5
THE LIBERATORY AXIS OF POLITICAL BELONGING
Introduction: The Sociopolitical Communities of Black Low-Income Neighborhoods
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 community.1 To be invested in national or even city politics, people need to feel they belong to a neighborhood or a group of people living in their local community.2 Without a sense of belonging, some respondents haphazardly noted that, yes, they felt like an American or a Chicagoan, but it rarely seemed to result in visible sociopolitical tools. In Avoiding Politics, Nina Eliasoph clarifies the value of belonging to the development of sociopolitical communities. She asks, “How do citizens create context for political conversation in everyday life?” She concludes:
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.3
In this chapter, I consider the role of public housing as a Black enclave public sphere and a sociopolitical community where some respondents felt they could belong. My work takes Eliasoph’s framework and builds on it through an assessment of the intersections of multiple marginalized identities and their impact on a sense of belonging to the local sociopolitical community. Specifically, this chapter focuses on the y axis of the PPS matrix, the representation of individual sociopolitical belonging.
As I mentioned in the prior chapters, the vulnerability of CHA residents to the authority of the government occasionally destabilized their ability to establish and act upon a coherent sense of sociopolitical community.4 However, residents were frequently able to retain their local sociopolitical communities or build new ones. Among the respondents I spoke to, a sense of individual belonging to their local sociopolitical community was frequently built from a shared identity of being poor, Black, and often, female. In other words, the shared experience of living with multiple intersecting high-stigma marginalized identities functionally reinforced their bonds with one another.5 In the early years, Chicago public housing held a greater capacity to serve as a Black enclave public sphere where communities of residents could exchange ideas and social resources.6 Unfortunately, the Plan for Transformation required a forced dislocation of many residents.7 As a result, some residents’ sense of self became more individualized and isolated from communitarian ethics. However, some women had relationships within their community and felt they belonged to their local sociopolitical community. This sense of belonging facilitated the establishment of networks that helped them feel safe.8 Those social networks also seemed to facilitate the development of more visible sociopolitical tools. In the context of Altgeld Gardens, building community included making friends with neighbors or classmates and also creating resources and systems of support that reinforced an internal feeling of safety and security.9
Respondent Case Studies
As I mentioned in the Introduction, I am using Chapter 5 to provide further insight into the belonging axis of the PPS framework. To be more specific, both cases presented in this chapter fall along a y axis that goes from alienated to community within the PPS matrix (as shown in Figure 5.1).
The extent of a person’s feeling of belonging to their neighborhood or their neighbors is an important contextual clue to discovering their relationship to their local sociopolitical community. Individuals who lack a sense of linked fate to their residential community are more inclined to avoid using any visible sociopolitical tools.10 If a person experiences an increasing sense of isolation from their local residential community, they may acquire a set of behaviors referred to as political “alienation.”11 Past research has consistently indicated that there is a relationship between spatial residential context and the cocreation of political identity.12 Additional research has shown that social networks, as well as welfare policy, can shape individual politics and political behavior.13 This chapter builds on that research by examining if the spatial contexts of public housing, as well as public housing bureaucracies, contribute to the formation of resident political identity, specifically via their impact on sociopolitical belonging.
Figure 5.1Max’s Political Possible-Self
Given the centrality of local sociopolitical community to individual well-being and sociopolitical development, I share a small example of a CHA housing policy that did not support the maintenance of multigenerational sociopolitical communities within Altgeld Gardens. The following vignette is from field notes I took during a Altgeld LAC meeting I attended in April 2011.
Khadijah James, the LAC president, ran the meeting according to Robert’s Rules of Order. Ms. James mentioned they would not be doing an “old timers’ picnic” this year. The old-timers’ picnic was an event where former residents of Altgeld Gardens came back for a daylong picnic in the Altgeld Gardens Park. According to Ms. James, CHA took issue with this event, so CHA was trying to shut it down. The news was met with significant displeasure from the audience, in the forms of grunts and “humphs.” . . . But Ms. James quickly let the audience know they would replace “old-timers’ day” with “family day” to escape the suspicions of the police and CHA.
It was not clarified why CHA street-level bureaucrats did not want former residents to come back for a day of reconnecting with friends and loved ones currently living in Altgeld Gardens. But within the rationale for mixed-income public housing, I consistently noticed that policymakers seemed to believe keeping poor people away from one another was what was “best” for them.14 When U.S. welfare and public housing policy analysts discuss what will “help poor people succeed,” a core belief seems to be that economic success cannot happen if poor Black people develop, grow, and maintain multigenerational networks and communities.15
Amid debates about the “failure” of Chicago public housing, one of the key data points pundits refer to is the tendency of families to stay in public housing for generation after generation.16 This point of view was consistently reflected back to residents via CHA street-level bureaucrats.17 When I attended a CHA Central Advisory Council (CAC) meeting in April 2011, I noted the following vignette in my field notes:
Another resident issue seemed to be that CHA residents were living in broken down and overcrowded apartments. Current residents were being made to wait, while new people were being moved into the new developments. The old residents were threatening to expose the CHA to the media around this issue. The resident who spoke on this issue said, “nobody cares about us, but us.” Mr. Smith, a CHA street-level bureaucrat, said the following: “this project called public housing is meant to help families move on, not house you forever. . . . I know this is a tough economy . . . but it has also forced us to help more new families. . . . Public housing is not meant to serve the same families for the rest of their lives, we are trying to help families become self-sufficient and move on. . . . You are not going to get everything you want . . . you have to stop this ‘us’ vs. ‘them.’”*
Critics frequently cannot understand why individuals would want to stay in public housing, so they immediately point to laziness or some sort of cultural deficiency as the reason families living below the poverty line want to put down roots, develop a sense of community, and ultimately create a space and place they can call home.18 But this way of thinking has never made sense to me. As sentimental as it may be, most of the people I have met and interviewed over the years desired a place where they belonged, a place that felt like home.19
Given the centrality of home to our social, political, economic, and even financial well-being, how do you develop a sense of belonging when your right to put down roots within your neighborhood and local sociopolitical community is constantly challenged? I argue that understanding how the sociopolitical bonds of belonging are created, solidified, and strengthened within the spatial context of Chicago public housing is critically important. It illustrates the sociopolitical importance of a sense of belonging to facilitating political empowerment within Black marginalized communities. Within the United States, whether we are allowed to participate in each election is directly connected to our ability to prove to state and local governments that we are residents of a particular neighborhood.20 In practice, this facilitates political organizing, get-out-the-vote efforts, and political canvassing organized around the local sociopolitical communities of specific residential neighborhoods. As I will show throughout this chapter, a sense of belonging to specific sociopolitical communities and public spheres is truly foundational to the creation of political identity and sociopolitical tools in the U.S. context.
For many in the United States, having a place to come home to in a neighborhood we like and enjoy is something we take for granted. But for Black women living in public housing, this desire is often pathologized (as illustrated in the vignette above).21 Many in the United States only confront the reality of people without housing, or without residential security, when walking past a soup kitchen or a shelter. But approximately 554,000 people in the United States are technically without housing.22 In Chicago, the number of people without homes is approximately 5,657, and 1,561 of those people are “unsheltered,” or physically living outdoors.23 For Chicago public housing residents, the possibility of homelessness is ever present. The demolitions of high-rise public housing developments and CHA’s failure to find housing for many displaced residents make that point ever clearer.24 At Altgeld Gardens, some long-term residents were moved out of apartments they had previously lived in for decades.25 Given these policy and spatial realities, this chapter is informed by the narratives told by respondents who were attempting to go about everyday life amid all this uncertainty.
When activist Max Shaw (a respondent whose narrative is featured in this chapter) reported that entire voting blocks were destroyed by the Plan, she meant that multiple social networks connected through their multigenerational residence within Chicago public housing developments were separated from the places they identified as home.26 In essence, this policy of displacement led to an erosion of sociopolitical community, creating large networks of residents who subsequently experienced a sense of disconnection from their residential neighborhoods. Networks who may have formerly been invested in making sure their communities evolved for the better were later consumed with escaping to the next place. As postdemolition networks appeared in Altgeld, older residents observed the shift in values separating the residents of formerly cohesive blocks from the new tenants. Unlike the older residents, many of whom had chosen to reside in Altgeld decades before, many new residents were placed in Altgeld through no choice of their own.
A sense of belonging is a critical proxy required to understand the individual PPS. To what extent does the individual feel they belong to their neighborhood? To their city? And to their nation? Because of the stigma, surveillance, and lack of access to public resources that came with living in the Altgeld Gardens public housing development, many respondents understood the geography they belonged to as being limited to a few neighborhood blocks.27 As scholarly literature and ethnographic studies can confirm, the activism in public housing is often limited to these few blocks, not simply because residents have limited time and resources but because it is where they feel safest.28
Political scientists Cathy Cohen and Michael Dawson examined the extent to which impoverished neighborhoods shaped the political identity and engagement of Black residents.29 They found that increased levels of poverty can shape the politics of Black Americans:
Neighborhood poverty has a devastating effect on politically important indicators of social isolation, even after controlling for individual characteristics, including individual poverty. . . . The neighborhoods with the very highest concentration of poverty (above 30%) are particularly effective in restricting the social and networking opportunities of African Americans living in them. . . . Data indicate that the effects of contextual poverty on political participation are evidenced when the threshold of severe neighborhood poverty (over 21%) has been crossed.30
Critically, Cohen and Dawson found the higher “the concentration of poverty within a neighborhood, the more pessimistic community citizens become regarding any hope that a solution can be found for their problems.”31 In short, the spatial qualities of a residential space can have immeasurable effects on the development of an individual’s sociopolitical tools and PPS.32 As Cohen and Dawson note, these findings have critical implications for the full functioning of democracy. If people are limited in their ability to access institutions, let alone in their ability to shape and lobby those institutions, then the system has gone tragically awry. Therefore, studying the forces contributing to the sociopolitical development of Black communities living in poverty is critical important.33
The Power of Belonging within a Sociopolitical Community
When I interviewed Maxine “Max” Shaw, she was approaching her fiftieth year of living in Altgeld Gardens. As a younger woman, she had left the development for a handful of years after taking a job, but she returned once she began having children. When I asked her why she chose to return to Altgeld Gardens, she cited the support she had there. After growing up in Altgeld, Max had access to babysitters, her mother, her friends, and other family members who were able to help a young mother as she struggled to get on her feet. Max’s mother was responsible for the founding of a local organization that did tremendous work around environmental justice. As a result, Max had the opportunity to travel around the country with her mother. Max also visited the White House, and over time she met three sitting presidents. Accordingly, it should be no surprise that Max was incredibly politically active. Max continued her mother’s work after Ms. Shaw died and even after Max’s children grew up and left the development. She conducted voter registration drives every year, she was responsible for organizing multiple protests on the development, and she also consistently raised enough grant money to pay everyone who worked in her organization’s office, although she was unable to pay herself. As a result of Max’s commitment to sociopolitical activism, she lived in poverty for most of her life.
Despite living in poverty, Max was and continues to be exceptionally active in both the public and the private spheres. In addition to running her organization, she also politicized, and in some ways radicalized, multiple women throughout the development. Many of Max’s neighbors, who later became respondents, told me that she dragged them to meetings, protests, and other activities throughout the development. In this way, not only did Max’s sociopolitical community remain active both publicly and privately but Max also single-handedly helped many adult women living in Altgeld Gardens become active members within various sociopolitical communities. Because of her political engagement, Max seems like a good place to start when thinking about how women living in public housing understand their own power and the power of others.
Since Max lived in the Altgeld development for most of her life, she understandably had close relationships with many of the maintenance people, as well as the managers who oversaw the bureaucracy within the development. In stark contrast to many of the respondent cases I’ve already discussed, whenever Max needed something fixed in her home, she was able to get the repair taken care of relatively quickly. On the other hand, some of the respondents I interviewed sometimes waited weeks, if not months, for things as simple as new light bulbs or as critical as new locks. Interpersonal relationships were everything when it came to psychoemotional well-being and personal safety on the development. Because of her many personal relationships with the privately owned management team, Max was able to keep a cute little dog she took with her everywhere (around the development, there was quite a bit of debate about whether dogs are actually allowed in Altgeld apartments). Max also took great pride in her apartment: the walls were painted, and her kitchen was quite clean. It is not an overstatement to say that Max had a strong sense of her own personal power. If she needed something from management, she was able to get it, and if it required bending the rules ever so slightly, Max knew how to make it happen.
A: [I’ve] heard different things, that management doesn’t let people plant flowers. . . .
M: Yes, they do. They used to give them to you, back in the day. Back in the day, they used to give you flowers to plant. But you can do whatever you want to do now. That’s not true. If I want to decorate my yard, I can go decorate it. If I need the tools to be able to decorate my yard, they’ll give it to you. You just have to leave your state ID or something like that. And then you bring the tools; you get your state ID back. So that’s not true. Now, what might be true, they might not have the tools; somebody stole them from the inside. It may not be available ’cuz they don’t have it no more. But no, you can fix up your own yard. So that’s not true. People just don’t fix them. Maybe ’cuz I used to do that stuff so much when I was a kid, I would not plant a flower.
A: Yeah, I feel the same way after working in my mom’s garden.
M: You see, no, no, no. Vegetable garden, raised bed . . . I will not garden, period, or take care of a yard. I will pay [somebody] to mow . . .
A: I feel the same way.
M: . . . to mow my yard, or something like that. But I know if I had to put flowers, I mean I got to water and maintain, I’m not doing that. I’m not with that, so I just keep my yard. I sweep in front . . . my neighbor real good; we’ll sweep stuff up, but I’m not into that because I hated it when I was doing it when I was a kid, I guess, unconsciously.
When Max was a child growing up in Altgeld Gardens, her mother made her work in the garden every weekend. As a result, in her adult life, she had no desire to garden, maintain vegetables, or plant flowers. However, unlike a number of other respondents in the development, Max was well aware of the CHA gardening and yard maintenance rules, as well as how to access tools and other resources should she decide she was interested in gardening. Despite her lack of interest in yard upkeep, in stark contrast to Sofia from Chapter 4, Max had the resources to ensure her lawn was well cared for. Notably, she also had enough credibility with the local neighborhood kids to keep them from running across her lawn. Max frequently employed young men from around the neighborhood—many of whom she mentored—to do tasks around the house for her, like mowing the lawn, fixing a window, and doing other errands that would keep them out of trouble for the day. Max was able to build relationships within the neighborhood and create a home space where she felt comfortable and safe. She also had a tremendous sense of pride in the environment she created for herself. Altogether, Max had a sense of personal power, which fueled her daily participation within the local sociopolitical community.
In this way, a sense of belonging to a neighborhood community seemed to play a large role in shaping an individual’s sense of power, agency, and authority throughout their life. When an individual felt they did not have power over their place of residence, it became even more challenging to create a sense of power, and by extension, sociopolitical confidence, in the same individual.
A: Yeah. Are people treated equally in this society?
M: Hell, no, you know that.
A: Who isn’t treated equally?
M: The poor. The poor is not treated fairly, because if the poor don’t know their power and understand the relationship of the power that they do have, you know . . . power’s not defined by wealth. You know what I mean?
A: Absolutely.
M: And power is something . . . power is something that you want to make change or make it better and it gives you that dedication to make that change, you know. So what we don’t understand is our power is among the people, but a lot of people think power is associated with how much money you got.
A: Right. Is that a power that you think you have?
M: I don’t know . . . no . . . I have an influence power. I can influence people better than trying to acquire people to be on my side. I can influence you. And I can motivate you so my powers is in motivation too because I can motivate you and I can present a picture in a way that you can understand it.
Max’s point about influence being a form of power is significant. She had the power to influence others, to go wherever she wanted in the development, and to do as she pleased with her apartment. It is a “power-to” that built her confidence as a member of the sociopolitical community, in large part because of the love that sociopolitical community had for her.34 Max’s friends, political comrades, and neighbors loved her deeply. It was not simply control; it was Max’s ability to shape things according to the political imaginings she cocreated with other members of their sociopolitical community. Power, from this vantage point, lay entirely within Max’s sense of her own ability to act, as well as to influence others to act. Max could not control how any woman on the development would act on their newfound political sensibility. After all, part of the political education she provided to residents involved convincing them they were also free. Max had a power of influence that facilitated her capacity to provide education in political skills and community building.
As a child, Max was fortunate enough to have a mother who taught her how to navigate government bureaucracies of all shapes and sizes. As a result, Max’s personal sense of power was birthed in her ability to advocate for herself from an early age. This personal sense of power was further cultivated by always living in a home where either she or a member of her family felt, and behaved, as though they were fully in control of their home. What is often left out of conversations about public housing residents is the role the home plays in the individual life. As Howard Mansfield makes clear, the home is where we begin the process of cocreating who we want to become:
All houses are mysteries. In all houses we are struggling to live the life we should; we are confined cluttered, slothful, or ambitious, planning, rebuilding, self-improving. In all houses we are hiding out, from the neighbors, from the world out there, from the world in here, from each other, from ourselves.35
In this way, residents of public housing are similar to everyone else. The individual spaces and places we live in shape the sociopolitical possibilities we can imagine for ourselves.36 As one example, my mother has lived in the same house in Detroit for almost forty years. She remodeled it with her father and my father right before she had her first child (me). Over the years, she has built relationships with neighbors and local businesses, all of which played a core role in helping her care for her children, as well as her father before he died. Needless to say, the neighborhood and the house she has spent most of her adult life in carry a lot of meaning for her. As she approaches her midseventies, she has no intention of ever leaving her home. She has spent years making her house and her neighborhood beautiful in a way that speaks to her as an individual. Her community provides a source of support and refuge that could not possibly be replicated anywhere else.
In numerous studies of neighborhoods, one social scientist after another notes that people tend to not leave their neighborhoods, mostly for the same reasons as my mother.37 Puzzlingly though, despite the generally common experience of becoming attached to home and its surrounding community, critics of public housing policy don’t seem to think about the same experience among the poor. Perhaps one of the biggest problems in media and academic analysis of Black populations living below the poverty line is the propensity to treat groups on the margins as though they are alien. It seems fairly obvious that every community, including marginalized Black communities, seeks the safety and stability of home. Max was clear, she stayed in public housing for almost fifty years because Altgeld Gardens is where her mother raised her. Altgeld was where Max and her mother developed a community that sustained them politically, emotionally, and spiritually. Altgeld was Max’s home and her legacy.
Practically, some of the respondents I interviewed may never make enough money to care for their families and pay for childcare during the day while they work. For many, staying in Altgeld meant they had a free (or nearly free) babysitter in one neighbor or another. Practically, emotionally, and spiritually (there are more than three churches within the Altgeld Gardens development and a countless number surrounding the development in other neighborhoods), the connections and attachments respondents developed within public housing left them just as deeply rooted to their communities as their wealthier American counterparts.38 It is critical to consider these embedded relationships and attachments when thinking about how and why one’s connection to home can be a source of sociopolitical empowerment, or alternately alienation.
In this way, the ability to call your place of residence “home” becomes political. In today’s political climate, access to a home (regardless of whether it is rented, owned, or passed down) becomes a surprisingly classed thing, and women living below the poverty line are very much aware of this.39 During and after the renovation at Altgeld, many women were moved from apartments they had lived in for decades. Along with the move, residents were required to get rid of laundry machines, ceiling fans, and other household items that were no longer allowed in the renovated development. While the CHA hailed these changes as improvements, many women interpreted them as a loss of agency within one of the few spaces they felt they had autonomy. In this way, housing decisions made by housing authority street-level bureaucrats, on both the local and federal levels, can chip away at the power residents feel they have over and within their households.
I asked every respondent whether she had heard of the Plan for Transformation, and many had no idea what I was talking about. Older residents did know, however; they had been required to get rid of several expensive household items and appliances during the renovation. While my mother has the power to go to a neighborhood board meeting and protest any major changes (a political power to act),40 many, if not most, Chicago public housing residents were simply informed of the changes and asked to throw away certain belongings when they were moved. In my mother’s neighborhood, board meetings are held during the evening after everyone is home from work. Most Chicago Public Housing Authority meetings started between 9:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M., during the workday. For residents able to attend public housing meetings (a handful), the extent to which their influence was considered in final decisions was indiscernible.
These realities are critically important to remember when thinking about the way the politics of homemaking can add or detract from an individual’s sense of belonging to their local sociopolitical community.41 By slowly chipping away at resident sociopolitical agency, public housing authorities can also begin to chip away at their efficacy and, ultimately, their sense of belonging.42 As cliché as it may now sound, as feminists have said many times before, the personal is political, or maybe it is better said that the private is as political as the public.43
Max’s PPS fell approximately dead center within the liberatory domain (the far upper right corner of the PPS matrix). She received a thorough sociopolitical education from her mother from a very young age. Max also finished high school and college, earned a master’s degree, and traveled nationally and internationally. As a result, her sociopolitical imagination was extensive, and it was appropriate to place her near the uppermost end of the political imagination spectrum. Because she had lived at Altgeld Gardens most of her life, Max had an extensive sociopolitical network throughout the development, Chicago public housing, and the city of Chicago. She was also generous, kind, and social. As a result, Max had a tremendous sense of belonging to her local sociopolitical community, and it was appropriate to place her near the uppermost limit of the belonging spectrum. Overall, Max’s case is a fantastic example of how much can be learned about political identity and sociopolitical tools by paying close attention to the role belonging plays throughout the individual life.
Given Max’s ability to negotiate the bureaucracy of the CHA, she was able to create a home space that maintained her own internal power. In addition, Max had interpersonal relationships that facilitated her safety throughout her lifetime. Her highly visible sociopolitical tools, among other skills, sustained her activism within the community organization whose leadership she inherited after her mother’s death. Max’s mother taught her how to be a political activist and how to work the system. Her upbringing gave Max a sense of personal capacity that facilitated her work across the country. As I mentioned briefly, she also had a community of friends and family who looked out for her and provided her with emotional and financial support. Throughout her interview, she talked about both of her children (now young adults in their twenties and thirties) and the ways they ensured she could take care of herself. More than anyone else, she talked about the women at the development with whom she shared most of her life.
A: Are there any other kinds of activities you participate in at Altgeld? Besides your work with your organization?
M: Well, I network with a lot of organizations on a local or national level. That’s what we do. I’m focusing more on engaging the community. I’m starting a group called [organization name redacted] . . . well, I’m part of a membership that got started bringing communities on the southeast side together. And we call ourselves [organization name redacted]. We fight these developments that’s coming in, the fire range the city trying to propose. [I] want to put these manufacturing companies in there, but they’re using tires as their means of burning, which would be hazardous to people health. The quality of life is already diminished because of poor air quality now. We not against economic development. It’s just that we want safe, healthy, clean development for this area. Why we always get this polluting stuff? So that’s why [organization name redacted] can help, and we work real well together. . . . Also, I’m the one who [helped] Regine Hunter [become a] community politician; golly, she flying with it! You know! I inspired her to get that talk together. So it’s inspiring and training that you do, that I’m trying to do, that’s a level of empowerment because long as somebody else doing it, you’re depending on something. It’s all about being independent or voicing your concern. . . .
A: Anything social? Any social activities?
M: My social thing . . . my girlfriends, we hang out, or we may come over here and go over there. I might go out and party some, but you know, I did that at a very young age, and my mama told me when you get old enough to do it, you ain’t going to want to do it. And she didn’t lie. So it’s all about, if it’s not stimulating me or teaching me or educating me or collaborating with each other, all that other stuff is not important for me. That’s my social stuff too. I like going to listen to somebody being socially conscious about something. I do take trips, go visit friends. My daughter took me to the Bahamas last year though . . .
A: Oh, that’s nice.
M: . . . for my fiftieth birthday. They tried to give me a party; I was like, nah. You know, they trying to give me a party this year. My birthday March 11, so they trying to give me a party this year. My niece is really geared up with this party, and I’m like, I’m not feeling this party, you know.
For Max, one of the most important aspects of her life was empowering other women to take on their own political projects. Two of the respondents in my sample were Max’s neighbors. They were new residents who moved in a year or so before I began visiting Altgeld Gardens. Both women were politically educated via their relationship with Max. It began by Max teaching them how to get maintenance to address their concerns quickly, and from there, she was able to motivate them to become more active throughout the Altgeld sociopolitical community. Max also mentored Regine Hunter, another woman who lived in the development. Initially, Regine had little to no interest in anything remotely political. By the time I met Regine years later, she was leading a protest against a local grocery store, serving on the LAC executive board, and working as a neighborhood block captain (an elected position).* When Max called her a “community politician,” she wasn’t joking. Ultimately, Max’s case taught me that it was the everyday pieces of their lives that developed their sense of connection, commitment, and belonging to their local sociopolitical community.
Does Policy Shape Political Identity?
Given how central the social networks and interpersonal relationships were to the respondents I interviewed at Altgeld Gardens, it is particularly important to think about how public policy can encourage or thwart the development of local social networks and local sociopolitical communities. Because people living in poverty are more vulnerable to changes within public policy, this is particularly important when studying the politics of marginalized populations, such as Black women living in public housing.44 Political scientist Traci Burch argues that although “the obvious goal of government policy is to affect people, usually by encouraging or enabling them to do things that they might not otherwise do,” governments “may also restructure future politics in unexpected ways” when they bestow benefits.45 Along the same lines, Joe Soss argues that welfare policy influences behavior through specific program designs and that welfare clients develop program-specific beliefs about the wisdom and efficacy of asserting themselves. He writes, “Because clients associate the agency with government as a whole, these program-specific beliefs, in turn, become the basis for broader orientation toward government and action.”46 Soss found that recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) are less politically active (here, he defines political action using traditional measures) than recipients of Social Security Disability (SSDI) and attributes the difference to the designs of these two programs.47
While SSDI recipients did not feel they were stigmatized or berated by program officers, AFDC clients viewed the agency as a “pervasive threat in their life, as a potent force whose limits were unclear.”48 According to Soss AFDC clients determined that engaging with the bureaucracy was almost futile.49 This, in turn, led them to believe that engaging with government more generally (using traditional measures) was also futile. This finding is critical when considering if living in public housing can shape the politics of residents, as Lerman and Weaver make clear:
Welfare positions recipients as “undeserving” through stigmatizing rules and requirements for receiving aid. In some places, for instance, individuals receiving benefits must submit to home searches and drug tests, toil in prisonlike garb along highways, and take any job given them.50
Lerman and Weaver note that when welfare recipients’ experiences with government bureaucracies—be it a housing authority, a welfare office, or a job placement agency—are mostly negative, the likelihood they will develop a sense of hopelessness about their political agency becomes exponentially higher.
The design of political institutions is politically consequential because it provides a direct view of how government works, what role individuals are expected to play and their worth vis-a-vis other citizens and the state. Through social programs, citizens garner important material resources, but also receive a blueprint of the character, capabilities and commitments of the state. These lessons feed back into citizen participation and engagement.51
This is why the study of spatial contexts and local sociopolitical communities is critically important. As I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, CHA street-level bureaucrats can control everything from which friends resident children are allowed to play with to whether the leaseholders are allowed to have a reunion barbecue for former residents. It is astonishing to think that government bureaucracy has such complete control over the friendships, families, and communities of everyone participating in public housing. For Black people living in poverty, freedom of association simply does not exist. If a formerly incarcerated child comes to visit his mother briefly, she can be immediately evicted and permanently banned from public housing. Every day, bureaucrats who implement government policies can have a profound impact on the politics residents adopt.52
But the impact of housing on individual political identity is not limited to policy; the shape, form, and condition of neighborhoods matter as well. In her work, Clarissa Rile Hayward echoes Pierre Bourdieu in her push to think more deeply about space, context and citizenship.53
As people engage in practical activities in such physical spaces, his [Bourdieu] claim is (as they sow and reap in the fields, as they buy and sell at market, as they cook and care for the sick and dying in the house), they learn and relearn implicitly the meanings built into material forms.54
Residents learn politics (and their political value to the public sphere) via the material form of public housing itself.55 Neighborhood placement and design have a profound impact on everyone’s political development.56 Each neighborhood teaches distinctive lessons about what a citizen could and should look like, as well as what residents can reasonably expect from the state over their lifetime. Like Eliasoph, I am arguing that people learn what politics look like via their experience within neighborhoods.57
Vesla Weaver, Gwen Prowse, and Spencer Pison show that many citizens are not limited to learning politics from friends and coworkers, or even from formal civics education classes and organizations.58 Instead, marginalized populations, in this case Black people living below the poverty line, frequently learn about the state via personal experiences and their surroundings.59 These conclusions are consistent with my own research. This knowledge becomes part of a community knowledge network operating within the Black enclave public sphere(s) of public housing developments, welfare offices, and the street.60 Respondents like Max, Toni, Shug, and Khadijah were deeply plugged into this community knowledge network. They took this knowledge and used it to educate their friends and neighbors throughout Altgeld’s local sociopolitical community.
For respondents who felt they belonged to the local sociopolitical communities within Altgeld, this informal information dissemination often kept them safe. Even if a respondent didn’t personally experience a violent interaction with the state, when it came to the police, they almost always knew somebody in their community who did. As you’ll remember from Chapter 2, the local police screamed at Toni and ransacked her apartment. Later she watched them do the same thing to her neighbor. Significantly, by witnessing what happened to her neighbor, Toni learned a new strategy for managing this unique gendered form of police brutality experienced by Black women behind closed doors. Often, discussions with neighbors and other members of their local sociopolitical community helped respondents put their personal experiences into context and gain a deeper understanding of their political implications.61
Relationships, Safety, and Belonging
Respondents who had relationships within their community—that is, women who felt they belonged to their local sociopolitical community—were able to establish networks that helped them develop sociopolitical tools. Building local sociopolitical community could include making friends with neighbors or classmates and also collecting resources and systems of support that facilitated an internal feeling of safety and security. Take Sinclair James, for example. She moved to Altgeld Gardens in 1987 after testifying at a trial against a resident in the Robert Taylor Homes. Not only was she active in the Altgeld community (in terms of going to local community organization meetings and participating in other forms of politics) but Sinclair also knew how to access CHA resources. When Sinclair needed an emergency transfer from CHA because her life was being threatened, she was successful in her self-advocacy. Because Sinclair had a deep foundation of belonging to her local sociopolitical community and significant experience navigating CHA bureaucracy, she was able to advocate for herself and get what she needed.
During her time at Altgeld, Sinclair became well connected and knew most of the community organizations and resources available to seniors within the development. This knowledge about the community and the inner workings of the development itself allowed for a PPS that provided Sinclair with enough confidence to care for herself and her community.
A: So have you ever had any problems with robbery or being stuck up?
S: My son.
A: So he was robbed [while] walking around [Altgeld]?
S: Going over here to the garbage. Yeah. A boy walked up to him and his friend and stuck them up. He didn’t have but ten dollars on him, and I always told my kids if you got some, let it go because your life is more important. You can always get that money again.
A: They had a gun . . . ?
S: The two boys, my son and the other boy, said they didn’t know if he had a gun or not, but he was in his coat with his—they don’t know if it was finger or gun. You know, you can’t take a chance ’cuz you don’t know. So he gave it to them. But they’ve been doing a follow-up with me, you know. The police. And the boy, we contact him, and I came and talked to him, and he told me, “OK, I’m going to give your son his money back ’cuz I was wrong.”
A: Oh, so you went and talked to him.
S: Mm-hmm. I had seen him walking to the Rosebud Farm, and I had asked him, “Why did you take my son’s money? Why did you do that?” He was like, “I’m sorry, we didn’t have no food,” this, that, and the other. And I was like, “Well, you shouldn’t do stuff like that ’cuz you could of easily got yourself killed.” But now he waves at me and everything.
A: And you weren’t afraid to go talk to him?
S: No, because I had heard this kid had been sticking up other people out here.
A: So that was pretty brave of you to go talk to him!
S: Yeah, yeah. [Laughter.] I used to do security work back in the day and stuff, so I try to be a little cautious. You don’t come to a kid in a rough tone of voice and everything; sometime you get a little information out of them, you know. And the problem really what’s going on and the reason he’s doing it.
Instead of being paralyzed by fear when her son was robbed at gunpoint, Sinclair used her knowledge of the community to find a solution. She was able to find out who the child was and what he had been up to through various social networks within Altgeld. Knowing who the child was and where he was from transformed him from some anonymous “violent predator” to a kid from the neighborhood who was obviously having some problems. This allowed Sinclair to feel safe and secure enough to go find the child and find out why he was behaving that way. As the transcript makes clear, it turns out that the child didn’t have enough food to eat at home. Critically, Sinclair did not experience this incident as an emotional violation; instead, she experienced it as a problem that she had the wherewithal to solve. Sinclair’s lifelong experience in public housing taught her how to intervene in the space in a way that protected and benefited herself and her family.
What is crucial here is to think through what it means to experience violence. Often, violence causes an individual to feel that they have lost control of their lives and their bodies in some fundamental way.62 First when Sinclair was under threat of violence in the Robert Taylor Homes and then when her son was robbed, she was able to assert a level of political capacity over what that violence could do to her life. It is the experience of not feeling fully violated by Altgeld Gardens that allows Sinclair a fuller expression of her sociopolitical tools.
A: What are your interactions with the police like? What is your opinion of them?
S: I’m cool with them. I go to some of the CAPS meeting. . . . And I used to go to them. They have them at the end of the month all the time. Sometime it used to be on a Wednesday or Thursday, and that is Beat 005, I think they gave me.
A: What are those meetings like?
S: They tell you what places that they, when people call in, senior citizens, they tell you what places that they done shut down, drug houses, places that was abandon people was calling and saying they were seeing people going in and out. They tell you about when the next meeting. Sometime they give little trinket gifts, things like that, door prizes, but they mainly try to keep the community together. If people not together, it’s going to fall apart.
A: So you find them useful.
S: Mm-hmm, I go every now and then. Yeah, and they tell you about the next places that they looking at, because they say somebody called in and say it’s a vacant lot here but they notice it’s an abandoned car there and people been sleeping in it, and they go check it out and everything. It’s been pretty reasonable though.
By going to the CAPS meetings held every month at the local police station, Sinclair was able to stay informed about what was going on in her neighborhood. Her participation allowed her full knowledge of whatever crime or violence was reported to the police in Altgeld Gardens. This is significant because, again, it moved physical violence and crime from some unknown specter that could attack at any time to a spatial reality that had certain logics and targets. By continually gathering information, from both the police and local community organizations, Sinclair was able to create a more balanced view of what was happening within her local sociopolitical community. In this sense, knowledge really is power. Critically, Sinclair’s engagement with the local CAPS meetings also helped her build the institutional relationships that could assist her during her time of need. As I noted earlier, it was Sinclair’s institutional relationships at the Robert Taylor Homes that facilitated her emergency transfer when her life was in danger. In the same vein, Sinclair built similar institutional relationships with the local police, CHA employees, and local activists at Altgeld Gardens.
By gathering information, building institutional relationships, and interacting regularly with their neighbors, Black women living below the poverty line in neighborhoods with high rates of violence can develop a PPS with room for them to express visible sociopolitical tools. Sociopolitical tools are not limited to singular (traditional) political actions. Instead, they are a set of behaviors that happen in collaboration with other people to shift the reality of things within a given sociopolitical community. Community-based collaborative efforts are central to the BFDC of politics:
The acts, ideas, or set of behaviors named as “politics” are rooted in the effort of two or more people attempting to use power to create (or limit) possibilities via acts or behaviors in service of a political goal. Specifically, this is the set of behaviors people engage in together to have possibilities created (or limited) by (or for) their targets.
This belief in the possibility of a future, including a cleaner neighborhood, access to jobs, and a safe, daily lived experience, allowed respondents like Sinclair to fully participate in their own lives, publicly and visibly. To put it simply, respondents who believed that the material reality of their world could change had sociopolitical tools that reflected that core belief. In this sense, Sinclair’s PPS leaned toward the more efficacious end of the political spectrum.
A: When you interact with people who live here, what do you typically talk about?
S: Most the time I be talking about going out of town, talking about the kids, because I was just telling some people just two weeks ago I notice, you know I don’t mind the kids playing basketball behind my house and everything, but when they leave they papers, cups, and trash back there, that’s what bothers me. Even though I tie a bag on that bench right there, they still throw it on the ground. So I have gotten so now I don’t too much even say nothing. I just tie the bag and a lot of times come in here. The reason I don’t say nothing ’cuz my son play basketball with them too. . . .
A: Do you feel like a member of this community?
S: Yeah, somewhat, because I know a lot of people and I don’t know a lot of people, which really with the new peoples that have moved out here, I don’t know hardly, just some of them. Like they’s some that they moved from Robert Taylor. There’s two of the ladies I know that moved from Robert Taylor out here. She was saying, “Oh, I hate it over in this block.” They talk about Block 10, that they hate it over here. They be like, “Oh, I wish they’d have moved me over where you at because you got it peaceful and quiet and y’all keep it clean right along here.” I say the reason we keep it clean too because a lot of times when people go to the liquor store and the store up here, they come through here. ’Cuz we get good compliments a lot of times in the summer. People be like, why is y’all stuff so clean through here! When you get to the other part, they be like, what happened over there! I be like, no, it’s not like that; it’s that we all on this row, we try to keep it a little decent, you know.
In this vignette, Sinclair described her block’s commitment to keeping their part of the development clean. Even though there was a lot of foot traffic through their block because of their proximity to the local liquor store and the basketball courts, they managed to keep their space clean from debris. While it may seem like a relatively trivial and politically benign behavior, in fact, this could not be further from the truth.
In a Black enclave public sphere like Chicago public housing, a refusal to give in to presumptions about the development or to the benign neglect forced upon residents by CHA became a means through which residents could assert political self-determination.63 In short, neighborhood cleanup became another signal of Sinclair’s belief in the political possibilities for her future.* Respondents I interviewed who were not only depressed but totally politically disengaged from the local community had no desire to leave their homes, let alone participate in activities with their neighbors. Sinclair’s desire to clean up stemmed from a deep desire to improve and provide support to her block and the larger Altgeld community.
A: Do you think you could make a difference by participating in politics?
S: Yes, I believe maybe so, ’cuz at one time I had wanted to work for Carol Moseley Braun. We have did literature work for her [passing out flyers]. We have had kids go out and do literature work for her, but they didn’t want to go back. I don’t know why. But we did it one time. I think we went down Seventy-Ninth Street. Passing out the literature in the door. We took some of our kids and did it for her. But I don’t judge nobody because I say maybe one day I might be out there.
A: So you think you could be a politician one day?
S: Maybe, yeah, maybe.
A: But you definitely feel you have the ability to.
S: Yes.
Figure 5.2Sinclair’s Political Possible-Self
In this vignette, Sinclair clearly articulated her commitment to politics in a more traditional sense. She had a PPS that was coherent and acted upon. Throughout the interview, she mentioned her participation in get-out-the-vote activities for various Chicago politicians like Harold Washington, Carol Moseley Braun, and her district alderman. Not only did she participate in these activities but she also brought along neighborhood kids from her former residence, the Robert Taylor Homes, and her current residence, Altgeld Gardens. In this way, Sinclair acted as a political bridge maker, linking younger people with political activities that they otherwise may not have been able to access.64
Sinclair’s PPS fell approximately right of center within the community domain (the upper far left corner of the PPS matrix). When I interviewed Sinclair, she had lived in Chicago public housing for most of her life. In October 2011, she had been leasing an apartment at Altgeld Gardens for seventeen years. Before that, she had lived in the (now-demolished) Robert Taylor Homes. Like most respondents with ten or more years of lived experience within Chicago public housing, Sinclair was knowledgeable about and adept at navigating CHA and welfare bureaucracies. As a result, her sense of belonging within Altgeld and the larger Chicago public housing Black enclave public sphere was extensive. Most of her political imagination was focused on creating an environment within Altgeld’s local sociopolitical community that could provide comfort, aid, and solace to the people who lived there. Sinclair spoke extensively about how much she had learned via her relationships with Khadijah James, Max Shaw, and other friends and family who lived in Altgeld, as well as in other public housing developments. Sinclair’s PPS is an important example of how critical local community-based networks can be to the political development of individuals and communities.65
Because of her sense of belonging to the wider CHA Black enclave public sphere, in contrast to other respondents, Sinclair was relatively fearless in her willingness to pass out leaflets in a variety of neighborhoods. For Carol Moseley Braun’s campaign, Sinclair took the children down Seventy-Ninth Street from east to west. Sinclair also regularly passed out flyers throughout Altgeld for several different community organizations. This activity required self-confidence and a relatively impenetrable sense of safety. As ethnographers have noted, many people living in low-income neighborhoods do not venture farther than the major streets that enclose their community.66 In Chicago, this was especially the case as the danger of crossing various gang lines throughout the city was always present.67 In Altgeld, as more and more new residents moved in from across the city, the rates of violence continued to rise. This was due in no small part to the arrival of people with opposing gang affiliations who used to live in other public housing developments demolished by the Plan for Transformation. Many continued to be placed in Altgeld Gardens throughout my year interviewing and observing the local sociopolitical community. Yet, in the face of this, Sinclair did not allow her mobility to be limited; her sense of security and safety provided her with the opportunity to do political work.
Conclusion
It’s not enough to say that poor people and individuals with less formal education have lower levels of political participation.68 Social scientists have established that individuals living in poverty have unique and nontraditional means of expressing their membership in the political community.69 This chapter illustrates the need for more refined analyses of the social networks within friendship groups and local residential neighborhoods. Scholars of political networks have done an excellent job of measuring the connections between individual sociopolitical tools and their social networks.70 However, places like Altgeld, where there are spatial characteristics like high levels of residential isolation and high rates of violence, could potentially complicate those studies.71
Marginalized populations, particularly those living below the poverty line, require an analysis that accounts for spatial obstacles to an active and fully developed political identity.72 The cases presented here illustrate that the spatial conditions of neighborhoods, beyond the level of income, need closer consideration. The violence an individual has experienced and the level of interconnectedness they feel within a community are critical factors in understanding political behavior. Whether an individual is living in poverty or not, if they are surrounded by daily violence and believe that they have no meaningful way to protect themselves or their family, they are unlikely to connect with their local sociopolitical communities, politically or otherwise.73 It is meaningful that many of the respondents who felt threatened by the violence within the community placed their children in schools outside the Altgeld Gardens development complex when they had the resources to do so (car, time, etc.). When interviewing individuals who live in urban environments with high rates of crime and violence, political practitioners benefit from asking respondents about how they perceive and manage crime and violence (and whether the respondent perceives violence, crime, or other spatial realities as an impediment to their sociopolitical engagement).74 Political practitioners benefit from considering how violence, neighborhoods, and friendship networks function in relationship to the sociopolitical development of U.S. citizens.75 Given the disproportional impact public policy has on the lives of people who live in poverty, we must also continue to pay close attention to the relationships between housing and welfare policies and the sociopolitical development of the people affected by those policies.76
* Mr. Smith seemed to be a CHA street-level bureaucrat with a lot of authority. I saw him frequently at the public CHA meetings across the city that I attended in 2011 and 2012. However, he never once identified himself or his role in CHA.
* For Regine Hunter’s story, see Chapters 1 and 2.
* This is not meant in any way to perpetuate broken windows theory, which has been widely debunked by scholars (Harcourt, Illusion of Order; Michener, Fragmented Democracy). Instead, I am trying to make clear that the respondents in this study had a diverse set of sociopolitical tools. For some women, it included running for block captain; for Sinclair, it included cleaning up her block. The point is that as political scientists we have to provide room for respondents to articulate their sociopolitical tools, in whatever form they may take.