Resisting Through 2020: Political Strategies of Black Women Receiving Government Assistance In the U.S. During Floyd, Trump, and COVID-19

The year 2020 in the United States is one that TIME magazine mentioned “will go down in history books”. Edits and revisions have already occurred in scholarly publications to include the historic events that shaped the lives of so many. On February 11, 2020, the World Health Organization announced coronavirus (COVID-19), May 30, 2020, the conversation about systemic racism extended beyond COVID-19 as the world watched the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, all while Donald Trump served as president. This work focuses on Black women receiving government assistance in the U.S. and looks at the ways these three factors, Trump/Trump’s Administration, COVID-19, and what scholars have called “The Summer of Racial Reckoning”, impacted how women thought about their bodies, reproduction, and motherhood while also addressing the chronic stressors that occurred in their everyday lives. However, instead of focusing the research question solely on the negative impacts on these women, this qualitative work uses a Black Feminist Intersectional methodology to center their resistance and social transformation. Through interviews and Isoke’s bottom-up approach to structural intersectionality, this project spotlights the everyday resistance strategies: faith, sacrifice, centering self, and community support, used by these women to persist through the systemic oppressions these factors had on their bodies. Persistence, resistance, and dissent are then defined as emic categories to show how the strategies implemented by Black women partook in all of them; concluding that Black women receiving government assistance in the U.S. spent their lives consistently participating in politics.

Author

• Gaddy, Ashley

• Black Woman
• Government Assistance
• Intersectionality
• Persistence
• Political Strategies
• Resistance

Identifier

hdl:1920/14016

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:MARS:1920/14016