“Who is outside?”
“The police.”
“What are they trying to do?”
“They’re trying to kill us.”
“Do you want to go out there?”
“No.”
These are amongst the last words uttered by Korryn Gaines to her child before they were both shot by police. Gaines, a 23-year-old mother of two, was killed Monday after an hours-long standoff with Baltimore police. She had her five-year-old son in her arms. In a feat of violence that stretches the bounds of the imagination, her young son, captured on a video which Gaines then uploaded to Instagram, not only witnessed his mother’s murder but was himself shot by police. The conversation above took place between Gaines and her son shortly before police raided her apartment in full SWAT gear on an outstanding traffic charge. Police say a man residing at the same house was also wanted on an assault charge. That man fled with Gaines’s one-year-old child some time before police shot her and her son.
Gaines’s death is an instance of police violence that nauseatingly recalls another violent shooting: the death of Philando Castile, the aftermath of which was recorded by his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds and witnessed by her four-year-old daughter, Dae’Anna. In the Facebook Live video Reynolds recorded, Dae’Anna’s tiny voice can be heard from the back of the car saying, “It’s OK, Mommy. It’s OK. I’m right here with you." In both instances, the pretext was a traffic violation, small children were present, and black women remained unnervingly calm while recording the final moments of a life.
Korryn Gaines was the ninth black woman shot and killed by police this year, illustrating clearly that not only does police violence impact black women at a disproportionate rate, but that as caretakers and providers for black children, the risk of extreme trauma and injury—even death—extends to the children of black women too.
Take for instance the recent and savage murder of 24-year-old Joyce Quaweay, a Philadelphia mother of four whose children witnessed her boyfriend, a former police officer and his best friend, a current police officer, strip her naked and beat her to death. All because she “would not submit” to his whims. While this is an instance of interpersonal violence, arguably all that qualifies it as such is the fact that the cop implicated was off the clock. Note the dearth of press; it has not inspired a movement to take the streets in protest. Quaweay's death is seen as a private facing issue, of individual domestic violence.
We already know that police culture allows violent individuals to use their position to inflict violence on the most marginalized—Daniel Holtzclaw’s serial assaults against black women made that apparent. Earlier this year, SB Nation published a 12,000 word hagiography of Holtzclaw, and though it was later deleted, it is a fraught reminder of how violence against black women is relegated to the background.
The truth is, black women and girls account for 20 percent of unarmed people killed by police in the U.S. since 1999, despite comprising just 7 percent of the overall population. It suggests police violence against black women—to say nothing of the crimes committed against trans women, like Dee Whigham and Skye Mockabee, of which there have been seventeen murders this year—is actively erased from larger narratives around state violence.
As in the murders of black men, accountability is exceedingly rare. Take the case of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, a seven-year-old girl shot during a SWAT raid on her home targeting her uncle—not unlike Korryn Gaines. While Stanley-Jones is supported by local activists, her case has garnered limited traction on a national scale. Last year, murder charges against the officers were quietly dropped.
The organizing mantra #SayHerName—which came out of the African American Policy Forum, the brainchild of legal scholar and organizer Kimberle Crenshaw—is an attempt to rectify that narrative and to draw attention and resources to the fight against interpersonal and state violence against black women and girls. Crenshaw, who originated the concept of intersectionality, sees current frameworks around police violence as lacking when it comes to black women. "We have a narrative within which to place [violent images] of black men,” she says. “We’ve experienced it, we’ve contested it, it fits within a basic script of what happens when black men encounter police violence. We don’t have that for black women.”
It seems that brutality leveled against black women in private and in public rarely inspires the same outrage and organized resistance that the deaths of black men do. One theory is that violence against black men is viewed as a public facing issue, while state and interpersonal violence against black women is often inaccurately seen as a private or localized community issue. The lackluster response social movements have to intimate partner violence, which is often state sanctioned and the number one killer of black women ages 15-34, makes clear that battles we thought were already fought—“the personal is political”—have not been won. It is difficult to classify the disparity as anything other than misogyny.
Black women have carried movements for racial justice in this country, from the Civil Rights movement, to the gay rights movement and current iterations of Black Lives Matter. It has inspired a weary fatigue in black women who are interested in organizing to resist the violence visited upon us from the state and otherwise. We are literally dying for our communities across this country, and yet we remain unseen. It is tragic that in New York City, where I live, arguably the epicenter of anti-police brutality organizing, I expect that organizers will remain largely silent on Gaines, Quaweay, Stanley-Jones, Whigham, and Mockabee. It has happened before: when a protest was organized for Rekia Boyd, only a handful of people showed up.
We ought to ask ourselves: Where is the support for these women? Why are their deaths not given their due?
Crenshaw cites Jessica Williams, who was killed six weeks ago in San Francisco. She has not become a household name (nor a hashtag), and not a single major political leader has spoken about her death. “The struggle is a two-part struggle: against the vulnerability black women face but also against the irrelevance that their loss of life seems to symbolize to many people who know nothing about it and haven’t been motivated to lift up their names,” Crenshaw says. “That’s why we’ve been insisting on saying her name, in order to fight this erasure, of their loss of life.”
