Despite my usual visceral negative reaction to identitarian subgroups competing for attention, this Guardian post gave me pause.
When she speaks at public meetings, Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw has a trick. She asks everyone to stand up until they hear an unfamiliar name. She then reads the names of unarmed black men and boys whose deaths ignited the Black Lives Matter movement; names such as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin. Her audience are informed and interested in civil rights so “virtually no one will sit down”, Crenshaw says approvingly. “Then I say the names of Natasha McKenna, Tanisha Anderson, Michelle Cusseaux, Aura Rosser, Maya Hall. By the time I get to the third name, almost everyone has sat down. By the fifth, the only people standing are those working on our campaign.”
Crenshaw was the professor who coined the word, “intersectionality,” which is hard to forgive, but that doesn’t mean her point here doesn’t have merit.
The campaign, #SayHerName, was created to raise awareness about the number of women and girls that are killed by law enforcement officers. For Crenshaw – who coined the term “intersectionality” in the 1980s to describe the way different forms of discrimination overlap and compound each other – it is a brutal illustration of how racism and sexism play out on black women’s bodies.
While I may be familiar with some of the names that aren’t “household words” because I spend more time reading about such things than most people, it raises a real question. Why is it that the wrongful killing of some black men by police becomes a cause célèbre, and yet very few black women, aside from Sandra Bland and Rekia Boyd, have received any media attention at all?
Granted, not all killings of black men have garnered attention, and certainly a great many killing of white men have remained obscure, but in the relative scheme of things, they have received far more attention than the killing of black women. Is it racism? Sexism? Obviously, killings become better known if the media spreads the word. If there is a video (if it bleeds, it leads), there is a far stronger likelihood to make the cut. But that doesn’t sufficiently answer the question.
Where is the media on this? Do white male journalists not care? Then what about black journalists? Or women journalists? Or black women journalists? If there aren’t enough, why not? If there are, but media outlets run by white men won’t hire them, why aren’t black women creating their own media outlet? If they are, but they’re limited to racial and/or sex-based issues, why? Why aren’t black women creating general interest media outlets that attract a broad audience? Tons of questions. Few answers.
It’s reminiscent of the missing children dilemma, where a missing beautiful white child will be covered by every newspaper, every television news, while a missing black child goes completely unnoticed. While this may be a slight exaggeration, it’s only slight. Certainly, every missing child should be of concern, should be newsworthy. And yet, that just isn’t the case.
Rather than make this a competition between identitarian groups, we would do better to focus on the cause of the problem for everyone. Yet, Crenshaw is right about this (despite her being off-the-wall [ableist slur] about pretty much all her other “causes,” that black women have been ignored in the scheme of people wrongfully killed by the police.
There is no acceptable explanation for why that should be. So, yeah, #SayHerName. Dead black women at the hands of cops are no less worthy of our concern than anyone else.
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Thank you for the links. Even the esteemed Guardian(specifically, Michelle Dean and her editor) cannot seem to stick to the story of a black woman killed by police. The article on Tanisha Anderson spends most of its time talking about “the erasure” of black female stories, which leaves Tanisha’s personal story disjointed and difficult to follow.
That brings me to my next point. How is a story “erased from the spotlight”, if it has multiple Guardian articles on it? It was brought into the spotlight, and for what could be a myriad of reasons it did not stick the same way Freddie Gray’s or Tamir Rice’s stories did.
The intersectionality specialist’s explanation for that focuses on sexism and racism, as you would expect. What about the differences in the personal stories? What if more people relate to Michael Brown’s story than to Natasha McKenna’s, or find Eric Garner’s story more moving? Favoring sex and race is its own form of “erasure” – erasing the individual facts and narratives of each case, and boiling them down to labels. I would guess most people do not live and breathe isms like intersectionality feminists – to them, the particulars of the story is what drives its memorability, not the labels you can slap on it.
It is the BLM movement that most often chants the names of the black males – Crenshaw’s analysis implicates them as sexist. Or maybe they’re ableist, given that all the female stories involve mental illness. Of course, you wouldn’t want to accuse your allies of a failure to act directly, so you would blame the omnipresent oppressionarchy on it, pulling the strings of the underprivileged puppets.
I’ve watched a lot of BLM protest footage, and quite often the leaders and most vocal proponents are black women. Are they erasing their own problems? What about the names of dead black men not featured in Crenshaw’s trick, like Edson Thevenin or Corey Jones? Or those that had the fortune of staying alive, like Tyrone Carnegay?
The Guardian article on Tanisha Anderson says that “At least seven of the 23 women killed by police in 2015 were African American like Tanisha”, compared to >1000 black males. Are black women underrepresented? Now we know the names of 2 out of the 7, do we know the names of 300 of the black men? Perhaps stories like those of Eric Garner are simply the lucky ones that managed to float above the marsh pit of apathy, and it’s just a matter of numbers.
I agree with your final sentiment, but I think the superficial analysis given by intersectionality does not crack the surface of actual understanding. I don’t think black women are “ignored” – not more than black men, at least. In the case of police shootings, focusing on sex(and possibly race, but I don’t have numbers to back that up) is a distraction from the constellation of other factors – the first rule of policing, unchecked police power, the high level of trust and the blue wall that protects cops from possible misconduct.
These are strangers: Strangers die unjustly all the time and make no impact on me. The default is to not care – this is just part of the human condition, it’s not physically possible to care about everyone.
What needs to be explained is not, “why are we not bothered about the death of Natasha McKenna” but “why are we bothered about Michael Brown or Eric Garner”. We care because it is part of a larger narrative framework we are invested in. We care about the argument not the person.
I suppose the difference may be that we can’t fit females into the narrative framework because we find it harder to imagine a police officer killing a woman or a white man other than from a genuine mistake or necessity.
“Rather than make this a competition between identitarian groups, we would do better to make focus on the cause of the problem for everyone.”
It’s not about identity so much as it’s about allocation of resources.
If you choose to focus on police killings based on where your efforts may produce the biggest results, “police killing black men” is a good choice. The bad-outcome rates for black men appear to be some of the worst in the system; those for black women are much lower. You use your resources most efficiently, although you treat folks differently.
If you prefer to focus on police killings generally, that’s a good choice as well. You avoid leaving some groups behind and you avoid identity politics. But you might not do as much to change the significant difference in outcomes between black men and some other groups, and you might be a bit less efficient on the “reductions in killings per hour spent” scale.
To get a better idea of media priorities, they should add Cecil and Harambe after the men’s names.
ISWYDT.
It’s a sad commentary when a couple of animals get more news coverage and sympathy than the killing of a human being, regardless of race or sex.
Maybe it is because in all the cases but Hall (shouldn’t he be considered a man since he identified as a man despite his genitalia?), the primary issue was not that they were black but that they were mentally ill. How many people would sit down if the first names she presented were Phillip Coleman and Elliot Williams? While it might be that Michael Brown was mentally ill, that was never presented as a part of his story while it defined the story of the black women (except Hall, and it is unlikely that race had much of an impact on the NSA deciding to shoot a SUV busting through the gate to Fort Meade).
I can think of two very good reasons why this might occur. Firstly and obviously it may well be that women are a small minority of the people this happens to. Secondly It may be a result of the unwillingness of the media to follow and report stories that connect women to criminal behaviour. Perhaps it is only when a person with an agenda of advocating for women specifically researches these stories that they come to light. Newspapers don’t have the time to make sure that the stories don’t reflect badly on women so they leave them alone. When reporting on black men the story will either put men or cops in a bad light which is a win win for the popular narrative.