Faux Heads of Households and the Gendered and Racialized Politics of Housing Reform

Since the congressional overhaul to public housing’s federal policies in 1998, close to 300,000 public housing units have been demolished, displacing mostly African American women and their (extended) families. In the hearings for these policy changes, most congressional leaders did not address the policies’ gendered consequences. Instead, congressional leaders worked to manufacture the illusion of racial consent by mobilizing and elevating the political voices of Black male housing bureaucrats. These bureaucrats shared congressional leaders’ anti–Black women deviance narratives, insisting low-income Black mothers were prone to welfare dependency, intergenerational poverty, and poor parenting. Politically posturing as proverbial “heads” of low-income Black mothers’ households, these Black housing managers deployed racial uplift and Black nationalist ideologies to help legitimate the bipartisan congressional policy goals of deregulation, privatization, and self-sufficiency. While some low-income Black mothers worked to challenge this negative portrayal of Black (female) poverty and home life, this article provides a troubling reminder about how the public censure of low-income Black mothers continues to provide exploitable capital for political actors who want to be seen as tough, anti-welfare, pro-capital, and thus effective leaders.