various marginalized groups (e.g., Afro-Cuban immigrants, Black trans women, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [DACA] students seeking citizenship, etc.). When it comes to Black women in the United States, survey data often misses them altogether (Alexander-Floyd, “Why Political Scientists” Jordan-Zachery, “Beyond the Side Eye”; Jordan-Zachery, “‘I Ain’t Your Darn Help’”; D. Harris, Black Feminist Politics; Simien, Black Feminist Voices in Politics; Junn et al., “What Revolution?”; Junn, “Participation in Liberal Democracy”; Richie, Arrested Justice). We know they are being missed because of the onslaught of qualitative data (and some quantitative data) that shows how concerned marginalized populations are with whether power and politics affect their everyday lives (Weaver, Prowse, and Piston, “Too Much Knowledge”; Prowse, Weaver, and Meares, “State from Below”; Michener, “Medicaid and the Policy Feedback Foundations”; Cohen, Democracy Remixed; Dawson, Black Visions; Simien, Black Feminist Voices in Politics; Alexander-Floyd, “Why Political Scientists”; Jordan-Zachery, “‘I Ain’t Your Darn Help’”; Prestage, “In Quest of African American Political Woman”; N. Brown and Young, “Ratchet Politics”).

In an effort to contribute to the ongoing knowledge production around the politics of marginalized Black women and of Black women more generally, this book builds upon Evelyn Simien’s work in Black Feminist Voices in Politics. Most centrally, the ethnography and the in-depth interview questions were informed “by an appreciation of the lived experience and the political objectives of both African American women and men” (Simien, Black Feminist Voices in Politics). In practice this meant the study was centrally concerned with centering the words and experiences of the Black women involved, all of whom were incredibly generous with their time, experience, and stories.

* Journalist Isabelle Wilkerson defines the Great Migration as “the outpouring of 6 million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the north and west from the time of World War I until the 1970s.” She goes on to say that the Great Migration “stands out because this was the first time in [U.S.] history that [U.S.] citizens had to flee the land of their birth just to be recognized as the citizens that they had always been. No other group of [U.S. citizens] have had to act like immigrants to be recognized as citizens. So, this Great Migration was not a move. It was a seeking of political asylum within the borders of one’s own country. They were defecting a [system of oppression] known as Jim Crow. It was an artificial hierarchy in which everything that you could and could not do was based upon what you looked like” (Zomorodi 2021).

* Occupy the Hood Chicago was a spin-off organization that developed after multiple failed attempts at getting Occupy Wall Street Chicago (and the national formation) to become serious about integrating the needs and demands of Black people more generally and poor Black people specifically. When I started visiting Altgeld Gardens, Occupy the Hood Chicago and Environmental Justice Organization would occasionally collaborate.

† The distinctive political engagement practices and the unique political identity characteristics of populations like poor Black women are often missed in large-N surveys because of cultural incomparability. Put another way, the politics of Black women living in poverty frequently register as nonexistent within political survey data because of differing cultural interpretations of the survey questions.

* According to the New York State Education Department, through civic education, students learn how to identify and address problems in their community or school community. Students also learn how to demonstrate respect for the rights of others, respectfully disagree with other viewpoints, and provide evidence for a counterargument (Office of Standards and Instruction, “Civic Readiness Initiative”).

* The word respondent is how academic researchers describe anyone we interview. Occasionally researchers will also use the word “sample,” or “subjects,” to describe everyone who is participating in their research.

* After asking respondents for a year how I should categorize people who fell into my Black feminist definition of politics and the political, most respondents had no idea, or disagreed with one another, and ultimately just wanted me to deal with it.

* In simple terms, street-level bureaucrats are white-collar workers who work with the local, city, county, state, or federal government. They are the nonelected bureaucrats who work in government and interact directly with the public. Scholar Michael Lipsky developed this term in 1980 (Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, xi–xx).

* In The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance and Solidarity, Amy Allen argues that power is simply the ability or the capacity of a set of actors to act. While Allen thinks about three different types of power and the way they show up within important concepts like solidarity, resistance, and domination, ultimately she gets to a core idea of power that considers how we create or act on capacity building in our day-to-day lives.

* Patricia Hill Collins argues that violence has become so routinized in the lives of Black women, the public tends to overlook the centrality of violence in their daily lived experience (Collins, “On Violence, Intersectionality and Transversal Politics”). Beth Richie rightly notes, “Because few scholars or activists respond to incidents of police brutality as the gender violence that it sometimes is, the experiences of Black women in public housing where police uses of excessive force seldom appear in estimates of violence against women” (Richie, Arrested Justice, 23). Key to the invisibility of the violence visited upon Black women’s bodies is a reluctance of knowledge workers to name it as violence (Collins, “On Violence, Intersectionality and Transversal Politics”).

* The PPS framework is made up of two components. First, to what extent does the individual respondent feel they belong to a sociopolitical community? Second, how much political imagination does the individual have, and how much do they think they have?

* I focus on “physical” local communities in Redefining the Political because I collected data and conducted my theoretical analysis with a focus on the physical space of Altgeld Gardens. However, it is important to mention that I suspect this dynamic could be (and maybe already is) replicated in digital online spaces (e.g., Facebook groups, Discord, or Reddit).