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The Cost of Participating while Poor and Black: Toward a Theory of Collective Participatory Debt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2020

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Abstract

How do resource-poor Black populations participate in the policy process? And what are the interpretive impacts of their participation? Using multiyear qualitative data on mass school closures in two large U.S. cities—in which nearly 90% of the population targeted were Black and low-income—I investigate how 1) the school district and local organizations provide resources for those affected to participate in the policy process; 2) affected participants interpret their engagement as contributing positively to the development of civic skills and perceptions of internal efficacy but negatively to their perceptions of politics, policy, and future participation; and that 3) these negative attitudes persist even among those who secure success in fighting the policy. I conceptualize this last phenomenon as indicative of “collective participatory debt” and raise serious questions about the utility of participating while poor and Black in American democracy.

Type
Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 4: Special Issue: Race and Politics in America , December 2021 , pp. 1115 - 1130
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

She would like to thank the members of the American Politics Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University for helpful comments. She would also like to thank her advisor Reuel Rogers, her partner Ezekiel Richardson, and the anonymous reviewers for invaluable feedback. The research was supported in part by a fellowship at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

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