Kimberlé Crenshaw on Sandra Bland & Why We Need to #SayHerName
Kimberlé Crenshaw on Sandra Bland & Why We Need to #SayHerName
The jailhouse death of Sandra Bland has her family and activists asking a lot of questions—which don’t seem to have good answers. Bland’s case is the latest example of police violence against black women, joining many other women and girls of color who have been harassed, abused or killed at the hands of law enforcement. The Ms. Blog spoke with Kimberlé Crenshaw, founder and director of the African American Policy Forum and co-author the #SayHerName report, which aims to highlight the policy violence that black women experience, about Bland’s case.
The Ms. Blog spoke with Kimberlé Crenshaw, founder and director of the African American Policy Forum and co-author the #SayHerName report, which aims to highlight the policy violence that black women experience, about Bland’s case.
What was your immediate reaction when you learned of Sandra Bland’s death?
Deeply disturbed that this kind of tragedy continues to happen. [It makes me hopeful] that her death would prompt the media and activists alike to pay more attention to the vulnerability of black women. We may never know what exactly caused her death, but the fact that she was pulled over, manhandled and arrested for something that was so minor in the first place is itself an indicator of how vulnerable black women are. I don’t want that vulnerability to disappear if we, in fact, never do find out what actually caused her death. The thing is, she wouldn’t have been in the jail had she not been pulled over, and the entire possibility is that had she been white, she would not have been in that jail cell in the first place.
Why is the police brutality that black women experience never foregrounded in conversations surrounding police use of excessive force?
You rarely, if ever, have black women at the center of how we imagine and politically resist racism. And that’s especially the case when we deal with questions like police brutality, excessive force and mass incarceration, things that are widely understood to be particularly salient when it comes to racism and its efforts to contain and police black masculinity. Black women and black girls are, in general, marginalized in the way we think and imagine race discrimination. When it comes to matters of force and punishment, in which black men are so disproportionately impacted, there’s scant attention paid to how black women are impacted by some of these same dynamics.
What do you think Sandra Bland’s death could mean for the #SayHerName movement?
It has so far raised awareness and attention to her case and her vulnerability in particular. Our hope is that justice is served by the attention that her case has generated. There’s vulnerability that all black women face and that vulnerability will still be there even if we never know what really happened to Sandra. Or if it turned out that Sandra did commit suicide, the fact of the matter is that she was abused, she was manhandled. We saw it, we saw her last words to the public and that cannot be the image of policing that we’re satisfied and happy with. My hope is that we build from the tragedy to a proactive movement that actually does put black women in the middle of our concerns and that we build policy and accountability structures that respond to the specific ways that black women are made vulnerable to police violence.
Where does this dangerous social narrative of black women being inhuman, superhuman or unrape-able come from and how does it contribute to these tragic cases we see over and over again?
We just have to start with acknowledging that black women came to this country as forced labor and forced engines of capital reproduction. They were worked for both their capacity to create more workers and they were worked themselves. That exceptional way in which black women have occupied womanhood has long, long, long been one of the justifications that has always been given for how the treatment of black women has diverged wildly from how women are supposed to be treated or understood.
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http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/07/30/kimberle-crenshaw-on-sandra-bland-why-we-need-to-sayhername/
