At a WinCo grocery retailer in a suburb exterior of Los Angeles, a Black lady is attacked by cops for recording them on her cellphone as they held down and handcuffed her husband. A police officer then pulls this unnamed lady by the neck, flings her to the bottom and kneels on her in a terrifying scene that has develop into eerily and tragically acquainted: “I can’t breathe,” she mentioned.
We have no idea this Black lady’s identify. We do know she had no weapons. We all know she was not charging towards the police. We all know she was standing with a cellphone. And we all know, for that, she was brutally attacked.
We’ve seen this snippet earlier than — a Black lady being thrown throughout a highschool classroom, a Black teenager in a bikini being tossed like a rag doll, a Black lady on the aspect of a highway being pummeled by a Los Angeles deputy, a Black lady being dragged out of her automotive for refusing to place out her cigarette. We might not know her, however we know her.
In America, we must always ask ourselves how a Black lady who started as a bystander to an incident of police violence grew to become the middle of it. We should always ask why so many others like her have been manhandled, crushed, tasered, shot, and a few killed, and but we as a society don’t ask these questions. The truth is that this concern barely registers within the public discourse.
The confluence of things that converge to make Black ladies and ladies essentially the most susceptible of all ladies to state violence additionally conspire to erase their lack of life, each in particular person instances and as a bunch.
Black ladies and ladies are extra seemingly than every other group of girls to be killed by the police. Black ladies make up round 10% of the feminine inhabitants within the U.S., but they account for one-fifth of all ladies killed by the police and nearly one-third of unarmed ladies killed by the police.
Black ladies have been killed by police of their properties, of their automobiles, within the firm of fogeys, and in entrance of their kids. Women as younger as 7 and ladies as outdated as 93 have been killed by the police. That they’re feminine and the group most definitely to be unarmed after they had been killed does little to problem the all-purpose excuse that officers had been in worry for his or her lives after they used deadly drive.
Tragically, of the greater than 200 cases of Black ladies who had been killed by the police and profiled in “Say Her Title: Black Girls’s Tales of Police Violence and Public Silence,” a brand new ebook revealed by the African American Coverage Discussion board, just about not one of the officers concerned have been held accountable.
The invisibility of Black ladies as victims of police violence is widespread, extending throughout the social and political spectrum. Chances are you’ll know the names Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Philando Castille, or George Floyd as victims of police violence, however do you acknowledge India Kager, Michelle Shirley, Kayla Moore, Michelle Cusseaux or Tanisha Anderson?
For individuals who rely themselves as advocates of racial justice, not figuring out that these ladies misplaced their lives to the police shouldn’t be a private failing however a conceptual one. The tales about Black ladies and police brutality don’t match inside the prevailing body of reference, which is centered on males, even in the case of racial trauma. When the info don’t match obtainable frames, they develop into dispensable and simply forgotten.
Resisting the erasure of Black ladies’s encounters with the police requires an intersectional manner of seeing the causes and penalties of police brutality. From the outset, the #SayHerName marketing campaign has sought not solely to acknowledge and memorialize the deaths of Black ladies killed by the police but additionally to uncover the interconnected methods during which Black ladies’s vulnerability to state violence has been normalized.
Because the summer season of racial reckoning in 2020, right-wing extremists have doubled down on their efforts to erase Black historical past, Black voices and Black lives. They’ve likewise sought to censor Black feminism, Black queer research, and intersectionality itself — caricaturing efforts to carry to the forefront the experiences of Black ladies and others who’ve been relegated to the margins of antiracism and feminism actions.
There’s a twisted methodology to this insanity.
Intersectionality is a prism for seeing extra clearly the injustices that demagogues like Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida would favor to obscure. It’s no shock that he tried to ban instruction on intersectionality, even demanding that the idea be purged from the Superior Placement African Research course. But, understanding how racism, sexism and different forces intersect is vital for the survival of Black ladies and ladies, simply as vital eager about race is a necessity for all Black individuals.
I’m not naive sufficient to assume that the top of police violence might be caused by the #SayHerName motion. However what we are able to do is to bear witness in opposition to the insurance policies and practices that systematically brutalize Black ladies, with nearly no consequence.
Girls like Korryn Gaines and Shelly Frey and Atatiana Jefferson deserved extra. Girls just like the unnamed lady within the WinCo car parking zone who might have died deserve extra. Our society deserves extra.
Step one in recognizing the worth of the lives of those ladies might sound easy, however it is important: Say her identify.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a professor on the Columbia College and UCLA regulation faculties and govt director of the African American Coverage Discussion board.
