Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance

Z. Isoke

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137045386
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary urban spaces are critical sites of resistance for black women. By focusing on the spatial aspects of political resistance of black women in Newark, this book provides new ways of understanding the complex dynamics and innovative political practices within major American cities.

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INTRODUCTION

Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance is a sustained examination of how US black women have created political spaces to confront contemporary social marginality in Newark, New Jersey. Political space refers to the physical, symbolic, and relational spaces that black women create to politicize and transform communities plagued by economic disadvantage, social alienation, and highly destructive racial–gender ideologies that routinely constrict the political empowerment of their inhabitants. Using what Nikol Alexander-Floyd (2007) has called “a black feminist frame of reference” that relies upon the political biographies, oral narratives, and political discourse produced by US black women activists, and employing what I call a “black feminist intersectional analysis,” this book explores the diverse and divergent ways that black women have resisted structural intersectionality. By linking personal narratives, political histories of place, and the quotidian politics of organizing in a city dominated by black male political elites, I critically examine the possibilities and constraints of African–American women’s political leadership in Newark, New Jersey.

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. They seldom vote or engage in partisan political campaigns (Verba et al. 1995). They rarely run for elective offices or lobby elected officials (Burns et al. 2001; Rosenstone & Hansen 1994). Political analysts interpret minimalist participation in mainstream political venues as an index of apathy based on masculinist assumptions about the nature of politics. Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance challenges this white-washed account of inner-city black women’s political engagement. Through an intensive case study of Newark from 2003 to 2007, I document how black women confront contemporary social marginality through political means.¹ By respatializing the mobilization and deployment of social capital, and what I call “the politics of homemaking,” black women activists vigorously rework the meaning and significance of urban space and urban politics. By creating and activating disparate communities of political practice in Newark, black women forge new geographies of resistance.

Over the course of this book, I argue that black women activists in Newark function as alchemists of resistance. As school board and city council members, community organizers, executive directors, clergywomen, and underpaid issue-based activists, black women take the harshest realities of urban containment and create wellsprings of possibility for positive social action. Using the wisdom gleaned from dedicating their lives to actively reimagining the social, political, and physical landscape of the city, black women talk back and act against urban despair. Responding to the calls from women of color scholar-activists for academic attention to the specificity of women’s oppression, I document how black women combat the intersecting effects of racialized poverty, homophobia, and misogyny (Cohen 1999, James 1999, Collins 1991). I show how everyday black women move beyond the boundaries of any single-identity politics to forge alliances across diverse communities of struggle in order to challenge spatial domination in the inner city. In this book, I outline a theory of black women’s resistance politics that describes how black women confront and transform structural intersectionality in everyday life.

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. Black women make direct linkages between past and current realities of black social deprivation and despair—they unearth, invoke, reenact, and, most importantly, reenvision historic legacies of struggle against injustice. 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 community (i.e., black queers, hip hop heads, antiviolence activists, and antipoverty activists) to mitigate the interlocking effects of black heteropatriarchy and white economic hegemony.²

Building upon recent theorizations of race and power developed by black feminists who critically engage questions of space, place, identity, and belong in their writings, including Katherine McKittrick (1996), Carole Boyce Davies (1994), and Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002) and bell hooks (1990, 2009), I argue that black women create geographies of resistance that undermine structural intersectionality—convergent systems of race, class, sexual, and gender violence—in Newark. Illuminating aspects of black female political agency that have been overlooked in research in American politics, urban politics, and in various (inter)disciplinary engagements of women of color activisms in the United States, the book describes modes of urban activism that destabilize stereotypic images of “blackness,” “femaleness,” and “politics.” Through detailed analysis of two community mobilizations in Newark—one following the 2003 murder of 15-year-old Sakia Gunn, and the other preceding the 2004 National Hip Hop Political Convention (NHHPC), I explore how black women use their bodies, identities, and personal histories to subvert urban heteropatriarchy. Developing new forms of social and political action, black women who are young, gender non-conforming, and highly critical of the US racial state and capitalism are active participants in political processes that are often overlooked by traditional scholars.

PLACING RESISTANCE POLITICS IN A DESPISED CITY

I place black women’s resistance politics in a despised city that has been brought to its knees by deindustrialization, neoliberalization, the roll back of welfare rights, and efforts to control the effects of racialized poverty through the securitization and privatization of public schools and local prison systems (Arrastia 2007, Gilmore 2007, Harvey 2006, Anyon 1997). Despised cities like Newark, Detroit, Saint Louis, and Gary have unforgiving histories of racial strife, deindustrialization, white flight, and decayed public infrastructure (Wilson 2009, Massey & Denton 1996). These cities undercut the glamour and intrigue of America’s global cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Despised cities are instead marked by extreme levels of poverty concentrated in majority black and Latino neighborhoods, ruthless patterns of gentrification, and political corruption (Cohen & Dawson, 1997). The overrepresentation of racial–ethnic minorities among the poor, combined with virulent practices of media-instigated racism, contributes to the depiction of these cities as “dangerous” blackened spaces (Wilson 2009, Collins 2005, Jackson 2003). The ugly reality of neoliberalism is slammed home in America’s central city neighborhoods, too many of which vaguely resemble abandoned war zones.

Newark has barely escaped the bleak desolation of the inner cities of Saint Louis and Detroit, as blacks and Latinos have a marked history of collectively organizing to preserve black and brown political autonomy (Mumford 2007, Woodard 1999). However, racial minorities who succeed in winning public offices must contend with severe social and economic marginality produced by generations of differential racialization.³ Like other despised cities, Newark has a living history of chronic black male unemployment, the relegation of generations of poor women of color to low wage, service sector jobs and/or public welfare, excessively large pockets of poverty, and patterns of gentrification that present tempting opportunities for wealthy entrepreneurs while depleting local communities of much needed social capital. African–Americans and Latinos remain at the very bottom of the racial hierarchies that continue to structure the city’s economy, despite the emergence of a slowly growing black and Latino middle class (Wilson 2009, Pulido 2006, Massey & Denton 1993). Newark’s political landscape is aggravated by patterns of police brutality and law enforcement practices that target African–American men and others who dare to perform black masculinity on inner-city streets. Combined with declining educational and employment opportunities, these conditions have and continue to foster widespread social discontent and various forms of urban insurgency (Mumford 2007, Woodward 1999, Marable 1991, Cunningham 1988, Winters 1978, Parenti 1970, Hayden 1967).

Black women’s resistance politics go beyond the usual tenants of racial liberalism, cultural and revolutionary nationalisms, and liberal feminism to address these problems, as black women are not fundamentally concerned with inventing or necessarily even reproducing functionally bankrupt liberal democratic values. Instead black women’s resistance politics utilizes a different kind of political subject. Their politics re-imagine the role of the citizen subject in relation to the political system. As opposed to simply aiming to increase participation within the system by marginalized African–Americans, black women’s resistance politics expose the sociopathy of the normative political subject (rational, self-interested) by making space for caring, impassioned, affective, volatile, and socially unfettered subjects whose motivations are often otherworldly, and often only articulated dialogically with social spaces that black women either invade or create themselves.⁴ Black women’s resistance politics involves psychically undoing the harsh material conditions of existence, and envisioning and creating a new terrain of politics that extends from the self outward. These politics are realized time and again by reconfiguring the spatiality of self, home, and community.

To be clear, this is not necessarily a study of radical politics, as radical politics implies active confrontation, opposition, and unveiled hostility toward the political establishment. On the contrary, black women’s resistance politics involves demystifying the ways the current systems fails to meet its own stated ideals, while generating collective energy and resources to address the tacitly supported systemic failures of local institutions and elite power structures. Their politics aims not to destroy, but to reclaim, re-envision, vitalize, and transform. This process involves what Grace Hong (2008) has called “bringing out your dead,” or invoking the spirits of those who died in their personal struggles for integrity, recognition, and survival. These politics involve the creating of what hooks calls homeplaces: spaces to tell the truth about black and Latino drop out rates in poorly funded and grossly mismanaged public schools; to tell the truth about how politicians have lined their pockets through bribery, racketeering, theft, and fraud; to tell the truth about how government incompetence, indifference, and criminal negligence has led to the premature deaths of countless numbers of young people in Newark; and to tell the truth about how self-interested urban elites wantonly attempt to contain and eliminate legitimate seeds of change within the real and imagined landscapes of the city. Black women’s resistance is manifest through an embodied politics of storytelling, truth-telling, and community empowerment.

SPATIALIZING RESISTANCE

This book examines contemporary urban spaces as critical sites in which women are politicized as racialized, classed, and gendered subjects. Rather than construing politics as a means to influence government, I argue that black women interpret politics in relation to the cultivation of social and political consciousness among structurally disadvantaged young people. They foster critical dialogs to spark the possibility of political efficacy of a new generation of activists. Politics of this genre occurs in a large cross-section of nonprofit, voluntary organizations and informal networks that periodically ignite into intense, short-lived coalitions and community alliances—what Jasbir Puar (2007) has recently termed “assemblages” of resistance politics. By tracing the mobilization of these networks, their sustained political work with inner-city youth, and their mobilizations in response to particular crises and opportunities, I make manifest the political labor of urban black women that is too often ignored or mistakenly attributed to the leadership and charisma of politically prominent black men.

In addition to making black women’s political work visible, the book links resistance politics to the long-term sustenance of city life. Through “rant fests” organized by hip hop feminists, LGBTQ youth action networks, after-school programs, storytelling, African dance and drumming circles, and the creation of relational spaces in which women can share their personal histories of collective struggle, black women actively reconfigure the landscape of the city. In spite of the most intense forms of social violence imaginable, political black women in Newark march relentlessly and energetically toward a future rooted in justice. Examining the intimate factors that have politicized black women in Newark, this book-length study offers a fresh interpretation of political action in a city in transition, even as it details the personal and political tragedies and triumphs that necessitate oppositional politics on the ground.

By focusing on the spatial dimensions of political resistance, I provide new ways of understanding the complex political dynamics and innovative political practices within major American cities. Activist women devote their lives to creating and sustaining clothing exchanges, sister-circles, rites of passage programs, and other open and progressive spaces of struggle. In so doing, they transform blighted cityscapes into culturally symbolic homeplaces that nurture the life chances, leadership capacity of political efficacy of an emerging generation of activists. By documenting their political commitments and transformative endeavors, I demonstrate how black women challenge, resist, and transform converging systems of domination that circumscribe their lives in Newark.

Black women’s political agency and subjectivity are theorized in relation to a nested urban political arena overdetermined by intensifying pressures to adopt and enforce neoliberal social projects that pathologize poor black people who defy middle class norms of respectability (Brown 2008, Arrastia 2007, Alexander-Floyd 2007, Collins 2005, Ferguson 2004). Black women’s resistance politics occur within a media-charged global culture that persistently circulates destructive images of black masculinity and black femininity to sell everything from digital media to hamburgers.⁵ I describe how new generations of activists use hip hop and queer politics to subvert dehumanizing racist-sexist stereotypes while offering counter-narratives to their presumed apathy and criminality. Whether in public schools, social service agencies, school boards, or even seemingly benign community programs, black women in Newark regularly contend with social, economic, and ideological effects of neoliberalizing policies that have all but destroyed many long-standing public institutions. Ironically, “well intended” employees within these institutions turn around and use morality as a weapon to discipline gender non-conforming youth, blaming black and brown teenagers for systemic failure (Brown 2008, Miller 2008, Arrastia 2007, Anyon 1997).

THE NEW POLITICS OF SLIPPERY IDENTITIES

Black women often negotiate, deploy, and reconfigure identity as they find ways to subvert the negative impact of global neoliberal policies on their communities. As a result, women claiming “blackness” in Newark are not always African–American. Throughout these pages, we will hear from Puerto Rican women who alternatively identify as both black and Latina. As black female political subjectivity gets reconstructed within each mobilization, we learn about politics from black women who are not always black, and black females who are not always “women.” The polyvocality of black women’s political subjectivity is emphasized by illustrating how black women migrate within and between politicized identity discourses to challenge domination at the local level (Sandoval 2000, Brewer in Busia & James 1993). I show how young black women like Fayemi Shakur, Keisha Simpson, and June Dowell invade discourses like hip hop and black queer activism to “recreate and remove the lines of impossibility” that constrain the possibilities of coalition building to spark the possibility of emancipatory social action (Boyce Davies 1994).

For example, during the NHHPC of 2004, “hip hop” functioned as a strategic signifier to build solidarity within and between African–Americans, Latinos, Asian and Pacific Islanders, and other racialized minorities in the United States and worldwide. Black women activists strategically deployed hip hop as a slippery identity to entice young people of color allured by the culture and aesthetics of hip hop to consider organizing against race, class, and gender-based inequities that impacted the hip hop generation. Within the NHHPC, women alternatively participated in social justice projects rooted in black nationalism and black racial liberalism under the rubric of hip hop. Other activists used hip hop culture to politicize and theorize queerness in the context of black community struggle and empowerment. The Progressive Women’s Caucus used the convention to transform the meaning and practice of politics by hosting “rant fests,” an intimate public space for laughter, tears, nurturance, and catharsis that resulted in building the affective, broad-based support for a gender-progressive social agenda within the Convention.

Alternatively, in 2003, a 15-year-old named Sakia Gunn was murdered by a heterosexual black male in the downtown streets of Newark. The consequences of the double transgression of publicly acting on same-sex desires and defying socially acceptable scripts of Black femininity—indeed Sakia’s performance of a particular kind of black masculinity—elicited cat-calls, jeers, and, finally, a deadly encounter with Newark street violence. Within the resistance politics framework, Sakia Gunn’s death, while tragic, is transformed into an emblem of defiance to black homophobia and misogyny. Her slain body and pointed remembrances of her short life are mobilized as a formidable symbol of contemporary black political resistance. Politically active, but often closeted black gays and lesbians came out to challenge Mayor Sharpe James’ refusal to be proactive about protecting young lesbian and gays whose only refuge from virulent homophobia were the drug- and gang-infested city streets of the Central Ward. I argue that the kind of imaginative political work that continues to take place in Sakia’s name, and political spaces that have been subsequently created to transform the meaning of her death, c...