Dr. Andrene Wright-Johnson joined the Department of African American Studies as an Anna Julia Cooper Postdoctoral Fellow in the fall of 2023 after completing an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University. Now an Assistant Professor, she conducts research and hosts lectures on Black political engagement, mobilization, resistance, and radical imagination at the intersection of gender and class. Her work centers the voices of Black women and girls.
Before Dr. Wright-Johnson imagined herself as a political scientist, she first envisioned herself becoming a lawyer—the kind her father always said the family needed. “It was the only thing I ever thought of doing,” she admits. Like many first-generation college students from immigrant families, she saw law as a clear path to success.
That trajectory shifted after a conversation with a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where Dr. Wright-Johnson was a transfer student. Dr. Samantha Majic, professor of Political Science at CUNY, introduced Wright-Johnson to the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program, a federal initiative designed to support underrepresented students in pursuing graduate education. Wright-Johnson says “She quite literally changed my life. I joined the McNair program after that conversation.”
Under Dr. Majic’s mentorship, Dr. Wright-Johnson conducted her first research project, a case study that examined how Black girls in STEM are socialized differently from their peers. This study sparked a long-term interest in intersectionality and how race, gender, power, and access to resources shape educational and political outcomes.
It was during this time that her understanding of politics began to shift. After changing her major to Political Science in her second year of undergrad, she began to explore politics not just as a matter of institutions and elections, but as a system embedded with social hierarchies. “I learned that the branches of government and our institutions feed into systemic structures like gender,” she explains. “When you begin to understand how gender is a social construct, you then start to question how other social constructs make you experience democracy. This led me to think about my position as a Black woman. I thought of my class and my gender and how those things impact the way I engage with the world.” Graduate school became a space for her to deepen these inquiries. She credits two texts as seminal to her development as a scholar: Cathy J. Cohen’s “The Boundaries of Blackness” and Jenifer Christine Nash’s “Birthing Black Mothers”.
Dr. Wright-Johnson is currently researching Black mayoral leadership in majority-minority cities to think about how gender plays a role in their leadership strategies. “I’m interested in how city context can produce particular trade-offs in leadership’s decision-making,” she notes. “Theories on Black politics need a bit more color for this particular moment.” Currently in the research phase of writing her first book, she wants to focus on post-1990s America, a period when Black leadership expanded but also revealed new contradictions. “The literature on Black politics rightfully notes that descriptive representation and symbolic representation are important; you want to have a leader that reflects your lived experiences to advance policies and increase political and ethical trust in government. But Black people have seen that Black mayors don’t always advance the interests of Black people, and we need to talk about that without romanticizing them. Serious Black political theorists must make space for these contradictions.” Her research insists on a more nuanced understanding of Black political leadership, one that accounts for how context, power, and identity interact. She emphasizes that race is inseparable from politics and that majority-minority cities offer a unique lens for examining what various racial and ethnic groups value in a leader. “Black people have a different relationship with democracy and with American life,” she explains. “This could possibly, controversially presumably, position them to understand, in distinct ways, the perspectives and needs of other marginalized communities.”
Looking ahead, Dr. Wright-Johnson hopes to earn tenure and continue to build something long-lasting in the department. “I want to create a space where students can marry theory with practice in the contemporary world,” she says. “There’s no better way to do that than by helping them think critically about how people live their lives, how they make decisions, and how every part of Black existence is political.” She wants students to recognize that their “freedoms and unfreedoms” (the ways society either grants or withholds resources) are shaped by political structures. But they are not immutable. “Thinking critically, and then acting, can change people’s lived realities. We have the power to build our own communities, invest in our own networks, and make a difference.”
For Dr. Wright-Johnson, this work lives both inside and outside the classroom. “The research I do, and the communities I write about, will make more sense to my students if I show them what it looks like to prioritize Black women’s wellness, to invest in our communities, and to engage politically. I want them to see how people can influence the government and their political leaders. That’s the goal of my research. The stakes of not recognizing our realities are real.”