ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Barry leverages Black authoritarian discourse to act as a self-appointed Black patriarch who seeks mainstream attention by promoting policies that discursively punish and reprimand poor Black women. In the early fall of 2007, Marion Barry, councilmember of Washington, DC, Ward 8, and former mayor of Washington, DC, sauntered into a community meeting. He was there to meet with Barry Farm public housing residents and discuss the city’s plan to transform their distressed and historically under-resourced 432-unit public housing community into a 1,500-unit mixed-income development. To answer the question of how and why Marion Barry wields conservative gender politics to enhance his creditability and visibility requires a discussion about how race-first public officials pursue prominence in a post-civil rights era. Scholarship on Black officials analyzes how younger Black politicians like Barack Obama and Corey Booker promote racially transcendent politics in order to secure broad electoral and crossover support.
