The Limits of Political Representation: Anti-Foreclosure Activism and Racial Injustice in the Post-Civil Rights Era

This essay asks what the recent efforts of anti-foreclosure activists can teach us about the contemporary challenges of representing the poor. I theorize their efforts as one potential answer to the limits of electoral and interest group representation in the post-civil rights era. In this era, official sources of representation have conducted and, in turn, been shaped by the emergence of a racial consensus between progressive demands for greater social rights and civic incorporation for the poor and conservative, race-coded, stigmatizing demands for greater behavioral regulation – that is, between radical liberalism and colorblind racism. To examine the challenge anti-foreclosure activists’ pose in this context, I present an ethnographic account of anti-foreclosure activism in Minneapolis, MN. I find that, in their responses to the foreclosure crisis, Minneapolis’ anti-foreclosure activists have largely upheld the post-civil rights commitment among progressives to radical liberalism. Making strident demands for a moratorium on foreclosures and claiming rights to affordable housing, they have portrayed poor constituents as socially excluded citizens struggling for greater civic incorporation. But rather than defending incorporation of the poor as a way to redress differences in racial status – as in the racial consensus – they turned to class-based portrayals, hoping to transcend the limits of the former strategy. Despite setting out specifically to challenge the limits of the racial consensus, I find instead that the representative strategy of anti-foreclosure activists has, somewhat paradoxically, reiterated them. More specifically, in order to protect their class-based portrayals of the poor from the divisive effect of racial stereotypes, activists would, at times, shape these portrayals to fit race-coded perceptions of responsibility and worthiness. While this tactic had some strategic benefits vis-a-vis colorblind racism, it led Minneapolis’ anti-foreclosure activists to, like those who focused on racial difference, reduce race to a matter of status and obfuscate the larger role played by white privilege and racial injustice. Ultimately, I narrate this contradiction less as a simple strategic failure of anti-foreclosure activists than as a recurrent challenge of representing the poor in the post-civil rights era. Centered, as they are, in radical liberalism, contemporary progressive interventions on behalf of the poor foster a fixation on incorporating low income people into society. When, as in the US, an ascribed and privileged trait like whiteness both shapes people’s exposure to poverty and is an entrenched norm of society, this fixation becomes a problem. Whether coding the civic incorporation of the poor as a way address racial difference or as an expression of racial commonality, representatives find themselves taking the norm of whiteness for granted. In this way, rather than disfiguring the egalitarian potential of radical liberalism, colorblind racism and the racial consensus, in fact, reveal its practical consequences.