The (In)Visibility of Unhoused Deaths: Tracing the Racialization and Gendering of Unhoused Deaths in Seattle, Washington, USA (2019-2023)

The tension between imagined realities of blackness (Hinton, 2016) and fabricated truths of poverty has historically mobilized discourse that dangerously misrepresents and normalizes the positioning of Black impoverished women in various states of vulnerability. Such racialized and gendered discourses become embodied by society, perpetuated within institutions, and manifested through policy- totalizing some realities of Black women. These falsehoods generate vicious cycles of social disparities, making the unhoused black community, particularly, unhoused black women, disproportionately vulnerable to experiencing death. Understanding the life-threatening implications eugenic-informed ideologies of poverty and blackness hold, motivates my aim of uncovering the health implications inherent in unhoused experiences among Black women in Seattle, Washington, USA. By interrogating the relationship between the "undeserving" poor and the "undeserving" victim, I trace the embodiment of violence (Fuentes, 2017) inherent in the experiences of homelessness. First, conducting discourse analysis between both The City of Seattle’s policies and public police records regarding the proliferation of homelessness, I reveal patterns of criminalizing narratives sought to disproportionately surveil and police unhoused Black women. And secondly, I analyzed, The Women's Housing Equality and Enhancement League’s, death data of the unhoused, in Seattle, Washington (2019-2023). Creating an interactive Rstudio dashboard, I mapped existing health disparities, highlighted impacted communities, and identified not only areas where social inequities are most concentrated, but signified points of intervention with the most potential to "mitigate, resist and undo" (Geronimus, 1994) social inequities experienced by the unhoused. Preliminary findings suggest: (1) hyper-visibility of unhoused deaths illustrates how the "undeserving" poor become the "undeserving" victim; (2) rise of the carceral state reshapes public property as a site of city-ordained violence; and (3) black unhoused women who are victims of homicide disproportionately experience brutal deaths. Significantly, these findings draw visibility to communities often deemed disposable, holding the potential to ignite policy that decriminalizes poverty.