When They Enter: Black Women's Politics in U.S Urban Centers

Abstract

This dissertation is a three-part paper series that explores the political behavior of Black women mayors', specifically their leadership approach and the public’s reception to it. Paper one, which a peer-reviewed journal invited to revise and resubmit, explores Black women mayors’ use of “Experiential Rhetoric,” a concept I formalized. Experiential rhetoric has its roots in Black feminist scholarship and is defined as the invocation of a candidate's lived experience as a means of persuasion. Analyzing mayoral debates from three American cities, I develop a robust emic coding scheme informed by the language of 37 mayoral candidates to unearth rhetorical distinctions between Black women candidates and others. My finding that Black women politicians leverage their lived experience more than their race and gendered counterparts serves as my motivation for paper three, where I explore how identity-salient frames are received by Black voters. Paper two is motivated by Gershon's (2013) and Philpot and Walton’s (2007) contributions and examines white women voters’ lack of gendered support for Black women politicians. Through a representative sample of over 1,000 white women voters, I sought to validate and contextualize the claims that gendered consciousness does not exist between Black and white women, by exploring what conditions would yield the greatest support for Black women politicians.

This scholarship seeks to advance the disciplines understanding of identity politics, complicate the internal dynamics of Black politics more specifically, and situate a Black feminist consciousness in political decision-making.