2

EXTRASYSTEMIC POLITICS AND THE POLITICAL POSSIBLE-SELF

Introduction

During the spring of 2011, I began a yearlong ethnography on the far south side of Chicago, Illinois. For the next year, I observed the lives, politics, and spatial realities of thirty-one Black women who at some point lived in the Altgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes, a CHA public housing development. I knew if I hoped to document the community within Chicago public housing, the only means toward a fuller and more accurate assessment of Black sociopolitical life was a path that understood the political expertise of Black women in the United States who live below the poverty line.¹ As several political scientists and policy feedback scholars have demonstrated, marginalized Black political communities in the United States have tremendous sociopolitical knowledge because of their proximity to street-level bureaucrats and government institutions.² To meet key survival needs (food, clothing, and shelter), Black people who live in poverty in the United States engage, push back, and efficiently navigate several government institutions.³ With this in mind, Redefining the Political takes up a central question: What theoretical framework of political identity can capture the sociopolitical lives of Black women living below the poverty line in the United States?

Chapter 2 explains my theoretical and conceptual contribution to the expansion of mainstream understandings of political identity, the PPS. I outline the theoretical foundation of the PPS and flesh out the mechanisms enabling it. Last, I show the applications of the PPS via respondent vignettes.

Political Engagement and Political Identity Frameworks Are Not Enough

Marginalized Black communities living below the poverty line in the United States may not always replicate all the sociopolitical tools used by more privileged groups, they are politically active, engaged, and knowledgeable. The unique nature of their political knowledge and sociopolitical tools matters when considering how politics are developed within communities. While some of the Altgeld residents I interviewed were demonstrably politically engaged in ways the mainstream public sphere would recognize, others were less traditional. Lisa was fifty years old when I interviewed her, and she spent most of her life living in Altgeld Gardens. However, three years before I interviewed her, she had taken CHA’s offer of Section 8 housing and left Altgeld with her elderly mother.^*

Lisa described her life, her community, and her support network as still being at Altgeld. She went back frequently to feel connected to a community she loves. She even requested we conduct her interview in the home of a friend still living in Altgeld Gardens. This was one of my favorite interviews. Originally it was scheduled to be a typical one-on-one interview, but Lisa did not want to do her interview alone. As a result, I ended up facilitating a lively three-person interview between Lisa and her longtime friends (amd former neighbors). Lisa was a good example of a respondent who did extensive work in service to her community and in service of sociopolitical possibilities. Her sociopolitical tools fell outside the traditional boundaries of what is typically considered political.

A: Do you go to CHA meetings?

L: Yes.

A: What are they like?

L: Phony.

A: Why do you say that?

L: I mean, you gave your opinions, but most of the time I just go to listen and everything, but I really just was in there.

A: The people that go to those meetings, what are they like?

L: They ask questions, but I have to give people credit out here; they do go to the meetings. Then like when we had that lawsuit with Levy, he beat us out of all our money. Then we had that spill real bad over there; we got beat out all our money then.

A: What spill?

L: Gas. In Block 2, my auntie, her curtain was green; it turned to orange.

R2: It turned orange to green.

A: So they spilled gas out on the highway?

L: It was a chemical thing.

R2: On 115th.

A: OK, so there was a lawsuit because of that too?

L: Mm-hmm.

A: And was that through EJO or something else or . . . ? (For more information on environmental issues at Altgeld Gardens, please see the endnote.)⁴

R2: Sister, what was that leak when we were evacuated and everybody went to Carver? That bad gas?

R3: Oh, yeah, yeah, we had a gas leak!

A: What year was that?

R2: ’Cuz Mama panicked! She come to get her mama. Man, that was so bad . . .

R3: That was like the early eighties.^*

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

L: I used to do volunteer work. I used to do CAPS [Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy] and all that. I got certificates in all that, arts and crafts . . . that’s like the police I was telling you about, CAPS.^†

A: Oh, OK.

R: Then that’s what I told you, when they raided my house one of the police used to come . . . we used to look out for him and stuff.

L: So it was like a neighborhood watch or something like that?

A: Well, back then it was. I was staying out here, but when they raided my house, he just stood there. He didn’t even try to search my house. He was like, “I’m so sorry.” That happened the day after the Fourth of July, ’cuz my Coleman [grill] sat out. When they did that, he stopped it ’cuz he knew somebody called the police on me. For what, I don’t know. Wasn’t nothing in my house.

A: So you said you did like arts and crafts . . .

L: Yeah, at the community building, volunteer. I got all kind of certificates. I been a lot of volunteering and stuff.

A: How did you get involved with all the volunteer work?

L: Just being in the community, helping out with the kids. Like they have a little after-school parade, they have barbecue and stuff for the kids, and I go up there and help.

A: Why?

L: I don’t know, ’cuz I want to help the community. Like I said, it ain’t that bad out here; it’s just the gangs. Far as that, this is beautiful.

Lisa’s political work centered on serving her community from within the local schools and the Altgeld Gardens community center. The late Dorothy Gautreaux, the tenant organizer who became the lead plaintiff in the 1966 Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority lawsuit, also started her sociopolitical work in the local Altgeld schools.^*5

In Chicago, the civil rights movement first took shape around de facto segregated schools. Dorothy Gautreaux took advantage of this situation to improve the quality of education in the all-Black Carver schools that served the students from Altgeld-Murray. She was instrumental in establishing a separate administration for the high school, and served as president of its PTA. Her focus expanded as she organized her fellow tenants to go to demonstrations and support boycotts around the city.⁶

There is a long history of U.S.-based Black sociopolitical organizing in and around schools.⁷ Those publicly funded institutions are an important site of political work. Beyond the schools, Lisa regularly participated in Tenant Services meetings, LAC meetings, and the CHA Executive Board meetings. If we are using the B.F.D.C. of politics, the effort of two or more people attempting to use power to imagine and then create (or limit) political possibilities via sociopolitical tools, then it becomes clear that Lisa’s work in her community was political.⁸ Her work with CAPS was an effort to create a more peaceful coexistence between residents and the Chicago Police Department. Lisa’s work as a volunteer at the community building was an effort to build meaningful relationships within Altgeld, as well as to give the local children a space where they could take part in safe and educational activities.

Black women residents, throughout the history of Altgeld Gardens, have been engaged in meaningful politics.⁹

As the civil rights movement took greater shape and eventually joined forces with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to form the Chicago Freedom Movement, Dorothy [Gautreaux] became the tribune of the CHA tenants within its councils. The image of tenants she projected was not that of abuse but of people with potential to be tapped, she was constantly nurturing that potential, in one housing development after another, holding workshops to help tenants gain the voice she knew was theirs, organizing carloads of neighbors and new-found friends to join the next demonstration. With great pride, she brought Dr. King to Altgeld for a rally.¹⁰

Beyond the long history of tenant organizing within Chicago Public Housing developments, political labor can be found throughout public housing nationally.¹¹ While low-income Black people may not be engaged in the same political arenas as other, more privileged groups, they are in fact active, engaged, and sophisticated.¹² This political knowledge and political engagement matters to discussions of how political identity is developed.

While A. Campbell and colleagues and Yvette Alex-Assensoh have argued that poverty depresses political engagement, additionally scholars have argued that when everything else is held constant, poverty does not dampen overall political engagement.¹³ In their article, Henry Brady, Sidney Verba, and Kay Lehman Schlozman examine the influence of a variety of sociodemographic factors on the political engagement of a diverse sample of U.S. residents.¹⁴ After testing the impact of class, race, civic knowledge, and political interest on political participation, they found that the major influence on political engagement is the extent to which an individual is interested in politics.

Other scholars note that the home and the neighborhood can become a space where political learning and engagement happen.¹⁵ Chapter Four and Chapter Five recount the process of respondent sociopolitical learning via their neighbors and family members. Ultimately I agree with Terrion L. Williamson, a sense of belonging to a particular geographic place can be key to developing an individual desire to change sociopolitical possibilities for the self or community. Without a sense of belonging and connection, the individual may become apolitical or politically alienated.¹⁶

Sociopolitical Community as a Key Sociopolitical Tool

Community (both residential and political) plays a significant role in the Black feminist theoretical foundation of this project. The BFDC for politics and the political understands politics as relational. Understanding individual relationships is also foundational to my framework of the PPS, a theory of political identity development. Assessing the extent an individual feels they belong to their local sociopolitical community is critical to fully understanding their PPS. A sense of belonging is central to the development of an individual’s sociopolitical tools and also to the BFDC of politics and the political.¹⁷ Sociopolitical tools are birthed in the home and raised in the spatial realities of residential neighborhoods. As I show in subsequent chapters, a person’s interpersonal relationships within their home and neighborhood create specific sociopolitical tools illustrated and articulated within the PPS matrix.

The aesthetic infrastructure of the home also helps to shape who the individual becomes politically. Additionally, spatial qualities like basic building maintenance (e.g., heating, hot water, and air-conditioning), state violence, residential violence, and access to public space, all play a role in whether an individual can learn and develop a firm and clear PPS.¹⁸ This matters, not only because the physical space (e.g., the neglect of the public housing infrastructure and the surrounding ecological space by the CHA) is giving birth to a specific set of sociopolitical tools and PPS within its residents, but also because residential spaces circumscribe the ways residents can behave as members within the sociopolitical community, individually, and with one another.

Attention must be paid to the aesthetics, physicality, and spatial realities of sociopolitical development. Political identity is not simply about the political party an individual ascribes to or the boxes they check off on a voting ballot. Instead, political identity encompasses a daily set of behaviors that shift and evolve, depending on the community the individual lives in and the relationship they have to the people within their neighborhood. Neoliberal logic has convinced many that placing residents in more “attractive” housing around wealthier people will solve the problem of systemic inequality and poverty.¹⁹ However, one cornerstone of individual sociopolitical health, well-being, and safety requires a sociopolitical community the individual feels they can belong to.²⁰ In the absence of a sense of belonging and sociopolitical support, the individual can be thrown into an ever-constant cycle of survival and alienation.²¹

Why Belonging Matters

Within public housing, an individual does not always have complete control over their sense of belonging and the extent of their sociopolitical support networks within their neighborhood. Because public housing residents are living on the dividing line of public and private space, their day-to-day lives can be completely uprooted by federal, state, and local public housing policy. One consequence of the first ten years of the Plan for Transformation (“the Plan”) in Chicago public housing was the displacement of residents from all over the city, who were uprooted and replanted in what appeared to be a random fashion. As a result, the policy disconnected entire communities from a sense of belonging cultivated over fifty years.²² When activists say the Plan destroyed entire voting blocks, they mean that entire communities of people, who felt linked to one another other through shared spatial realities and local sociopolitical community, were separated by state policy.²³ The Plan-fueled resident displacement led to an erosion of community, creating large groups of people no longer invested in their local sociopolitical communities.²⁴ Groups of people who formerly may have been invested in making sure their neighborhoods continued to have new sociopolitical possibilities, were later consumed with escaping to the next place.²⁵

The logics of politics are deeply tied to the relational bonds within communities. As a result, a sense of belonging is a mechanism critical to understanding an individual’s political identity.²⁶ To what extent does the individual feel they belong to their neighborhood? To their city? And to their nation?²⁷ Because of the stigma and lack of access tied to being a Black public housing resident, many CHA residents frequently understood their sense of belonging as existing within the space of a couple of neighborhood blocks.²⁸ As scholarly literature and ethnographic studies confirm, the activism in public housing is often geographically limited, not only due to time and resources but because residents feel comfortable, safe, and understood within their local sociopolitical community.²⁹

Much of the literature I have examined points to a strong tendency regarding politics: it begins in the local community.³⁰ In their interviews, various respondents linked their investment to national or city politics, to their sense of belonging to their neighborhood or some other group of people to whom they were in physical proximity (like former neighbors living in the respondents’ previous neighborhood). Without that, a respondent may have haphazardly noted that, yes, they feel like an American or pride in their hometown, but such feelings rarely resulted in a visible or active political engagement. Regarding this point, Nina Eliasoph is instructive; in Avoiding Politics, she asks, “How do citizens create context for political conversation in everyday life?” She concludes that,

without a vibrant public sphere, democratic citizenship is impossible: there are no contexts to generate the kinds of selfhood, friendship, power and relations to the wider world that democracy demands. The point is dual; participation in the public sphere helps cultivate a sense of community, so that people care more and think more about the wider world; and second, participation becomes a source of meaning-making power.³¹

My goal is to extend Eliasoph’s point by considering how the intersections of race, gender, space, and class affect the cultivation of sociopolitical community. The vulnerability of CHA residents to the neoliberal state can destabilize their ability to establish, form, and act upon a coherent sense of sociopolitical community. Simply put, when a state bureaucracy can move you, evict you, or blackball you from public resources, they can undermine your sociopolitical capacity in a way that cannot be understated.³² Before the Plan for Transformation, Chicago public housing could serve as a public sphere where sociopolitical communities exchanged ideas and social resources.³³ When the Plan for Transformation dislocated residents, moving them into neighborhoods that were unfamiliar, violent, and unstable, numerous residents’ political sense of self became more individualized and isolated from communitarian ethics.³⁴

Deepening the PPS Matrix Using a Black Feminist Perspective

For some Black women living in poverty within the United States, their sociopolitical isolation has created an environment where few places within the public sphere welcome and encourage their political contributions. As a result, many Black feminist scholars have noted that Black women living in poverty use their political imagination to create sociopolitical spaces in venues that are historically understood within political science to be private spaces, or spaces for “civic” (traditionally understood as nonpolitical) engagement. Scholars of public housing politics, as well as Black feminist social science scholars, have noted that community building, home building, being in home spaces, and belonging are all central to the politics of many Black women within the United States. Black feminist political theory provides a framework for understanding how politics and sociopolitical tools come together in the lives of Black sociopolitical communities in the United States. So much so, Beth Richie’s Black Feminist Violence Matrix and her larger intellectual project within Arrested Justice inspired some of how I articulate and graphically depict the PPS.

As Evelyn Simien argues, “Black feminist consciousness has three core ingredients: an understanding of intersectionality, a focus on community-centered politics, and an emphasis on the particular experiences of Black women.”³⁵ To understand how Black feminist political theory furthers the analysis of this project, an appreciation of intersectionality as a key concept is necessary. Intersectionality provides important analytical leverage towards the study of Black women living below the poverty line and their political lives. Intersectionality as critical social theory is especially helpful in the context of Michelle Berger’s framing of intersectional stigma.

a theoretical framework composed of the recognition of and attention to intersectionality (or acknowledgement of race, class, and gender subordination as interlocking forms of oppression), and stigma (or the ways in which people become socially defined as ‘other’). . . . Furthermore, intersectional stigma represents the total synchronistic influence of various forms of oppression, which combine and overlap to form a distinct positionality.³⁶

As Richie notes, “an evaluation of the interlocking oppressions that Black women face allows for a much more comprehensive understanding” of the violence Black women confront. Intersectionality also illuminates the role their interlocking oppressions play in shaping their individual personhood, their worldviews, and the political engagement strategies they feel safe using day-to-day.³⁷

A Black feminist theoretical analysis requires as a key starting point, an acknowledgment of identity, agency and community. Marginalized identities, and the intersecting stigmas they bring with them, are key to accurately understanding how everyday experiences shape how individuals understand power. I agree with the argument that a sense of belonging is a key component of political action.³⁸ However, I disagree that what brings Black women or Black feminists together is an experience of oppression. Instead, the everyday experiences of shared joy and shared pain facilitate a sense of belonging and linked fate, resulting in a somewhat communal politics.³⁹ As I discussed in the Introduction, community building, particularly sociopolitical community building supported by political homemaking, is central to many Black feminist understandings of Black women’s sociopolitical work.^*40

Particular to the interventions of Black feminism within the social sciences, as well as Black feminist political theory, is an understanding of interpersonal relationships, specifically those relationships rooted to larger communities (residential communities, sociopolitical communities, digital communities, etc.), that help Black women navigate the sociopolitical impact of intersectional stigma throughout their lives.⁴¹ Another feature of Black feminist political theory is centering Black women’s lives and voices. Black feminism throughout the social sciences, as well as Black feminist theory, has consistently argued that it is impossible to research or write about Black women without centering them.⁴² By centering Black women, political practitioners stand to grow, not only in their understanding of politics and the political but in their core understanding of sociopolitical tools and extrasystemic politics.⁴³

The PPS, Political Imagination, and Sociopolitical Tools

The PPS framework understands sociopolitical belonging and political imagination as directly connected to the development of individual and community politics. The PPS encapsulates several key political science concepts without being overly determined by them. For example, the concept of the PPS allows us to think about and measure concepts such as political “efficacy” without being limited to the questions typically used to measure efficacy—for example, “do you feel capable of participating in politics?” Instead, there is room for respondents to define for themselves what it means to be political and, subsequently, to describe whether they are a person capable of participating in politics. The PPS allows respondents to explain how they define their capacity to participate in politics. The idea of a PPS begins with self-definition and self-identification and then considers how communities and environments influence individual perceptions of the self as a political person (or not).

The PPS allows us to understand the connection between belonging and political imagination. In short, the PPS develops from a sense of belonging to a community and one’s capacity to imagine new or different political possibilities. Membership in sociopolitical community is defined by a politics seeking to create sociopolitical possibilities. This could be as simple as cleaning up the block outside one’s home or as complex as participating in local and national political campaigns.⁴⁴ The PPS matrix (see Figure 1.1) helps to illustrates the dynamic nature of politics and sociopolitical tools. The PPS matrix has four domain areas; this matrix can help us understand the political possibilities in people, and maybe even communities.

Individuals with a high sense of connection or belonging to one or more sociopolitical communities, seem to have a more active and visible politics. People with a visionary PPS can imagine new sociopolitical possibilities. Being highly connected to one of their sociopolitical communities provides them with the impetus and motivation to be a part of whatever possibilities they imagine. Individuals with high levels of belonging seem to have more visible interpersonal relationships, and more visible politics. Individuals without a sense of belonging to any sociopolitical community are also frequently alienated from politics and political life. The person who cannot imagine new sociopolitical realities has no reason to be active within the sociopolitical community even if they describe themselves as highly efficacious or capable. The disconnect resulting from the isolation experienced by those who are not connected to any sociopolitical communities adds another level of nonengagement from the political. In short, those who are disconnected from their sociopolitical communities tend to be solely focused on escaping those communities.

The PPS clarifies the roles that belonging and political imagination play in the development of individual-level politics, as well as community-level politics. Political imagination is the process of individuals or groups who go about envisioning a different sociopolitical reality for themselves or their targets. Political imagination often leads to political education, which can later lead to cognitive liberation. In short, the belief that something is possible can lead some to self-educate about their local sociopolitical community, the broader world, power, sociopolitical capital, or alternative solutions and perspectives. Via this process of political education, the individual, or sociopolitical community, is presented with the opportunity to achieve cognitive liberation, to free themselves from the sociopolitical norms and assumptions of everyday life. As I will explain later, political education also allows respondents to move from one PPS domain to another.

The first axis of the PPS matrix represents the continuum of political imagination in the overall development of PPS and the utilization of sociopolitical tools. At one end of the spectrum are individuals with low political imagination. An alienated PPS maintains an apathetic and/or ambivalent sense of their capacity to exert influence over state power or any government apparatus, more broadly conceived. Citizens exhibiting low-political imagination are described in Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver’s Arrested Citizenship.

Across our interview sample too, nearly all the individuals with whom we spoke described feeling that political participation was an exercise in futility, and that the voices of people “like them” carried little weight in the public sphere. Most spoke of government as distant and unhelpful, of politicians as untrustworthy and even corrupt.⁴⁵

A number of respondents told me stories about terrifyingly violent encounters. Domestic abuse, bureaucratic abuse, and police brutality were an ever-present part of many respondent realities.⁴⁶ Consistently, respondents who experienced physical violence at the hands of the state sat in the low-political-imagination and low-belonging domains of the PPS matrix. Among the Black women I interviewed, respondents who experienced the government as a physically violent force in their lives believed that maintaining a politics of invisibility was safest.^*

The stories residents and respondents told each other served as warnings, requests for help, and a sociopolitical education on how to navigate the unpredictable spatial realities of their neighborhoods. As Joe Soss and Vesla Weaver note, when state violence happens, “such encounters with police are retold and become elements of collective memory. . . . Stories of police brutality or unfairness are passed through family and friendship networks, the routines of black comedians, rap lyrics and black media.”⁴⁷ Marginalized populations, Black and brown people in the United States, and people living below the poverty line frequently learn about the state via personal, everyday experiences. When I would attend public CHA meetings, violence was frequently reported by Black women who were living in CHA public housing. Here, I provide some examples from a Central Advisory Council meeting I attended in April 2011:

One resident was on the CHA waiting list for twenty-four years. She finally received an emergency transfer from CHA because somebody was threatening her. Unfortunately, the resident was still being threatened by the violent resident who managed to find her. At the meeting the resident alleged that the CHA and the police failed to protect her.

Another resident came to the front to speak and complained that residents could not sign others into their apartments. If a guest came to visit and did not have government identification, the guest would not be allowed in the building. This particular tenant felt that the policy was unfair. She believed she should be able to have guests visit her apartment, at her discretion. However, the next resident speaker stated that she was in favor of requiring state identification prior to entry, because of prior violent experiences within her public housing development. The resident recounted a story of an unidentified young man who showed up at her apartment door, threatening to kill her gay son.

CHA residents shared their experiences with violence throughout the community via their social networks, public meetings, social media, and cultural production. Stories about violent encounters were consistent throughout the study. The mainstream public frequently mistakes police brutality as an issue only encountered by Black men. However, for Black women living below the poverty line, this could not be further from the truth.⁴⁸ As is illustrated in my field notes, the multiple iterations of violence that respondents experienced were made clear to me after an interview I conducted in November 2011:

I knocked on Toni’s back door and there was no answer, so I started to walk around to the other side but I saw a rustling by the window, and Toni began to open the door.

Toni was a heavy-set woman, she had brown skin with brown spots on her face. Toni’s hair was lightly pressed with grey streaks, pulled back into a ponytail. She had a grey t-shirt on, pants and house slippers.

Toni initially estimated she moved to Altgeld around 1976 or 1978. But later she realized her father passed around 1976, so the original move might have been closer to 1968 when she was 10 years old.

Early on, Toni’s experience at Altgeld had its difficult moments. Twenty-eight years ago, her brother was shot and killed at Altgeld Gardens.

But overall, she remembered Altgeld being a beautiful, community orientated place that she loved growing up in. However, Toni reported that in the present moment [2011], she experienced Altgeld as being “like a plantation” that she was constantly embattled with.

She was in the midst of fighting a case against East Lake Management Company, because they were trying to evict her.^* Toni’s son was on parole, he violated parole because “he had reefer in his system.” As a result, her son was on house arrest. Toni did not think there was any chance he would be released before the end of his sentence, so she put down her address for the house arrest. He could not go to his girlfriend’s home and Toni did not want him bothering her sister-in-law. But Toni said “my little trick didn’t work,” Her son was released. According to Toni, the house arrest paperwork said she could decline at any time, so she declined right away. However, the prison bureaucracy was slow with the paperwork and CHA residents are forbidden from having individuals on house arrest in their homes.

Ultimately, Toni did not let her son stay with her, and the police came to her home looking for him when he was not there. According to Toni, one of the police officers started swearing at her and yelling epithets and threatening her. As a result, Toni eventually let them in, and when they found out her son was not in her apartment they left.

Toni said that she encouraged her son to turn himself back in. But he kept telling her he just wanted to set aside some money before he went back to jail for his last month. Sometimes he would unexpectedly pop-up at her home for showers, etc.

The last time Toni’s son came by for a shower, the police showed-up soon afterwards. The police surrounded Toni’s home with guns drawn, screaming and beating on the door. The same officer from the previous CPD [Chicago Police Department] visit was yelling and screaming epithets at Toni (bitch, etc.). Toni kept yelling up the stairs asking her son to come down, and he pretended not to be there. Since the officer she previously had a bad experience with was at the front door, she let the officers at the back door in first.

The police officers continued to call Toni a bitch and other racial epithets, her brother, who was with her, told her to ask for a warrant. But Toni did not feel she could ask for paperwork. She was afraid she would get kicked out of her home.

[At this point in the interview, Toni began to cry.]

The police officers tried to put handcuffs on Toni and pushed her on to the couch. The police threatened that she would get kicked out of her home. Toni said the police intimidated her and made her so nervous she couldn’t advocate for herself. All of this happened over the summer in June or July of 2011.

A especially aggressive police officer told Toni, “I’m the one who pays your rent.” Toni told me she thought he made that statement because he thought she was on section eight, which she was not. Toni went on to say that the police officers’ statement did not make any sense because taxpayers pay his salary. She then told me all of the police officers were white.

Toni went on to tell me about a young woman who lived in one of the apartments across the street from Toni’s apartment. The young woman called the police due to domestic violence. The police officers called her a bitch and started destroying her belongings, breaking a glass table, some of her windows and a number of other things. Toni heard the young woman screaming from her apartment. Interestingly, the young women actually called 9-11 on the police. Toni thought the strategy must have worked out for her neighbor, because she now has constant surveillance around her home to protect her. Her neighbor was also able to get all of her belongings and windows replaced. Toni wished she had been brave enough to do the same thing. Toni then said, “I have a lot of respect for the police, but a lot of them are prejudiced.”

Respondents told stories of police running through the front door of their apartment and out the back door in pursuit of suspects. Some spoke of threats made by Child Protective Services if they did not comply with a variety of orders. Multiple respondents reported being unable to receive an emergency housing transfer order to another public housing development after suffering through violent sexual assaults within the development they currently lived in. These experiences resulted in residents developing a wide range of knowledge about the extent government could be depended on, trusted, or even consulted when they were in need.

Soss and Weaver argue that this knowledge becomes part of a community knowledge network; in Altgeld Gardens, these networks of Black women operated within public housing developments, in welfare offices, and on the street.⁴⁹ Ultimately, this knowledge frequently produces a hard-won skepticism of the state, which sometimes results in a low level of political imagination.⁵⁰ However, political imagination is not a static quality among citizens. As Harold Baron writes in his tribute to the late Dorothy Gautreaux (a Altgeld Gardens resident), there are many Black women within Altgeld Gardens who refuse to concede their individual and community power.⁵¹ Gautreaux was the lead plaintiff in a historic 1966 federal case against the Chicago Housing Authority for racial discrimination and housing segregation.⁵² As a result, women like Dorothy not only occupied the liberatory domain of the PPS but also insisted that other residents join them there.

Dorothy Gautreaux was of, by, and for the tenants in public housing. Her very being contradicted the perceived wisdom that CHA tenants lived under such heavy control and threat from the political machine that they could not be expected to stand up for themselves. Her view was that tenants both could and ought to direct their own lives. She set out to prove that proposition by example.⁵³

Some women I interviewed recounted how they moved from a community PPS to a liberatory PPS because of the political education they received via the interpersonal relationships they developed in their neighborhoods. Testimonies about Dorothy Gautreaux’s life speak frequently about her political education work throughout the Altgeld-Murray development. She created community and built a sense of belonging among residents by “organizing Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts and the PTA.”⁵⁴ Through her work, Gautreaux built a sense of belonging among her neighbors and helped several move to the liberatory PPS domain as they grew in their sociopolitical education.

Regine Hunter is a example of an Altgeld resident who benefited from the sociopolitical intervention of her neighbors. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, I interviewed Regine in 2011. Regine had been living in Altgeld Gardens for forty-one years, after moving in with her mom and dad during the Great Migration. As was clear in the first series of vignettes from our interview, Regine is a great example of how interpersonal relationships within the neighborhood can move an individual in any direction around the PPS matrix. In Regine’s case, it was her neighbors and the women she grew up with in Altgeld Gardens who moved her from a community PPS to a closer iteration of a liberatory PPS. Because of living in Altgeld Gardens for most of her adult life, Regine was well acquainted with the private management company that controlled most of the resources available to Altgeld residents. She was also a frequent participant in various CHA resident groups, and she held an elected position in the development for three years, as block captain.

A: Do you go to CHA meetings?

R: Oh, yes.

A: What are they like? What do you think of them? What are the people like?

R: Well, the meetings, really, they don’t get anything done. I mean, we goes to the meeting; we voice our concerns; they let us talk to different representatives of CHA. OK. They always tell us that they’ll get back to us, and they never do.

A: So what specific kind of meetings are these?

R: The commissioner meetings we’re going to. And I go to the LAC meeting. Actually, I used to be a block captain, so I was involved with the LAC. So we meet about different things going on in the neighborhood, and really, we don’t achieve anything at the meetings. We don’t get anything out of those meetings.

A: Why don’t you?

R: Well, they tell us that they get our complaints and our concerns, but every time we look up, it’s another meeting a month later or two months later we go, and then it’s the same old, same old. And then when we do try to talk to the people and they say, “Well, you’ll hear from us,” we never do. We never do.

A: So what was your experience like being a block captain?

R: Oh, that was fun because I interacted with the neighbors, all these different folks that I didn’t know. You know, the kids. And then like I say, we would give them, like, lunches and stuff like the summer and school supplies and things like that with the kids. Like I say, I was more involved with the kids than with the parents, because we had a lot of working parents, and then the few that didn’t work, they didn’t never come out. So the kids did, so it was fun with the kids.

As I mentioned in chapter one, Regine’s PPS developed over time with the support of her local sociopolitical community.^* Her initial intuition directed her toward volunteering on the development to support young people and senior residents. But relationships with neighbors like Max Shaw, a nationally known environmental justice and public housing advocate, began to transform Regine’s sociopolitical engagement.

Max Shaw is the daughter of Harriet Shaw, a nationally known environmental justice advocate who was the founder of Environmental Justice Organization (EJO). When Harriet passed, Max took on the leadership of EJO and as a result developed a formidable political reputation in her own right. While I discuss EJO and Max Shaw in Chapter 5, what is important to know is that Max and everyone in EJO had an intentional ethic about bringing as many Altgeld residents into their political organizing work as possible. Whenever I came to the development, it was common to hear women reference Max or the EJO meetings when discussing the formation of their politics. Regine often looked to Max and EJO for guidance when it came to understanding the political issues of the day.

A: What kind of skills and knowledge are needed to participate in politics?

R: Politics . . . well, one thing you need some kind of education. You need education. That’s number one. And you need to understand English and reading, and you know what I’m saying, in politics. Because I don’t understand it all myself. I’m going to tell you that now, I don’t, ’cuz it’s a whole lot I don’t understand ’cuz I’m not all into it, you know what I’m saying? . . . But like I say, I listen to the news every day to try to get an understanding . . . it’s so depressing though. It’s so depressing.

A: Yeah, you have to be careful about listening to it all the time.

R: Yeah, it don’t make you don’t want to listen to it, but you still try to get, want to know what’s going on out here in this world too, you know. But no, I understand a little. I don’t understand a whole lot of it. And I’m being truthful, I don’t. And if I don’t I ask . . . I ask my mom. I ask either Max Shaw or different people that might know a little more than me.

As Regine continued to grow in her political knowledge, her political capacity, and her political imagination, her interpersonal relationships facilitated the development of a more liberatory PPS. For many of the respondents in the study, a site of more radical politics was regarding entitlements policy, specifically how state resources should be shared and disbursed among people living below the poverty line.

A: Are people treated equally in this society?

R: I don’t think so.

A: Why is that?

R: I think some people are and some people aren’t. Some people get a fair chance. Are you talking about all over or just out here?

A: Everywhere.

R: Well, I’m going to say out here, they have their picks. They choose their picks, who they want. And I don’t know, we don’t get a fair chance out here when it comes to maintenance and, like, people trying to get applications and with the company called You Can and things of that nature. So I know everybody not getting a fair, equal chance. I already know that from experience out here.

A: So who does get those opportunities?

R: They family members, stuff like that, somebody real close, best friends, and stuff like that. ’Cuz we see with our eyes, you know. . . .

A: Do people in government care about the people who live in Altgeld Gardens?

R: I don’t think they care. They should care, but I really don’t think they care.

A: Why don’t you think they care?

R: Because it’s a lot of things we need, like a lot of different programs they could put out here, build different facilities, give monies, you know, to have these kids off the streets. You know, do a clubhouse or something, you know, ’cuz every time . . . you know they have these little gym rooms out here, but now these kids got to be paying a dollar, two dollars to go in the building to play balls and stuff like that.

A: So to go in the park district building, they’ve got to pay?

R: They have to pay to play ball, because I have nephews out here, and they have to pay five dollars to play basketball, and I think that is ridiculous, you know. I think they need to open it up. They pay security or somebody to be up there, you know, where these kids play. The government, they got money; they can do that. They just sitting back right now, but they can make it real possible for our youth, ’cuz this our next generation, so you know a lot of them are getting killed. But if they open up and let some of this money loose so these kids can go in these places or build districts for them, you know, communities or clubhouses where they can go play in, then I think it would be a little less killing and fighting. Because they have something to do. Government, get the security, pay money for these people to watch these kids. So yeah.

A: Does working hard guarantee success?

R: Working hard . . . no, I don’t think it does. Working hard, you’re going to kill yourself. I feel it’s only what you make it. And working hard, no success . . . you making the company successful. They don’t care nothing about you. I experienced that with my job. They just let me know them companies don’t be behind you. So you work hard because you want to work hard. Only going to do what I’m supposed to. I’m not going to kill myself, which I did do, so I experienced that before. So no. It partly depend on what employer you work for. You know. But who I worked for, no. And I worked hard. And this what came out of it; I’m still injured, and I’m still going through this case with them.

A: You going through a case with who?

R: East Lake.

A: Like workers’ comp or something like that?

R: Mm-hmm.

A: Has CHA done enough to help you?

R: No. ’Cuz I have been interactive with CHA about getting my daughter and her son an apartment, and he got acute bronchitis where he sleeps on the floor, and since they moved us over here three years ago, we never had the central air. And I believe being on that floor, he never had bronchitis, too, till we moved here.

A: Why is he on the floor?

R: Where he gonna sleep?

A: What do you know about the Plan for Transformation?

R: Actually, I don’t know a whole lot about it. I only know from the things from what I hear, and I don’t know if that’s true. You know you hear things on the street.

A: What kind of things do you hear on the street about it?

R: Well, I’m hearing they missing $99 million they done put into the development! Now, I don’t know how true that is! And then I hear they supposed to hire Section 3 people, which would be like our children in the neighborhood. But like I say, they go they picks, the few they picks. Management stealing the money, yeah. That’s what I hear. I don’t know how true it is, but that’s what I hear.

A: Do you think you and other people in public housing have any impact on these issues?

R: I think we do. We complain about no jobs and this and that, but they not going to listen to people like us. I just really never thought that they did. I just never really thought it. And then being Black [chuckles briefly]. I just always thought that.

Because CHA residents sometimes work within the private management companies or have resident positions on CHA committees like the Board of Directors, in 2011 there was a powerful whisper network throughout the CHA public housing developments. These whisper networks regularly reported on the mismanagement of funds within the CHA much earlier than the major newspapers. Being privy to those whisper-network reports, in addition to regularly attending public CHA meetings, meant that Regine was acutely aware of the CHA operating budget; its public federal, state, and local funding; and the ways CHA spent that money. During our interview, she was clear that the poor should receive substantially more resources. Regine had a variety of ideas about how local tax dollars should be spent: more money should go to departments like parks and recreation so that city kids could have more access to healthy outlets, CHA residents should have the right of first refusal for all construction jobs on the developments, more money should go to public education, and more money should be used to get residents through higher education (or trade certification).

Indeed, Regine’s political viewpoint became increasingly more radical over the course of her years on the development. One example is Regine’s admission that it was up to her and the other Altgeld residents to provide meaningful and safe resources for the children who live in the development. Her willingness to look to extrasystemic strategies to meet her needs and those of her neighbors and their families is especially notable. Ultimately, it was Regine’s pushback against capitalist logics that insist “productivity” is the only means to moral goodness and a meaningful life that clarified her growing liberatory PPS.⁵⁵ She understood hard work does not always result in a just reward. Regine had clear-eyed expectations around what you will receive from a corporation (or government bureaucracy) regardless of your work ethic. Between the relationships within Altgeld Gardens that helped develop her cognitive liberation, and her personal experiences with injustice at the hands of CHA and other government bureaucracies throughout Chicago, her sociopolitical viewpoints skewed to the far left of the U.S. political spectrum.

Political imagination is not a static quality in individuals. Throughout the interviews, respondents recounted their experience of moving from a low to a neutral and eventually a high level of political imagination. Black feminist theory was central to parsing out how Black women could go from apathetic or alienated to a political imagination that allowed them to consider unconventional and more radical sociopolitical ideas. As Zenzele Isoke depicts throughout her work, Black women can develop higher levels of political imagination through a relational process focused on cognitive liberation via the creation of accessible home, social, and educational spaces:⁵⁶

Black women in American cities form sister-circles, girls’ groups, book clubs, create formal and informal networks in their schools and workplaces, and they open their homes, knock on doors, and send emails to form community organizations and unlikely community coalitions. . . . I argue that in communities that are struggling with racialized poverty, open and hostile misogyny and homophobia, and urban economic containment . . . they are intimate spaces that build the will to resist structural intersectionality. These are intimate spaces that make sustained public resistance possible. These are places where young black people (male, female, transgender, and non-gender identifying) learn that their voices and perspectives are valid, that their commitment to social justice is needed, and their sacrifices for political struggle are appreciated. Most importantly, these are spaces where they learn they are not crazy, but that their feelings of discontent, despair, and frustration have been produced by an extenuated living history of black racial subjugation and gendered racialization and not by individual deficiencies in mood, temperament, and bad (read pathological) behavior.⁵⁷

It is by developing relationships with their neighbors, attending community meetings, and cultivating a sense of belonging within a community, that the Black women in my study could develop a capacity for radical political imagination. The second axis of the PPS matrix is a visual representation of the spectrum of reported belonging to a sociopolitical community. On the low end of the spectrum of sociopolitical belonging are individuals who are completely, or almost completely, cut off from geographic or even digital community. These are people who have few to no friends or family members nearby and who spend most of their time alone or with a romantic partner or children (if they are not working).

People who had a general interest in sociopolitical issues and consumed news media, volunteered in their sociopolitical community, or took advantage of opportunities for political education had a neutral to high level of political imagination, despite their isolation. These folks could move in any direction on the PPS matrix as their sociopolitical belonging or political imagination grew. Respondents who could grow in political imagination but not sociopolitical belonging engaged in varying levels of political activity that focused on their unique and individual interests. On the other hand, people with high belonging and low political imagination would find work within their sociopolitical community especially salient or helpful. People with a visionary PPS were open to radical political ideas but were rarely substantially involved in the issues beyond political debates and discussions. As I will discuss later in the chapter, structural issues throughout Altgeld had a significant impact on which residents developed a sense of sociopolitical belonging in the Altgeld sociopolitical community.

The Spatial Realities of the PPS

The relationship I found between individuals with a more alienated PPS and spatial characteristics further illustrates the flexibility of the framework. The PPS framework might allow political scientists to explore how the politics of various groups are affected by traditional stimuli like political advertisements and nontraditional stimuli like music, dance, theater, or murals. The ability of the PPS model to explain how spatial characteristics affect the politics of an individual facilitates a fuller understanding of the politics of the Black women at the center of this study.

My data indicated that regular incidents of neighborhood violence or the chronic neglect and mismanagement of building infrastructure can skew the individual PPS toward the more disengaged end of the spectrum. The mechanisms of this process range from isolation that happens when a resident is afraid to leave their home, emotional fallout that leaves people too tired to even consider the future, and a singular focus on leaving public housing altogether, a focus that leaves no time for cultivating belonging or political imagination. Other spatial qualities, like the creation of apartment blocks near the bus route, the CHA administration, and businesses, can skew the individual PPS toward the more engaged end of the spectrum. These areas seemed to experience less violence because of the presence of rule-enforcing infrastructure. Violence generally was not performed near CHA bureaucracies because residents did not want to get kicked out of public housing.

Residents who lived in safer spaces, both old and new, veered toward the more engaged end of the spectrum. Their sociopolitical tools included activities like cleaning up their blocks, holding protests, planning community-wide programs, pushing back against the CHA, and planning field trips for the young people who lived in the development. The women who lived in these blocks were friends with a handful of neighbors and would bring newer neighbors along with them to community events. In short, something seemingly simple, like your apartment placement within the development, could have a radical effect not only on your sense of belonging but also on your emotional capacity to cultivate political imagination. It is important to note that there were women who had visible political engagement and lived on the more violent blocks within the development.

Other aspects of space, like the aesthetic qualities of the apartments and neighborhoods, can have a dramatic impact on how residents conceptualize and discuss their sense of political power. Redefining the Political examines what it means when residents understand power to be singularly organized in their individual body, and specifically what this means for the development of their PPS. Among the most significant conclusions of my project is that space matters deeply for the development of political identity and political engagement.⁵⁸ The impact of space goes beyond sociodemographic variables and reaches into those less easily quantified characteristics such as geographic boundaries, structural maintenance, benign neglect, aesthetic appearance, and interpersonal relationships, with both neighbors and various bureaucrats.

It is important to consider seriously the relational nature of politics, specifically in political engagement. It does not matter if we are discussing a traditional or quotidian idea of politics; generally, to participate within a sociopolitical community, you must be present; on the phone, in person, online, or in some other manner. Participating within a sociopolitical community is a key criteria for political engagement within Black feminist political frameworks.⁵⁹ The increasing potential for grassroots political work to facilitate access for all bodies of all abilities via material space and online and social media space means that politically necessary presence has an exponentially increasing number of forms. However, it is nearly impossible to be present if you do not feel safe. A loss of safety means you often no longer feel capable of speaking within, participating in, or being a part of the sociopolitical community.

A Black feminist criterion of the political requires an extrasystemic view of politics. It understands politics as something that can happen outside of traditional structures and institutions. Extrasystemic politics can include gossip about a particular manager resulting in their power being undermined. It could include a refusal to obey Robert’s Rules of Order in a public board meeting to strategically draw attention to your cause. It could even include planting rosebushes with thorns in a development that has banned resident gardening. A Black feminist conception of extrasystemic politics understands everyday habits, speech, and patterns as being a part of the broader makeup of an individual’s PPS. For an individual’s political engagement to be visible—and beyond that, politically meaningful—they must be able to interact with others. Isolated and paralyzed political engagement is absent any form of power.

Given that sociopolitical tools require interaction with others, when an individual suffers a violation that creates difficulty communicating with people in their sociopolitical community, not only does it cause a gross loss of integrity but sometimes it disables their sociopolitical tools altogether.⁶⁰ To put it succinctly, when you live among violence, your sociopolitical tools can become less and less visible until its existence becomes debatable. For people living in violent homes, neighborhoods, states, or countries, a significant part of their life is transformed through the loss of integrity; they no longer feel safe. Losing safety means that, politically, there are entire groups of people who no longer feel like they can have visible sociopolitical tools. A democracy with segments of the population restricted in this way is not a fully functioning democracy.

My interview with Kate, a new resident of the Altgeld Gardens and Murray Homes, offered an example of how violence can foreclose on individual potential for local community belonging. Months before our interview, Kate’s son was jumped and beaten up by more than twenty children. Kate also witnessed multiple shootings and beatings around her home. Because of these violent experiences, she requested an emergency transfer to move her and her children out of the Altgeld Gardens and Murray Homes. Without a transfer approval from the CHA, Kate couldn’t move to another public housing development in Chicago. Because of those violent experiences, she fell into a deep depression and could not find steady work after she moved to Altgeld. Although she requested help from CHA multiple times, nothing was done about the physical and emotional violence she and her family encountered. As a result, Kate felt stuck in a neighborhood where she felt unsafe in almost every way.

Violence can shut down individual capacity for political engagement. As Katherine McKittrick argues, “Racism and sexism are not simply bodily or identity based; racism and sexism are also spatial acts and illustrate black women’s geographic experiences and knowledges as they are made possible through domination.”⁶¹ The violence is inscribed into the geography of the neighborhood, which works to restrict and reshape the political habits of the people who live there. When an individual is entrenched with fear that they can or will be harmed at any moment, even attending to basic needs like getting food and going to work can be strenuous. Women I interviewed spoke about having bullets fly through their homes and police running through their houses in pursuit of a suspect. The home space was not a guaranteed place of safety or sociopolitical belonging.

Women who were aware they lacked a sense of belonging and support seemed to be isolated and expressed a diminished quality of life. Because Kate experienced multiple forms of violence, was relatively new to the development, and was without sociopolitical community or institutional support, her sociopolitical tools were on the less visible end of the spectrum. However, her PPS was not absent political imagination.

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

K: I vote. I haven’t participated in any political activities out here. I haven’t gotten involved in any political activities out here, and I don’t know if it’s because they . . . well, that’s not true. The LAC, the Advisory Council, has little forums and things, and I just attended the CHA listening forum they had. . . .

A: So do you think you would participate in LAC activities again?

K: Well, they address the concerns of the residents and . . . I don’t know how many times they may post it for what they’re doing. But they do send out things saying what they—like this past summer they sent out something that they had wanted Comcast . . . they were monopolizing us with just Comcast, and so they want another hearing for us to be able to choose the providers. And so they wanted us to come out for that, but I didn’t go because I don’t have cable. And I won’t be interested in having cable any time soon, so I didn’t participate in that. But normally I pick and choose.

A: Just according to what you think fits your life and applies to you?

K: Yes.

A: You said you didn’t get involved in any political activities here, but have you done political activities elsewhere?

K: I helped a friend of mine. He was running for Illinois state representative.

A: OK, and what was that experience like for you?

K: It was interesting. Kind of get to see the inside of how it operates. You know, you’re normally on the outside being a voter, but this way you’re communicating with people, you’re asking them to be involved, and you’re asking them to sign petitions and things like that. So just more community activity.

Kate chose to not involve herself with political activities in the development. She generally didn’t speak to her neighbors or go to community events. However, as Betsy Sinclair noted in her study, friendship networks outside of the residential neighborhood often facilitate political behavior.⁶²

Because Kate kept in contact with a friend who ran for Illinois state representative, she took part in some get-out-the-vote activities. In various ways, Kate could be defined as alienated because her political engagement did not include most of the traditional political participation behaviors. However, her PPS (see Figure 2.1) occasionally participated in traditional political activities when asked by friends. Significantly, she also envisioned herself capable of one day leaving public housing and changing public housing policy for the better.

Figure 2.1Kate’s Political Possible-Self

Political Imagination and the Ability to Cultivate Political Possibilities

The Black feminist definitional criterion (BFDC) of politics and the political put forward in this book centers the effort to create sociopolitical possibilities as a core component of recognizing the political from the nonpolitical. As I noted in the Introduction, the Black feminist definitional criterion of politics understands politics as the work of trying to create (or limit) possibilities (for better or worse) within or around the substantive reality of the world around you. By centering the creation of sociopolitical possibilities, the Black feminist foundation of this project helps us understand political imagination as vital to any politics or political work. Nina Eliasoph defines political imagination as “a quality of mind necessary to grasp the constant interplay between our personal lives and the political world.”⁶³ To create sociopolitical possibility, one must do the critical work of imagining those possibilities.

When Nina Eliasoph points to political imagination as the key to understanding that “the personal is political,” she is reminding us that political people, structures, and institutions only have power because of the sociopolitical norms (embedded within everyday life) that make that power seem normal, palpable, and sometimes even desirable.⁶⁴ It is via the work of building points of connection and belonging to sociopolitical community, as well as developing political imagination, that the individual can move through the political domains making up the PPS matrix. The Tenant Services meetings within the CHA provide a good example of political imagination and political belonging as central to political identity formation. Frequently, residents used the meetings as a space to protest potential amendments to housing policy or injustices that touched their lives. For example, observed differences between the treatment of residents who lived in high-rise developments and those who lived in walk-up developments (like the Altgeld Gardens Developments) were frequently brought up during these meetings.

According to tenants at Tenant Services meetings, high-rise residents were under a higher degree of surveillance than tenants who lived in other types of developments. Below is a vignette from my field notes from a CHA CAC meeting in April 2011:

At this point, the floor is opened up to tenant questions and concerns. There seems to be a [consistent] issue with destruction of property [within CHA public housing developments]. As a result, a resident [justifiably] asked “what happens when somebody breaks the rules?” The response from Mr. Smith [an unidentified person who seemed to be in charge] was that “residents don’t have the privilege of knowing what the punishments are, but they do happen.” Needless to say, this struck me as a dodge, and the meeting attendees were visibly unsatisfied with this response, but there is no further explanation of the issue. It strikes me as strange that there are no clearly defined set of punishments for broken or stolen property within the ACOP (the CHA public housing development rule book) rules. Notably, actually getting a copy of the ACOP was a fruitless endeavor for me and many of the CHA residents I spoke to. It seemed that this pretty much allowed the CHA to do as little or as much as they want for any individual case with little to no oversight.

The next tenant had a concern with the exclusion list at Lake Park Place.^*

According to the resident, if one person is evicted from the development, their entire family can no longer enter any CHA buildings. According to this tenant, an eight-year-old girl, whose mother was evicted from a CHA development, was banned from visiting her friends [the children the little girl grew up with]. The situation was so extreme that the little girl was asked to leave a slumber party being held by one of her friends, in the middle of the night. The eight-year-old had to wait across the street from the development for her mother to come pick her up. The resident reporting this incident was incredulous this happened and found it completely ridiculous. Mr. Smith directed Jane Doe, of CHA Asset Management, to answer this question (interestingly, she was the only CHA staffer fully introduced to the room, I wondered why that was. Was she the only person CHA wanted individuals to be able to access and contact?) Doe said that “the reality is, if you are kicked out, you cannot be on the property.” Smith followed up by saying, “adults make decisions that affect children and cause them to suffer all the time, the adults need to be more responsible.” This struck me as incredibly paternalistic and cruel. There was lots of grumbling from meeting attendees, once again, they were visibly unhappy with an answer from CHA.

Lake Park Place was a high-rise public housing development, I was surprised to realize CHA did not demolish all of the high-rise buildings, as they were reputed to have done.

The tenants then began to discuss the differences between the treatment of high-rise residents [like Lake Park Place] and walk-up residents [like the row houses of Altgeld Gardens, where residents had private access to their apartments and their guests did not have to show ID]. High-rise residents were under a higher level of surveillance, they had to go through intense security to enter and leave their homes, the high-rise residents believed this was unfair.

Interestingly, the CHA seemed to be highly invested in monitoring the social behaviors of residents, but they did not want to take responsibility or liability for the maintenance of property, resident safety, the quality of apartment rehab or repair, etc.

High-rise residents (and their guests) were required to show government-issued identification to enter the building, and in the absence of identification, guests could not visit resident apartments. High-rise residents consistently complained that this was unfair, that it constituted unnecessary surveillance, and that they should have greater freedom to come and go as they pleased. While on first pass this seems to be a relatively minor issue, it is an example of Eliasoph’s public-spirited conversation.⁶⁵ The residents were concerned with how these surveillance policies affected them individually, but they were also concerned with how they affected everyone who lived in high-rise public housing in Chicago. When residents discussed these issues, they almost always framed them as issues of justice: as legal lease holders, they should have full access to their places of residence in the way they deem appropriate.

Over time, I observed the Tenant Services meetings to be a space of political learning and political engagement for the people who live in Chicago public housing. The meetings served as a sociopolitical training ground for residents: they learned how to speak in front of large groups of people and which communication strategies worked to effectively shift policy. During public discourse at CHA public meetings, residents tried to meet the expectations of both white and Black middle-class CHA Board members. The meetings served as spaces where residents from a wide spectrum of neighborhoods learned about the issues and concerns they shared. Many residents became regulars at the meetings and showed up early to take part in networking and informal information dissemination, where they made plans and strategized. Individuals shared stories with other residents about effective political strategies when combating the management companies, security guards, or even CHA itself.

After consistently taking part in the meetings, residents could make linkages between their individual struggles and the political power they held. Bearing witness to residents from other developments as they articulated their vision for a healthy and whole life within their public housing developments, helped new and old residents develop sociopolitical possibilities for their developments. By observing the creation of sociopolitical possibilities—that is, articulating their grievances, expectations, and dreams about life in the development—residents cultivated one another’s political imagination. Political imagination allowed them to see how the connection between their quality of life and the political world could make a better daily life possible.

For some residents, attending public CHA meetings deepened their sense of belonging to Chicago public housing sociopolitical communities. The experience of attending public CHA meetings sometimes led to an increased capacity for political imagination. As a result, over the course of the year I was in the field, I watched a handful of Black women who were residents at Altgeld Gardens move across the PPS matrix as their sociopolitical identities shifted, changed, and sometimes even grew. Some women went from a “nonvisible politics” to a “community politics.” Other women went from the “alienated” PPS domain to a “visionary” PPS domain. As scholars of women’s community organizing, public housing activism, and Black women’s political organizing have consistently shown, individuals often develop political capacity and political identity when they feel they belong to sociopolitical community and are given the tools to develop political imagination.⁶⁶

Applying the PPS Matrix

Central to the PPS framework is its capacity for movement and flexibility. It presents political identity and political participation as a spectrum rather than a set of fixed binary choices. But within the spectrum of choices, the matrix also allows the individual PPS to grow and change. Someone like Kate, for example, could start with a visionary PPS and move toward a liberatory PPS. If Kate continued nurturing her political imagination and developed a sense of belonging to her neighborhood community, her desire to transform the violence in her neighborhood could absolutely push her into a resistance-oriented liberatory PPS. But potential changes within the PPS are not limited to the horizontal or vertical axis. A transformation could also happen on a diagonal axis. If we use the example of Kate again, her PPS could transform from a visionary PPS to a community PPS (see Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2How Kate’s PPS Could Change over Time

Kate could become particularly inspired by a political campaign (for example, when former president Barack Obama, who was once a volunteer in Kate’s neighborhood, Altgeld Gardens, endorsed Joe Biden during the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign). If Kate volunteered for Obama organizers or the Biden campaign, she would spend time with other people from her residential neighborhood, as well as the wider South Side of Chicago. Acquiring new exposure to different people and places, as well as volunteering for a successful U.S. presidential campaign, could be enough to increase Kate’s sense of belonging and commitment to the community of Chicago. An increase in her sense of belonging and a decrease in her political imagination would move Kate diagonally into a neutral PPS.

Becoming involved with traditional political engagement activities (volunteering for a political campaign, voting, etc.) could decrease an individual’s political imagination. Individuals who consider engagement with the state to be the only legitimate form of political engagement, limit their political engagement accordingly. Those who are solely invested in traditional political engagement cannot, and will not, imagine radical alternatives beyond the state. By definition, their political imagination is limited. A decrease in an individual’s political imagination, alongside an increase in political belonging, would make their PPS neutral (as illustrated in Figure 2.2).

It is possible that after the 2020 U.S. presidential election Kate could have lost interest in national politics because the person who drew her in (former president Obama) was no longer a national politician. It is possible to see how, without the push and pull of a national U.S. presidential election, her political imagination could continue to decrease. But if she developed relationships with her neighbors while she was volunteering for the Biden campaign in 2020, it is possible that her sense of belonging could increase. A high sense of belonging and a lowered political imagination could ultimately leave Kate with a community PPS.

Conclusion

The movement and flexibility of the PPS is made possible by the clear articulation of the connection between each domain of the PPS matrix and (1) local (or sometimes digital) community and (2) state power. The theory of the PPS is built on a foundational understanding that the politics of any individual, A, within any context, B, cannot be understood without a clear picture of A’s relationship to B.

Women who had higher levels of belonging expressed more neutral levels of political imagination. Women who had a more liberatory PPS had higher levels of belonging and political imagination. However, there were few respondents in this category. Individuals with a high sense of belonging tended either to be very social and extroverted or to have lived in the development for ten or more years. A person with a community PPS developed a higher sense of political imagination by joining local organizations, volunteering in their local community, signing up for political education, being mentored by elders in their community, or participating in social, political, or capital protest.

The growth of individual political imagination is facilitated by the growth of cognitive liberation. An individual develops a liberatory PPS when their political imagination understands community-based political power. The PPS matrix allows for a holistic political understanding of the individual. Over a lifetime, individual political identity and individual political engagement will shift, change, and grow. By making flexible movement throughout the PPS matrix possible, the PPS framework allows for a more holistic political picture of marginalized individuals, and marginalized groups writ large.

* When the CHA initiated the demolitions of deteriorating buildings in Altgeld Gardens as part of their Plan for Transformation, CHA began offering residents vouchers they could use to leave the development. The Section 8 vouchers allowed residents to apply for market-rate apartments and have a portion of their rent paid by CHA.

* It is hard to know exactly which chemical spill the respondents were referring to here. Unfortunately, there have been a number of environmental accidents near Altgeld Gardens. However, I believe they might have been referencing “a small explosion inside a stainless steel hose joining a tanker truck to a storage tank on the property of Chicago Specialties Inc., a chemical manufacturer near East 115th Street and South Champlain Avenue” (Ferkenhoff, 1997). The spill caused a cloud of sulfuric acid that resulted in hundreds of people being evacuated from the area.

† “CAPS . . . brings the police, the community, and other City agencies together to identify and solve neighborhood crime problems, rather than simply react to their symptoms after the fact. Problem solving at the neighborhood level is supported by a variety of strategies, including neighborhood-based beat officers; regular Beat Community Meetings involving police and residents; extensive training for both police and community; more efficient use of City services that impact crime; and new technology to help police and residents target crime hot spots” (Chicago Police Department 2018).

* Helmed by Gautreaux, a group of public housing residents charged that the CHA and Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) violated the Fourteenth Amendment by concentrating over ten thousand public housing units in isolated Black neighborhoods. A federal judge agreed three years later, and, in 1976, the Supreme Court did as well.

* “The Politics of Homemaking” is a theoretical concept developed by Zenzele Isoke, who defines the politics of homemaking as follows:

Homemaking, as an affective form of resistance, involves more than just being attentive to and providing care to individuals. It also requires building an enduring affective relationship to the physical environment. It is the imaginative political work that transforms the built environment of the city into a home: a place of belonging, a place of remembrance, and a place of resistance. Homemaking, then encompasses black women’s efforts to build the will to resist the alienating and dehumanizing practices and ideologies that continue to ghettoize and minoritize black people. (Isoke, “Politics of Homemaking,” 119)

* The politics of invisibility is a concept developed by Cathy J. Cohen in Democracy Remixed. For more, please see Chapter 4 and the subsection titled “The Politics of Invisibility within a Sociopolitical Community,” pages 128–133.

* East Lake Management Company was one of a handful of private management firms CHA hired to manage their developments.

* See pages 15–18.

* In high-rise developments at CHA public housing, “exclusion lists” determined who was banned from the apartments.