6

CONCLUSION

Introduction

In Redefining the Political, I am continuing the Black feminist project toward a more expansive vision of politics and the political¹—a vision that considers the unique and stigmatized intersections of the marginalized in addition to race and gender.² This framework of sociopolitical community provide a framework for understanding how people with multiple intersecting high-stigma identities when cocreating community based political power. As Joy James points out, any set of intellectual ideas grounded in Black feminism must make central the practice of community building.³

Not unique to, but nevertheless a strong characteristic of, black feminisms are expressions of responsibility and accountability that place community as a cornerstone in the lives and works of black females. Community in fact is understood as requiring and sustaining intergenerational responsibilities that foster the well-being of family, individuals and as people, male and female. Even if the idea is discredited by the dominant culture, the knowledge that individual hope, sanity and the development come through relationship in community resonates in black politics.⁴

As several Black feminist political theorists have argued, a commitment to community has been and continues to be a foundational aspect of Black sociopolitical life.⁵ The function of the Black feminist definitional criterion (BFDC) of politics and the political is to recognize the PPS and sociopolitical tools of Black diasporic people globally, as they occur in the world. This capacity is rooted in the BFDC’s capacity to recognize and document the real political work of building intentional local sociopolitical community. An expanded BFDC of politics and the political must also consider the way an individual’s socioeconomic status and culture in the United States can often overdetermine how they are treated by the government and other political practitioners, according to the identity politics of their communities.⁶ Additional definitional criteria of politics and the political should also consider the intersectional stigma of gender identity, nationality, first language, disability/ability, neurodiversity, ambulation, and sexual orientation, to name a few.⁷

Political scientist Zenzele Isoke (2013) argued that the key terms used to describe Black lived experiences and Black politics frequently fail to accurately depict Black marginalized communities writ large and Black marginalized women living below the poverty line specifically.⁸ Because of this language dilemma, scholars like Michael Dawson, Cathy J. Cohen, Zenzele Isoke, Michele Berger, Rhonda Y. Williams, Melissa Harris-Perry, Lester Spence, and Michael Hanchard, among many others, continue to develop theoretical frameworks and conceptual tools meant to facilitate the accurate documentation of nontraditional (extrasystemic) political engagement within marginalized Black communities.⁹

Throughout the book, I have focused on a central question: What sociopolitical concepts and frameworks are capable of recognizing and documenting the styles of political engagement, political rebellion, and political identity creation used by marginalized Black women within the United States? Black feminist and Black politics scholars have worked hard to develop and publish a clear understanding of the Black sociopolitical world.¹⁰ The goal of this project was to continue the work of these scholars via a focus on marginalized Black women living below the poverty line. Through the use of Black feminist political theory, Black politics scholarship, existing conceptions of extrasystemic politics, and original ethnographic data, I developed two theoretical frameworks: (1) a BFDC of politics and the political and (2) the PPS. Both theoretical frameworks are a reconsideration of the holistic political identity of individuals within marginalized Black populations.

I argued that to fully understand the sociopolitical power of Black women living below the poverty line, studies must build upon the existing scholarship.¹¹ Developing additional theoretical and conceptual tools capable of fully seeing, analyzing, and describing the vast nontraditional, and extrasystemic, political expression of the Black sociopolitical world provides a deeper look at the multiple Black publics—in particular, the enclave public sphere of marginalized Black populations within the United States.¹²

Both frameworks feature (1) the flexibility to recognize the theories and concepts developed by scholars whose work precedes mine and (2) the capacity to facilitate the recognition of traditional, extrasystemic, and subversive sociopolitical tools in the field, to support continued theory generation specific to marginalized Black folks throughout the United States. It is critical to develop clear conceptual categories and theoretical frameworks capable of seeing a politics that often goes unseen.¹³ I argue that the PPS can help develop a fuller understanding of the sociopolitical tools and political identities of marginalized Black women in the United States who live below the poverty line. The PPS framework facilitates additional clarity through its rejection of rigidness and its flexibility in embracing differing spatial realities, as well as a variety of socio-political-cultural contexts. However, it is also analytically precise enough to be useful to academics and other political practitioners.

There is a need for more culturally relevant and flexible understandings of political identity. Additionally, there is a necessity for a theoretical framework capable of continuing the process of bringing the many expanded understandings of politics and the political in conversation with one another across disciplines and diverse creative forms. I developed the BFDC to facilitate this interdisciplinary process, as well as to assist in the recognition of extrasystemic politics (or political engagement) when in the field.

The PPS is made up of two concepts: (1) a sense of belonging to a sociopolitical community and (2) political imagination. In Redefining the Political, I delved into several respondent case studies to demonstrate why studying respondent sociopolitical belonging to a residential local community is deeply important. It also matters whether an individual respondent articulates a sense of political imagination. A clear and holistic understanding of the politics of marginalized Black populations cannot be achieved without first understanding spatial context, sociopolitical community, and the public spheres the populations of interest have access to.

Ultimately, the book argues, belonging and political imagination are two key factors in accurately recognizing and documenting individual political identity within marginalized Black communities. Through the study of Black feminist scholarship within the social sciences, Black politics scholarship, and an original ethnography of thirty-one Black women who live (or used to live) in Chicago public housing, I found Black women living below the poverty line in the United States who developed a subversive and extrasystemic politics. Their politics were facilitated via informal information dissemination within their local sociopolitical community, as well as intercommunity political education. Through community-based political education, respondents enabled the cocreation of individual political identity and the capacity to move from one PPS domain to another.

In the two empirical chapters (Chapters 4 and 5), I discussed what the PPS looked like in the context of the Altgeld Gardens sociopolitical community. I used each case as a study illustrating the theoretical frameworks I developed in this book. Chapter 4 focused on the axis of political imagination and the role pleasure, intellect, and alienation play in understanding the individual PPS. I argued 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.

In Chapter 5, I considered the role of public housing as a Black enclave public sphere. Altgeld Gardens functioned as a sociopolitical community where some respondents felt they could belong. Specifically, this chapter focused on the y axis of the PPS matrix, the PPS representation of individual sociopolitical belonging. Throughout my research on the politics of marginalized Black 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, respondents needed to feel they belonged to a residential neighborhood or a group of people living in their local community.

In this concluding chapter, I walk through what this work of Black feminist political theory adds to the study of U.S. politics and its understanding of the sociopolitical lives of marginalized Black women living below the poverty line. From there, I discuss the eight key findings of my research. Finally, I briefly discuss whether this work ultimately matters and what work I am leaving for future scholars to accomplish.

The Contributions This Project Has Made to U.S. Politics Research

Redefining the Political has contributed to theories of political identity formation by developing theoretical frameworks capable of helping scholars recognize and document the sociopolitical identities of people within marginalized Black communities. The first theoretical framework, the PPS, illustrates a more expansive context through which to understand dynamics between local sociopolitical communities and individual political imagination. When thinking about political behavior as a matrix instead of a static binary, political researchers have room to consider a wider range of activities and behaviors as political. As was demonstrated in this project, the PPS allows us to understand what traditional political behavior studies could not initially see: politics is just as much about cultural forms of engagement in the public sphere as it is about out how we have traditionally understood the formal work of democracies.¹⁴

Key to my findings is how critical it is to develop a sense of belonging to a local sociopolitical residential community and to actively cultivate political imagination. Belonging could function as a stand-in for membership in a sociopolitical community, as it indicates a level of investment and commitment to entities beyond the self—a quality that is key to the relational nature of politics and the political. While a respondent may not be able to respond to traditional politics questions like “Who is your congressional representative?” many of the respondents I interviewed in Chicago knew and had even engaged previously with their local alderman or their neighborhood block captain. These neighborhood-level expressions of politics are important to measure when studies continue to demonstrate how pressed for time and energy individuals living in poverty are.¹⁵ If we want to understand the politics of marginalized Black communities, we must understand to whom and to what they are committed. Ultimately, I found that respondents who had experienced multiple forms of violence and also lacked interpersonal support seemed to develop an isolated PPS almost entirely focused on their individual future outcomes.

Membership within a local sociopolitical community can and should be understood as a type of political power. I suggest that the sociopolitical membership of Black women living in poverty helped respondents develop a politics of self and community governance. The sociopolitical education of the respondents I interviewed placed a high value on developing the ability to navigate government institutions and to navigate their communities safely. Even those who felt most victimized by their surroundings expressed a politics of self-governance that dictated how they chose to show up in the world. For respondents who faced simultaneous oppression in the public and private spheres, their perceived ability to self-govern was a critical source of power and efficacy building that shaped the personal and political arc of their lives.

Last but not least, this research meaningfully contributes to a greater understanding of key concepts like extrasystemic politics and sociopolitical community. In the previous chapters, I outlined the connection between sociopolitical communities and power. That is, you cannot have one without the other. To have power is to have the capacity to act on your own volition and to compel others to act. Being a member of a sociopolitical community allows an individual to act politically and to compel others to act within a sociopolitical framework. In short, within a democratic context, membership within a sociopolitical community can be a form of power, assuming you have the political imagination to make it so.

The theoretical development of these two conceptual categories (belonging and political imagination) is crucial when considering power and oppression.¹⁶ While it would be easy to say the respondents in this study had no power, politically or otherwise, that would be disingenuous at best. The better question to ask is what kind of power, if any, these women have. By assessing whether they have power and then defining power through their own words and perspectives, I was able to gather a more nuanced set of political criteria, sensitive to the context of their lived reality and subsequently their everyday politics. The respondents described their power as the ability to direct their daily lives. It is an autonomy that allowed them to decide how they raised their children, whom they spent time with, and what they ate, even within a sociopolitical context that frequently demanded otherwise.¹⁷ With this in mind, next I consider the eight central takeaways from my research in the field, the archives and past scholarship.

Key Findings

First, I found that spatial characteristics like violence, isolation, interpersonal relationships, and an individual sense of power and self-governance over residential space can have a significant impact on the look and feel of an individual’s sociopolitical tools and political identity.

Second, in the BFDC of politics and the political, I argue that politics and the political must be defined in relationship to power. But, as Iris Marion Young persuasively argued, politics and the political must also be understood as relational.¹⁸ My ethnographic data confirmed that the relationality of politics and the political requires that they happen within a community context.

Third, Black women continue to resist sociopolitical oppression at every opportunity, in spite of, and sometimes because of, their many sites of intersectional stigma. Political scientist Zenzele Isoke explains this dynamic via an exploration of the inner character of Black women’s sociopolitical tools, a set of behaviors and political experiences that she calls resistance politics:¹⁹

Resistance politics are deeply spatialized and rooted in the politics of collective memory. They are realized through the intentional creation of social space in which activists revise and reformulate narratives of black political resistance. . . . Through testimony, truth-telling and spontaneous communal storytelling, black women imbue the ailing physical and political infrastructure of the city with meaning and instigate counter-hegemonic forms of social action. They actively create geographies of resistance by mobilizing disparate pockets of the black communities (i.e., black queers, hip hop heads, anti-violence activists, and antipoverty activists) to mitigate the interlocking effects of black heteropatriarchy and white economic hegemony.²⁰

Black feminist scholars regularly point to the work of storytelling, institutional memory, guardianship of ancestral history, recordkeeping, community creation, volunteering, and community education as central sociopolitical tools to and for Black women and their communities throughout the Afro-diaspora.²¹ Many ethnographic and qualitative projects point to the political and social role Black women play within their communities all over the world.²² So much so, Keisha-Khan Perry noted in her study of Brazilian social movements that “Black women shape the everyday and structural conditions of those living ‘below the asphalt.’”²³ In other words, Black women across the Afro-diaspora serve as a key and binding tie, holding their communities together via political work made invisible by the mainstream public sphere. Isoke’s description of resistance politics serves as a poignant reminder of the way Black women have historically and contemporaneously engaged in sociopolitical tools that elude traditional definitions of politics and the political.²⁴

While I was in the field, I regularly found Black women engaged in sociopolitical tactics like storytelling, informal information dissemination, and a “politics of homemaking.” This politics of homemaking prioritized the creation of sociopolitical power via self-governance and the reclamation of Black women’s right to make their homes a site of beauty, comfort, sociopolitical consciousness-raising, community building, and mutual aid.^*25 Similarly, my experience interviewing respondents in the field reified Terrion L. Williamson’s assertion that storytelling is a methodology of Black life.²⁶ Thus, the Black feminist theoretical foundations of this project require that I acknowledge the unique intersectional position of poor Black women living in Chicago public housing and the way those identities can, have, and likely will continue to shape their sociopolitical tools.

Fourth, mainstream feminists, Black feminists, and Black politics scholars have argued for the last few decades that there is a need to continue the work of expanding the definitions, and indeed our entire conceptualization, of what constitutes politics and the political.²⁷ In Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty, Nancy Naples argues that contemporary definitions of politics in the U.S. political mainstream only serve to obscure, and indeed erase, the politics of women, and women of color in particular.

When we adopt a definition of politics that is limited to voting behavior, membership in political clubs or parties, and running for public office, we obscure the political practice of community workers, the grassroots warriors. Since much of the community workers’ activity occurred outside the formal political establishment, traditional measures underestimate the extent of their political participation. Many of the resident community workers I interviewed rarely engaged in electoral politics, especially through established political parties, although many participated in voter-registration drives. Few expressed an interest in running for public office. Rather, they challenged the authority of city and state agencies, landowners and developers, and police and public-school officials. They maintained a close watch over the actions of elected officials to ensure that the interests of their communities were served. Furthermore, they were vocal participants in community-based protests against racism and other forms of discrimination in their neighborhoods.²⁸

The erasure of the politics of women of color is not simply about the everyday acts that make up individual sociopolitical tools, although they are a part of it. It is also about a consistent theme that shows up time and time again in some of the research done about communities of poor women of color and women of color writ large; in short, there is a belief that poor Black people do not participate in mainstream politics.²⁹ However, as political scientist Michele Berger argues, “commonsense” models of politics do not represent the politics of all U.S. citizens accurately:

The idea that all participation comes from general self-interest is a model that does not resonate with women’s forms of participation and reasons for participation (Acklesberg 1988). Women’s involvement in charitable organizations to community groups has been an important part of women’s political landscape (Cottonmouths 1987; Naples 1984).³⁰

Still, electoral idioms that say “you vote with your feet” or “you vote with your pocketbook” are all based on the same premise; as Spence argues, the U.S. neoliberal political framework only values how much money the individual can produce via their “human capital.”³¹ But scholars like Naples show that “women community workers . . . view citizenship as something achieved in community and for the benefit of the collectivity rather than as an individual possession.”³² Similarly, Berger argues that “community work captures a more-comprehensive spectrum of American women, and it potentially provides an in-depth mapping of informal political participation.”³³ Whether Black feminist scholars are studying the sociopolitical impact of Black women in Chicago, Newark, or Brazil, the conclusion remains the same: the political work of Black women is rooted in a community context beginning in the local residential neighborhood.³⁴

Black and gender studies professor Terrion L. Williamson argues that the central terms of U.S. mainstream political culture fundamentally fail to accurately depict marginalized communities writ large, especially Black women living below the poverty line.

Scandalize My Name is thus an inquiry into the representability of black social life primarily by way of poor and working-class black women and the narratives that have come to define them in public culture. . . . I consider how the logics of representation, coded by terms such as “value,” “visibility,” “citizenship,” “morality,” “respectability,” and “responsibility,” necessarily fail to account for the reality of black lived experience.³⁵

What is particularly important about Williamson’s intervention is that it lays bare how the language of U.S. political culture writ large, words like “citizenship,” “responsibility,” and “respectability,” fails to adequately map onto the sociopolitical everyday lives of Black women. Redefining the Political continues the legacy of Black politics and Black feminist scholarships, in their work to continue correcting the colonialist impulses underlying the urge to apply a one-size-fits-all set of political descriptors and theories to a diverse set of groups regardless of their socio-political-cultural histories and contexts.³⁶ It seeks to create an opportunity for political practitioners to stop and ask themselves if their political language choices are truly representative of the political languages used by the communities they are embedded in or doing outreach to.

The colonialism embedded within mainstream U.S. political and academic cultures becomes ever more important when taking into consideration arguments made by Michael Hanchard.³⁷ He contends that the nontraditional aspects of Black sociopolitical tools, and the sociopolitical tools of most 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 people who wanted to participate in any public, let alone an explicitly political, sphere.

The condition of spatial and formal exclusion from a polity has been a hallmark of most of African descended and aboriginal populations of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand from the moment of conquest and enslavement up until the granting of formal legal rights and spatial reserves (reservations and land grants).³⁸

Therefore, Hanchard argues, Black people throughout the diaspora, as well as Indigenous and Latinx communities, have had to adopt at least some nontraditional sociopolitical tools to access the power needed to shift and change their communities in the way they desire.³⁹

Exclusion from the polis and polity in several societies led black political actors to pursue politics and the political in spaces deemed “extra-political” or “apolitical.” One of the commonalities of the inception of black politics across the Americas, Europe, as well as in nationalist struggle in Africa was the utilization for political purposes of spaces designed and classified as “social” or “cultural” in the spheres of the dominant. Lunchroom sit-ins, for example, brought together members of a state recognized political community (whites with individual voting rights who managed and serviced those lunch counters) with members of a political community not sanctioned by the state (civil rights activists, some of whom were officially sanctioned by the state to fully participate in formal politics). Those lunch counters (and for Brazil and South Africa, the streets of São Paulo and Sharpeville) became sites for disputation over the right to consume in specific public spaces, which in itself was premised upon prior political and social exclusion. Yet neither lunch counters nor the retail stores housing them were intended for political disputation.⁴⁰

In the same vein as Hanchard, Keisha-Khan Perry notes that in Brazil, “Black women are celebrated for their role in maintaining Afro-Brazilian culture and religious traditions.”⁴¹ But as a result, there is an assumption that Black woman who live in poor neighborhoods “lack the political sophistication needed to organize social movements.”⁴² Throughout the diaspora, Afro-descended people have had to contend with a complicated set of assumptions around their ability to entertain and create cultural and religious artifacts, while also believing that they do not have the political wherewithal to engage in traditional or mainstream political engagement.

However, the Black sociopolitical world does engage in politics and the political; it is a political practice that understands, as Michael Dawson argues, that their sociopolitical fate is intrinsically linked with Black people throughout their country, and sometimes Afro-descended people globally.⁴³ Black feminist political scientist Evelyn Simien astutely notes, “The bottom line is this: the conceptualization of black political behavior must be determined, in part, by an appreciation of the lived experience and the political objectives of both African American women and men.”⁴⁴ Ultimately, definitional criteria of politics and the political flexible enough to fit a diverse set of socio-cultural-economic-ethnic-sexual-gendered experiences help political practitioners to accurately assess the political practices of marginalized communities. Theorists interested in quotidian politics have done important work that recognizes the extrasystemic political practices of Black folks living in poverty.⁴⁵ As political scientist Michael Hanchard notes, the “explication of quotidian politics serves as a corrective to political and cultural analysis that reduces all politics to the state or macroeconomic factors”; in other words, politics is about more than direct engagement with state institutions.⁴⁶

Fifth, the study of quotidian politics has played a significant role in the development of my work.⁴⁷ However, my capacity to create research centered on extrasystemic definitions of politics and the political is also due to history and anthropology scholars who made significant contributions to the study of nontraditional politics⁴⁸—in particular, the ways the extrasystemic has shaped and been shaped via the intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation, and class.⁴⁹ As Dietlind Stolle, Marc Hooghe, and Michele Micheletti note, the emergence of nontraditional political practices has been well documented in other disciplines (e.g., James C. Scott’s and Robin D. G. Kelley’s individual work around infrapolitics).⁵⁰ Thus, political practitioners cannot exclude nontraditional, infrapolitic, hidden transcript, quotidian politics from close study and analysis.⁵¹ But more than that, as Hanchard, Kelley, and Isoke clarify, the Black diasporic sociopolitical experience has been so specific, political practitioners are unable to limit sociopolitical interactions with the Black sociopolitical world to elections and cultural engagement.⁵² Kelley argues that, while both are needed, they do not make up the totality of the Black American political experience:

We need to break away from traditional notions of politics. We must not only redefine what is “political” but question a lot of common ideas about what “authentic” movements and strategies of resistance are. . . . Such an approach not only disregards diversity and conflict within groups, but it presumes that the only struggles that count take place through institutions.⁵³

In the preceding paragraph, Kelley makes clear the central problem with exclusively framing politics and the political within a traditional electoral framework: the sole use of that framework will almost always implicitly erase the experiences of marginalized groups.⁵⁴

In the tradition of Robin D. G. Kelley and his push to move mainstream U.S. political culture beyond traditional political frameworks, in Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance, Zenzele Isoke astutely focuses in on the political experience of poor Black women.⁵⁵ Isoke argues that the “conventional approaches to the study of politics often depict low-income black women as apolitical, and worse as lacking in respectable claims to citizenship and belonging. When judged in accordance with accepted categories of political participation, many black women fare poorly.”⁵⁶ In large part, this is because conventional approaches to politics research neglect to consider the interiority of respondent political identity. Instead, as numerous Black feminist political science scholars have pointed out, the impulse of the group consciousness literature is to compare all groups using the same set of variable measures.⁵⁷ While at first this may seem like a good idea for the sake of “objectivity,” it ultimately only serves to erase the political engagement of groups existing on the margins, and in particular the sociopolitical tools of Black women living below the poverty line.⁵⁸ This is especially problematic given that, as Nikol Alexander-Floyd and Julia S. Jordan-Zachery note, “in political science, where Political Man (Lipset 1960) and Political Woman (Kilpatrick 1974) are still seen as White, and in the study of Black politics where the focus is often on Black men,” there are few statistical measures designed with the political experiences of Black women more generally—and for the sake of this conversation, poor Black American women specifically—in mind.⁵⁹

Sixth, given how much my project owes to the scholarship that precedes my own, in Redefining the Political, I work to ensure that this research adds to Black feminist political theory by developing a theoretical framework that helps scholars assess and recognize the sociopolitical tools of marginalized groups.⁶⁰ The political identity framework, which I named the political possible-self (PPS), provides a broader and more expansive context with which to understand how communities and individuals understand and participate in politics. When thinking about political behavior as a matrix, instead of a static binary, political practitioners have room to consider a wider range of activities and behaviors as political. As is demonstrated in this project, the PPS allows us to appreciate what traditional “commonsense” understandings of politics could not initially see: politics is just as much about cultural forms of engagement in the public sphere as it is about electoral democracies.⁶¹

Seventh, many within the world of traditional electoral politics mistakenly believe that poor Black people do not engage politically and lack political sophistication.⁶² Typically, these lower numbers of engagement have been attributed to time and education constraints or alienation from state-sanctioned bureaucracies and other forms of state power.⁶³ However, anthropologists, policy feedback scholars, Black feminists, and sociologists have argued that not only do people living in poverty have a high level of political knowledge but, in fact, they have their own unique forms of politics.⁶⁴ My work extends the work of policy feedback scholars more generally and in particular takes Jamila Michener’s contextual feedback framework of political participation as a site of departure.⁶⁵ The contextual feedback framework combined with the PPS framework can capture extrasystemic sociopolitical tools that occur beyond the reach of government institutions and bureaucracies. This extends the work of policy feedback by illustrating how contextual and spatial features of public housing shape a largely extrasystemic set of sociopolitical tools within CHA local sociopolitical communities.

In The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality, Rhonda Williams wrote a careful and thoroughly researched analysis of the progressive politics of poor Black women living in Baltimore public housing. Williams points to the spaces and places responsible for shaping the sociopolitical tools of those poor Black women. Williams’s insistence that we take seriously the need for “activism at the point of consumption—that is, around housing, food, clothing, and daily life in community spaces”—is a prescient reminder that politics exists beyond electoral fights for power.⁶⁶ For Black women living below the poverty line, politics are a fight for basic survival. Although Black women living in poverty, as public assistance recipients, must contend with onerous and intrusive regulations, numerous Black women do receive a sociopolitical education through their engagement with the welfare system. The federal government’s subsidy of low-rent housing implies a right to decent living conditions for U.S. citizens.⁶⁷ From the beginning, this implied right has highlighted poor people’s low citizenship status and politicized groups of tenants. For poor Black women, subsidized public housing has created a sense that the previously private sphere of home has become public sociopolitical space.⁶⁸

Like the respondents in this research, the Black women Williams chronicled illustrated how the spatial context of state-sponsored public housing (e.g., the infrastructure, local sociopolitical communities, and street-level bureaucrats) functioned as part of resident sociopolitical education. Lisa Levenstein argued that there was “a mass movement of African American women to claim the benefits and use the services of public institutions.”⁶⁹ Similarly, Williams noted that “in their own way, poor black women, who increasingly relied on public assistance, placed pressure on the welfare state to make good on its promise of provision and social rights, especially for some of its most marginalized citizens.”⁷⁰ Ultimately, both authors used their work to illustrate how the determined sociopolitical effort of Black marginalized women led to a sociopolitical breakthrough: the understanding that “the government’s subsidy of low-rent housing implied a right to decent living conditions for U.S. citizens.”⁷¹ Both authors clarify that engagement with the welfare state is not simply a legitimate sociopolitical action but a meaningful one.⁷² By grounding my project within their work, I was able to continue the work of pointing to the urgency of this political moment. Scholars, activists, policymakers, and political practitioners of all sorts must take seriously the importance of constantly expanding our understanding of politics and the political. By using the work of Black feminist political scientists, political theorists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and humanities scholars, I can clarify the power and significance of the Black feminist politics of the everyday.

In Altgeld Gardens, housing policy seemed to create additional spatial features that shaped the sociopolitical identity development of CHA residents. In Chapters 4 and 5, I demonstrated that violence and the quality of interpersonal relationships within a neighborhood can shape the form and function of membership within a political community. Whether an individual is living in poverty or not, if they are surrounded by daily residential violence and believe they have no meaningful way of protecting themselves or their family, they are unlikely to participate within their communities, politically or otherwise. Key to my findings was discovering how critical a sense of belonging to a residential neighborhood and broader political community is to an engaged PPS. Belonging could function as a stand-in for membership in a sociopolitical community because it indicated a level of investment and commitment to entities beyond the self.⁷³ While a respondent may not be able to respond to traditional politics questions like “Who is your congressional representative?” many know and have even engaged with their local alderman or neighborhood block captain.^* These neighborhood-level expressions of politics are important to measure when studies have continued to demonstrate how pressed for time and energy individuals living in poverty are.⁷⁴ Ultimately, I found that residents who have experienced multiple forms of violence and also lack interpersonal support tend to develop a PPS that is isolated and almost entirely focused on their own individual future outcomes. Spatial realities like interpersonal relationships, violence, aesthetics, and communication with representatives of the state can all potentially alienate or empower individuals in terms of their relationships to government and political participation more broadly.⁷⁵

Like Williamson and Isoke, I demonstrate that public housing aesthetics helped to shape the sociopolitical tools and PPSs of low-income Black women I interviewed.⁷⁶ Aesthetics also played a fundamental role in structuring how marginalized Black women understood power in the U.S. context. I argue that we can understand Black women’s politics as a form of power—a power shaping the institutions governing U.S. sociopolitical life. I suggest that, via the experience of belonging to their local sociopolitical residential communities, respondents learned a politics of self- and community governance. Belonging to local sociopolitical residential communities taught the respondents I interviewed how to navigate welfare institutions safely and efficiently. Belonging to local communities also helped respondents to navigate their neighborhoods safely.

Eighth, the CHA also played a significant role in the cocreation of the political identity and sociopolitical tools of individual respondents. The CHA sponsored several meetings between residents and CHA street-level bureaucrats throughout the month. These meetings provided residents with the opportunity to express concerns about public housing development infrastructure, CHA employees, and services provided by local and state government via the CHA. Meetings created a public sphere unique to the life experience of CHA residents. Many residents were limited in their ability to access larger, citywide public spheres because of severe constraints on their access to public transportation, as well as the sociopolitical restrictions placed on them due to the intersections of their race, gender, and class identities.⁷⁷ On the other hand, CHA meetings provided a space residents could access regularly, given its proximity to their homes, as well as a particular set of rules and logics they were taught to engage and manipulate by past and present public housing residents.⁷⁸ These public spheres facilitated the development of political imagination among residents that created some unique and innovative sociopolitical tools.

The PPS considers sociopolitical tools to be a broad matrix of thoughts and behaviors.⁷⁹ In essence, context is what connects the theoretical work of the PPS to the empirical work of the case bracing this project. Michener rightly argues that “accounting for context sheds a different light” on the political behaviors of marginalized people.⁸⁰ She points out that for Black people living below the poverty line, their political story is “not just about political apathy, as traditional participation theories might have us believe; it is also about how local constraints, state policies and individual factors work in distinct ways to structure political life and shape a range of political actions.”⁸¹ I extend this argument by clarifying how public housing policy creates a context shaping the extrasystemic sociopolitical tools of residents, beyond traditional political participation and engagement with street-level bureaucrats.⁸²

The PPS, broadly speaking, is a framework linking the relationship between a sense of belonging to local sociopolitical community and political imagination within an individual’s “sociopolitical DNA.” My research clarifies the importance of data collection on respondent spatial context, sociopolitical-friendship networks, and the individual’s relationship to their local residential context. It is not enough to collect respondent location data and their personal residential timeline. Instead, Redefining the Political clarifies the importance of asking respondents how they feel about where they live, whether they feel they belong, and what relationship they have to their space. These questions matter when attempting to discern how, when, and where individuals think and act on the political.

Over the course of this project, I have learned that neighborhoods shape the type of sociopolitical community members we become.⁸³ If one person is fortunate enough to grow up in a neighborhood facilitating engaged sociopolitical membership, and another community of people are being relegated to neighborhoods depressing sociopolitical membership, this is a democratic crisis warranting attention. When marginalized populations have large numbers of people with depressed sociopolitical memberships and they typically live in neighborhoods constructed by the state (e.g., public housing, income-based housing, and multi-income housing), it follows that the circumstances creating those lived sociopolitical realities require urgent attention.

Does Any of This Matter?

From the outset of this project, my goal was to write a book accessible to the broadest segments of the population. I wanted to write a book useful to a variety of political practitioners. The limitations embedded within traditional “commonsense” definitions of politics constitute an important issue for everyone to take on. After all, if activists cannot reach out to a diverse set of communities because they do not know how marginalized communities engage with or define power, their campaigns will fail to achieve success. If policymakers do not understand the high-salience political issues within marginalized sociopolitical communities, they will fail to correct ongoing problems among groups made up of folks with stigmatized intersectional identities. If academics limit themselves to a narrow understanding of the political, they will experience failure within their statistical data, not only in polling but in major studies as well.⁸⁴ As political practitioners, we have reached a nadir in our understanding and outreach to nonwhite populations. If we hope to ever create a truly egalitarian democracy, then we must become serious about creating broader and more flexible political definitions.

In the years following empirical interventions like Cohen’s Democracy Remixed, we now know that young Black people (and potentially a number of other minority groups) are engaged in a politics that eludes traditional political research measures.⁸⁵ In Black Visions, Michael Dawson made clear that Black Americans have a varied spectrum of sociopolitical identities demanding a closer look into the sociopolitical motivations of Black folks living in the United States (beyond an assessment of political alienation from government more generally).⁸⁶ In turn, my project contributes to this growing literature around traditional and extrasystemic sociopolitical tools among Black Americans by identifying the conceptual categories and mechanisms facilitating extrasystemic politics within Black marginalized communities.⁸⁷

Conclusion

By developing the PPS theoretical framework and a BFDC of politics and the political, I have created a set of theoretical frameworks with the capacity to help scholars fully interrogate political behavior in relationship to belonging and political imagination. I have also developed theoretically rooted conceptual categories capable of traveling the world. Last, I have provided frameworks that could help political practitioners to better understand political behavior and engagement across marginalized populations. Beyond the PPS, I have also identified mechanisms that connect concepts like power, political membership, and belonging to the everyday sociopolitical experiences of Black women living in poverty.

It is critical that future scholars interested in continuing the theoretical work necessary to fully parse out the politics of marginalized Black communities understand how oppression shapes the individual relationship to politically important conceptual categories. This project began by focusing tightly on the shape of socioeconomic status and the sociopolitical experience of Black women living in public housing. Future scholars should explore a more thorough analysis of the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, orientation, disability, neurodivergence, and class and the ways those identities shape the individual relationship to the PPS and their position within the public sphere. It is my hope that future scholars will think through the theoretical relationship between liberation and membership in the sociopolitical community, particularly when it comes to the intersections of race, gender, and class. As many a Black feminist has said before, free Black people create more free Black people.

By thinking through how individuals understand their own liberation, or lack thereof, political practitioners can come closer to understanding what marginalized populations want from politics. In a sense, this question is one about desire, a concept only rarely considered.⁸⁸ What exactly do Black women desire from their sociopolitical lives? What does it mean when Black feminists and activists of all sorts make requests for a fully liberated political membership within civil society? Is this desire simply relegated to those Black women who work within political public spheres? Or is a political desire for liberation and freedom widely held by all? To use the framework of this project, is there a language of political desire and liberation among Black American women living below the poverty line? If so, what does that language look like, and what does it mean for the shape and form of their PPSs? Going forward, if scholars of the Black sociopolitical world begin to think broadly about conceptual categories like liberation, joy, and desire, we will have a fuller and more nuanced understanding of who engages sociopolitical life.

* In “The Politics of Homemaking,” Zenzele Isoke argues that “homemaking is a central mode of Black women’s political resistance in Newark. It stretches beyond individual women’s work in households and the sphere of domesticity. Instead, homemaking involves creating homeplaces to affirm African American life, history, culture, and politics. Homeplaces are political spaces that Black women create to express care for each other and their communities, and to re-member, revise, and revive scripts of Black political resistance” (Isoke 117).

* At Altgeld Gardens, the neighborhood block captain is an elected official.