{"id":148,"date":"2015-09-21T01:07:28","date_gmt":"2015-09-21T01:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/?p=148"},"modified":"2015-09-21T01:07:28","modified_gmt":"2015-09-21T01:07:28","slug":"secondary-marginalization-in-black-citymakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/2015\/09\/21\/secondary-marginalization-in-black-citymakers\/","title":{"rendered":"Secondary Marginalization in Black Citymakers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Throughout my reading of\u00a0<em>Black Citymakers,<\/em> I was struck by the recurring theme of what Hunter deems &#8220;secondary marginalization.&#8221;\u00a0In the struggle to find a voice for black Philadelphians in a political environment determined to silence them, black advocates at times found it expedient or necessary to make concessions and seek consensus at the expense of the community&#8217;s least privileged.<\/p>\n<p>Often, secondary marginalization\u00a0seems to\u00a0manifest\u00a0as a tradeoff between political representation and economic change, wherein the poorest black Philadelphians are denied basic reforms\u00a0so that elite black leaders might gain election. Beginning with the housing reform efforts beginning in the 1930s,\u00a0black leaders\u00a0emphasized\u00a0political enfranchisement over\u00a0housing reform. Perhaps, at this time, prioritizing leadership\u00a0was the only way for black interests to be heard; black advocates\u00a0appeared to believe\u00a0that the black vote would install an administration guided by black interests, ultimately bringing material change to housing and a myriad of other issues.<\/p>\n<p>Yet as the decades wore on, the claim\u00a0becomes less and less convincing.\u00a0During the War on Poverty, for instance, Bowser and Evans employed a selective funding scheme to grant organizations inequitable amounts of\u00a0backing from the Philadelphia Antipoverty Action Committee. The local Community Action Councils for which the PAAC had been created received relatively little funding, and ultimately\u00a0faced their demise\u00a0when the PAAC\u00a0faced budget cuts and dismantling. Thirty years later, despite improvements for black enfranchisement and leadership, less powerful members of the black community faced continued marginalization, particularly along class lines.<\/p>\n<p>If the 2010 flash mobs make anything clear, it is that some members of the community still see no place for their voices in politics. With black residents\u00a0nearing fifty percent of the population in cities like Philadelphia, and with a shift from &#8220;middlemen to mainmen&#8221; occurring, perhaps consensus-seeking concessions will cease to be\u00a0the norm, and a new openness to structural reform will shift the narrative for the\u00a0underserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Throughout my reading of\u00a0Black Citymakers, I was struck by the recurring theme of what Hunter deems &#8220;secondary marginalization.&#8221;\u00a0In the struggle to find a voice for black Philadelphians in a political environment determined to silence them, black advocates at times found it expedient or necessary to make concessions and seek consensus at the expense of the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/2015\/09\/21\/secondary-marginalization-in-black-citymakers\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Secondary Marginalization in Black Citymakers<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7297,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[142764,142769],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-black-community","category-philadelphia-negro-week-3"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7297"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions\/149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}