Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women
by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Andrea J. Ritchie, Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, Luke Harris
Published by: African American Policy Forum, Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies
2016

Breonna Taylor, a 27-year-old EMT, was shot and killed by three armed intruders who broke into her house at 1am on 3/13/2020. The intruders, it turns out, were police officers, which makes them different from any other armed intruder breaking into a house at 1am in that they may well get away with murder.

There’s a long history of police officers getting away with murder. Most of the time it doesn’t even make the news. This report, that’s only 124 pages long, is an attempt to address that issue, because black women are being murdered and even their deaths are being erased.

I read this report because as difficult as it was to read, it felt worse to be the person reading only escapist fiction right now.

Most of the statistics collected about police killings of black people are gender neutral studies: how many black people are being killed. But the reporting of those studies often shift to talk about how many black men are being killed, even though the actual breakdown, according to this report, is actually pretty evenly divided between black men and black women.

A lot of black people’s deaths go unremarked in the news, their murderers unpunished, but when one of those deaths does get deemed news-worthy, it’s almost always a boy or a man. This report is an attempt to remind the world that it’s not just black men who are dying, it’s not just black women who are left to mourn.

But because of the lack of reporting, the women who are dying are even harder to identify than their male equals. Their deaths pass unnoticed by the public outside of their local communities. These authors searched what newspaper archives they could in order to create short bios and summaries of the murders of thirty-five women, knowing that they would only be able to find those that made at least some newspaper give them attention.

Even before the current protests pointed a spotlight on police violence, I was already becoming uncomfortable with the way fictional police were so often shown performing vigilante justice and being dismissive and unfriendly to their own internal affairs officers. It’s more recently that I’ve become aware of how much worse the real police are. Policemen casual in their disregard for black lives because they can be, because they don’t face any repercussions. The police protect their own from any harm without caring that their own is the cause of harm to the people they are supposed to be protecting. As someone on tumblr put it: “If there are 1,000 good cops and 10 bad cops, but the 1,000 good cops don’t arrest the 10 bad cops, then there are really just 1,010 bad cops.”

One of the patterns that I noticed in this report because I’ve noticed it before in the news, is how scared the police are, or at least say that they are, of their victims. How the judges and juries let them get away with the murders because, “regardless of how real or not the danger was”, what mattered was the policeman’s fear. At the same time, many of the victims were killed trying to get away from the policemen who were presenting a very real and obvious danger to them. Their fear, their pain, their capacity for emotion, wasn’t even acknowledged. It’s an infuriating bit of hypocrisy.

The bios of the women were divided into sections based on the circumstances of their deaths: driving while black, policing poverty, the war on drugs, mental illness, death in custody, guilt by association, responding to a call for help, and sexual profiling, with a further sections to address serial rapist policemen, the treatment of black mothers, and the treatment of black survivors of police violence. Then a short conclusion with recommended further reading and recommendations for societal change.

Say her name: Alexia Christian, Mya Hall, Gabriella Nevarez, Miriam Carey, Shantel Davis, Malissa Williams, Sharmel Edwards, Kendra James, LaTanya Haggerty, Sandra Bland, Shelly Frey, Margaret LaVerne Mitchell, Eleanore Bumpurs, Kathryn Johnston, Alberta Spruill, Danette Daniels, Frankie Ann Perkins, Tanisha Anderson, Michelle Cusseaux, Pearlie Golden, Kayla Moore, Shereese Francis, Tyisha Miller, Natasha McKenna, Kyam Livingston, Sheneque Proctor, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tarika Wilson, Meagan Hockaday, Janisha Fonville, Aura Rosser, Yvette Smith, Duanna Johnson, Nizah Morris, …

Keep in mind, this report was published in January 2016, a full year before the Trump presidency ushered in a spike in racial violence and fascist behaviors.