Women Are Victims of Police Violence, and Part of the Fight Against It

When we talk about lynching, police brutality and mass incarceration, we are almost always talking about African-American men, not women. Being a target of racism is seen as patrilineal, a social and political disadvantage that black fathers unwillingly bequeath to their sons but not their daughters. The result is a dyad of vulnerability and invisibility that most African-American women, including me, learn to navigate at an early age.

This exclusion has also been true of the paramount social-justice movement of the moment, #BlackLivesMatter. Two years after its inception, few people remember that it originated with three black female activists, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. But nearly all of the victims of police violence whose cases have been made causes célèbres by the movement have been men — despite the fact in 2015 alone, at least six black women have died in or after encounters with the police.

Sadly, this erasure of women seems far-reaching: Last year, the#WhyWeCan’tWait campaign argued against the exclusion of African-American girls from President Obama’s singular racial-justice initiative, My Brother’s Keeper, while some critics have accused author Ta-Nehisi Coates of marginalizing black women altogether in “Between the World and Me,” his profound meditation against American racism. “Black womanhood in real life isn’t — as it largely is in ‘Between the World and Me’ — about beating and loving and mourning black men and protecting oneself from physical plunder,” writes Shani Hilton on BuzzFeed, in response to Coates’s book. “It’s about trying to live free in a black body, just like a man.

Writing for the Marshall Project in July, Maura Ewing referred to the “Sandra Bland breakthrough,” saying that after her death last month in an alleged suicide in a Texas jail cell, there’s a renewed sense of how police violence impacts women, particularly women of color. Ewing also refers to the Say Her Name report:

The anecdotal evidence gathered in the Say Her Name report — the most comprehensive available — asserts that black women are victimized by law enforcement for the same reasons that men are: racial profiling and traffic stops in the name of the war on drugs. There are also gender-specific forms of violence that are much less talked about. These include unlawful searches during enforcement of anti-prostitution laws, excessive force against pregnant women, and police responses to domestic-violence calls.

Women of color, then, have waited far too long to be visible as both victims of police violence and activists against it. That’s part of what’s so powerful about the Fusion video: these are, in many cases, women whose quest for justice and answers in the deaths of their loved ones goes back years, or even decades. The women are all based in New York; they are Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, Constance Malcolm, the mother of Ramarley Graham, Iris Baez, mother of Anthony Baez, Hawa Bah, mother of Mohamed Bah, Hertencia Peterson and Kimberly Ballinger, the aunt and partner, respectively, of Akai Gurley, and Margarita Rosario, the mother of Anthony Rosario.

“One family alone cannot do it,” Rosario told Fusion. “Standing together, we are a force.”

The full video is below.

Screengrab via YouTube/Fusion