After former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 United States Presidential Election to Donald Trump, politically active Black women across the U.S. wrote many think pieces discussing how disappointed they were with the election results. The election results inspired politically active Black women across the United States to sign an Open Letter to the Democratic National Convention Chair Tom Perez. In this letter, the signees provided evidence about how integral Black women were to the Democratic Party’s electoral success. They then used the aforementioned evidence to justify why Black women should be in charge of the party’s national election strategy to ensure future electoral success. Thus, this dissertation examines the shift in political mobilization efforts of Black women during the Trump Administration. In particular, this dissertation makes the case for the notion of agency raising. Politically active Black women are already aware of their marginalized status. Therefore, traditional consciousness raising efforts (i.e., making the subject aware of their marginalization) are ineffective when attempting to mobilize support. Instead, the rhetoric of agency raising allows politically active Black women to mobilize support through discussions about how, despite their limited agency, they can still impact political change to influence the future of the Black community positively. This dissertation works through three elements of the rhetoric of agency raising: temporality, visuality, and circulation. First, this dissertation examines how politically active Black women harnessed countertemporality in their agency raising tactics during the 2017 Alabama Special Senate Election. Second, this dissertation analyzes how Black women engaged in the rhetoric of agency raising through their enactment of militant visibility following the 2020 American Patriot Rally. Third, this dissertation works through how politically active Black women demonstrated the rhetoric of agency raising through their crafted circulation of messages about the murder of Breonna Taylor to create lasting change in relation to no-knock warrants across the U.S. Overall, this dissertation attempts to define and describe agency raising in order to showcase how the evolution of Black women’s political mobilization tactics combat white supremacy.
