I Want to Own the Plantations: Black Women, Public Housing, and Popularizing Austerity

Since the 1980s, public housing has suffered chronic disinvestment, prompting federal officials to champion budgetary and policy shifts that promoted privatization and demolition. However, this era of federal disinvestment coincided with a strategic shift in conservative popularization of austerity measures. Using the case study of Black women public housing tenants’ advocacy of resident management in public housing, this paper explores the Republican Party’s attempt to adapt racial and gender politics for conservative purposes. With an alliance between Black and White neoconservatives, Republican party leaders championed resident management and public housing ownership programs as the party’s signature policy goal for public housing reform. To advance this policy goal, Republican leaders joined forces with select public housing tenant activists, such as Kimi Gray, who led a local campaign to implement resident management in the nation’s capital. The political alliance proved short-lived and provided a protective cover for Republican leaders who were routinely accused of colorblind racism. Nevertheless, this debate over public housing ownership would become a critical inflection point in the country’s welfare history by demonstrating the Republican Party’s sophisticated curation of grassroots support from Black women. This political performance also helped underscore a long-standing trope of low-wage Black women’s welfare dependency and domestic irresponsibility. Ultimately, this political theater had dire consequences. By presenting these activities as representative of the honorable poor, conservative political leaders could legitimize disinvestment and more punitive measures against the remaining public housing tenants who were seemingly not aspiring to the middle-class ideal of homeownership.