Amid Optimism, Black Women Left Struggling

Relatively Few Share General Enthusiasm for Fenty, D.C.'s Future, Poll Finds

Doreen Hodges drove her green minivan past her dream house, a newly constructed five-bedroom home sitting atop a hill in Southeast Washington.

"This is what we want," Hodges said of the yellow two-story. "And this is what they want: $499,000."

Passing by that house every day is an act of frustration and aspiration for the married mother of two. She is an African American woman living in Washington, a city where she's had her share of challenges. She's had to fight for a better education for her special-needs son, and once she and her family slept on the floor of a friend's home for weeks after they lost their apartment and couldn't make ends meet.

A Washington Post poll last month found that, overall, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's first year in office has been marked by a general optimism in the city but that sentiment is not as strong in the city's largest demographic, black women. About four in 10 black women say they believe the District is moving in the right direction, compared with 56 percent of black men, 70 percent of white women and 78 percent of white men.

And although Fenty (D) has an overall approval rating of 72 percent, it slips to 63 percent among black women and to 29 percent among black women in households earning less than $50,000 annually.

Hodges, 42, and her friends are battling a feeling of marginalization -- being economically squeezed in an outpriced housing market, navigating poor public schools and poor health care, and grappling with a nagging sense that city leaders don't really see them and their needs.

She is part of a network of about a dozen middle-class black women who know one another through their memberships alternately in a marriage support group and a mothers' organization called Mocha Moms. They are women involved in their communities, professionally employed and proactive in their children's futures. Most have opted out of D.C. public schools, choosing charter or private institutions or deciding to home-school their kids.

And when it comes to the mayor, they have more doubts and frustrations, it seems, than kudos and rosy views. They know the challenges they face go far beyond Fenty, but when he ran in 2006, he took his populist approach to every corner of the city. Black women, it appears from the poll and interviews, have yet to feel the benefits of that approach.

"I don't feel like he's at the heart of people," said Teresa Price, vice president of the southern D.C. chapter of Mocha Moms and an assistant teacher at a private school. Her dissatisfaction with the city started years ago, she said, but Fenty has not met her expectations. Price, 45, whose children are in private school, said parents were disenfranchised by the school closings process and uninformed about Fenty's vision for their children's education. "I don't feel like the parents have a voice," she said. "I just want to make sure he's really doing what's best."

Fenty's Cabinet appointments -- among them, a white female police chief, a white male fire chief and a Korean American female schools chancellor -- have also made them tentative about the mayor.

"He started out with this big outreach campaign, and now it seems that we're being blocked out of everything," said Hodges, who works with developmentally disabled people.

"People wanted a change, but they wanted to be a part of the change, especially when you're talking about our kids and their futures."