Black Mothering Takes Shelter: Housing and the Gendered Afterlife of Slavery in the Carceral-Colonial Present

Abstract: This essay situates homelessness within genealogies of gendered racial and colonial dispossession. Through readings of the narrative and activist practices of Moms 4 Housing, a group of unhoused and marginally housed Black mothers in Oakland, CA, I consider how the deprivation of shelter relies on Black exclusion from normative categories of gender and mothering initiated by the Atlantic slave trade. By wresting shelter from a system of property rooted in multiple forms of carceral and colonial theft, I suggest that Moms 4 Housing’s protest of real estate speculation ruptured the afterlife of slavery and coherence of the settler state.