#SayHerName: Black Women + Police Violence
There is a kind of silence, and that is the silence of saying her name. The silence that surrounds Black women killed by police violence is deafening. Even as a Black woman, aware of the omnipresent threat of violence, when it comes to sharing the names of those who have fatally experienced that violence, I like most people, type a man’s name after the #justicefor. Not because men necessarily experience more violence, but because the erasure of Black women that experience police violence exists even within me.
For centuries, Black women scholars and activists show that race, class, and gender, not as additive variables, but intersectional and interlocking statuses, play a significant role in the lives of Black women in the United States, and thus impact the experiences within our everyday lives. Our intersectional identities strip us of power on multiple levels. Black women lack political power, as well as social power because we are stratified based on the interplay between our race, class, and gender, and thus our social status is uniquely disadvantaged and marginalized. We are regulated to the margins within society, as women, as Black, and specifically as Black women. Black women contend with multiple forms of domination as Black women, not apart from it, including police violence.
Policing in the United States is as American as apple pie. Rates of state sponsored violence, in the form of police brutality and police killings, are disproportionality high for a nation of this size and wealth, yet we see continued cases year after year. Although 13% of the population in the United States, Blacks accounted for 24% of those shot and killed by police in 2016. Proportionately, Blacks are overrepresented in fatal police violence. In 2012, the Malcom X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) produced a report called Operation Ghetto Storm that detailed all the known police killings of Black people that year, accounting for a Black person being killed every 28 hours. MXGM projected that with trends continuing, the number would increase to 24 hours or less. This disproportion exists whether or not an individual is armed, the distinction made to justify the level of force used by the police, with unarmed Blacks being seven times more likely to be shot than unarmed whites.
Police violence against Black women has largely been obscured and understanding the prevalence is even more severely limited compared to Black men. Black women are particularly vulnerable and subject to police violence. The African American Policy Forum reported that Black women have been killed by the police for driving while Black, battling mental health and poverty, being suspected of using or dealing drugs, through neglect of physical health conditions, their gender and sexuality, specifically those who are non-conforming or trans, and even when they are victims of sexual violence. Yet, we must often be reminded to #sayhername. Breonna Taylor. Alexia Christian. Mya Hall. Gabriella Nevarez. Shantel Davis. Miriam Carey. Malissa Williams. LaTanya Haggerty. Kendra James. Sandra Bland. Sharmel Edwards. Margaret LaVerne Mitchell. Eleanor Bumpurs. Kathryn Johnston. Alberta Spruill. Tanisha Anderson. Michelle Cusseaux. Kayla Moore. Shereese Francis. Sheneque Proctor. Natasha McKenna. Rekia Boyd. Aiyana Stanley-Jones. Tarika Wilson. Meagan Hockaway. JaNisha Fonville. Aura Rosser. Duanna Johnson. Alesia Thomas. And countless others because Black women’s subordinate position in society renders them invisible, even in their deaths. This positioning shapes how we are seen, engaged with, and marginalized. The subordination allows us to be subjected, to be made as appropriate bodies for the perpetration of violence, to not been seen as a woman, or feminine, or a human for that matter. To be punished, policed, criticized, ignored, invalidated, unseen, unsupported, seen as superhuman, causalities, or collateral damage.
To combat police violence, it is imperative that we understand policing more broadly than as a social institution to protect and serve — we must understand the far range of their power, even in spaces that are not criminal. The extent of police surveillance, and surveillance more generally is not seen or understood — purposely. This power of surveillance makes all visible, analyzing and documenting behaviors that are nothing more than harmless, and pathologizing them. It is why we see cases of Black women being murdered for merely existing. That is erasure. The exploitation of Black existence and the simultaneous denial of Black personhood. This surveillance turns Black communities inside out and associates daily living with criminality. It is this surveillance that allows the perpetuation of police violence.
To combat police violence, we must resist the urge to point fingers at individual actors that exercise power against Black women. Investigating police violence against Black women is not simply to put on the stand the individual officers who perpetuate the violence. It is to interrogate the power that allows those individual officers to operate that way. We must recognize that police violence against Black women is not just for fun, or the result of a couple of racist and misogynistic individuals; there is profit in making a body sub or non-human, profit in subjecting certain kinds of bodies to police violence.
To combat police violence, we must interrogate who does the speaking about police violence, what they say and do not say about it, who they mention and who they do not, how they respond to it, and how they ask others to respond. The way that police violence against Black people is put into discourse obscures the prevalence of the violence, the way the violence perpetuates and reinforces ideas of supposed Black criminality, and the victims of that violence. The institutions that control and shape the discourse around police violence against Black people produce many pieces of a singular narrative. But we must work to expand that narrative.
Black lives, including those of Black women, matter. And we must resist the erasure of Black women among the victims of police violence, because it is only as those on the margins are brought into the center, that we can dismantle the forces that create the margins in the first place. #Sayhername.
