“We do this for Marissa! We do this for Rekia! We do this for Tanisha! We do this for Islan! We do this for Aiyanna! We do this for Mya! We do this for Malissa! We do this till we free us!” These words—a riff on the famous Ferguson chant “Turn up! Don’t turn down! We do this for Mike Brown!”—were our chant as we marched through the streets of New York City on May 21, 2015. We were marking the first National Day of Action to End State Violence Against Black Women and Girls, called by Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), Black Lives Matter (BLM), and Ferguson Action. We had just left a beautiful and moving ceremony led by members of Harriet’s Apothecary, a collective of Black women and queer and trans healers, and organized by the New York City chapters of BYP100 and BLM at the African Burial Ground monument in lower Manhattan. There we had commemorated the lives of Black women lost to state violence. Now we were marching toward city hall to join a rally to protest the addition of one thousand police officers to the nation’s biggest police force—and one of its deadliest.
At the ceremony preceding the march, one participant told the story of Shereese Francis, a former day-care worker who was warm, outgoing, and beloved by her community and church. On March 15, 2012, concerned family members called for an ambulance when Shereese went into an emotional crisis after she stopped taking medication prescribed for schizophrenia. The police responded first. Four NYPD officers chased Shereese through her home and piled on top of her, one of them punching her. They handcuffed her as she lay facedown on a bed and suffocated her—much like police across the country would do to Kayla Moore a year later.1
Another participant told the story of Islan Nettles, a twenty-one-year-old Black trans woman who worked at a fashion company, who was beaten to death across the street from a Harlem police station. Islan had been walking with a group of friends when a man tried to flirt with her. When his friends made fun of him, he took his rage out on Islan, killing her.2 Islan’s murder sparked protests by trans community members and allies, who called attention to her death as emblematic of endemic and often fatal community violence against trans people, and of pervasive police indifference to Black trans lives.3
After the ceremony, we marched out the other side of the monument, through a representation of the “door of no return,” carrying a coffin bearing the name of Shantel Davis, a twenty-three-year-old Black woman—a loving sister, niece, daughter, auntie, and friend, with a warm and contagious smile, strength of character, and generosity. Shantel was killed by New York police detective Philip Aikins in June 2012 as she sat in a car, unarmed, in Brooklyn.4
We made our way, chanting, solemn, and determined, to city hall. There, activist Carmen Dixon had just testified on behalf of BLM, in the name of Black women targeted for police violence and Black mothers who have lost children to police violence, against the proposal to add a thousand more officers to the force. She concluded by saying:
When I close my eyes, and think about what makes me feel safest, I think of all my needs being met and the presence of people I love and respect. I do not think of one thousand additional police officers. . . . That is why Black Lives Matter NYC and the Safety Beyond Policing Coalition call on the NYC Council to redirect more than two hundred million dollars that would be spent over the next three years on additional police instead to adequately fund NYCHA [the New York City Housing Authority], jobs for youth, transportation, and mental health services, preventive services to keep children out of foster care, doula programs, food cooperatives, a fund for victims of police violence, and other urgent community needs.5
That afternoon, BYP100 and BLM members fanned out through Flatbush, a predominantly Black, immigrant, working-class neighborhood, to talk about state violence against Black women and girls. We ended the day at a monthly rally organized by Anita Neal, mother of Kyam Livingston, a thirty-seven-year-old, loving Black mother who worked as a security guard and died in a Brooklyn police lockup after being denied medical attention.6 Throughout the day, I watched as news of events held in more than twenty cities across the country marking the national day of action unfolded—marches, rallies, vigils, and direct actions, from Chicago to Charlotte, New York to New Orleans, Ann Arbor to Austin, Seattle to San Francisco.7
The night before, I had attended a vigil in Union Square honoring families of Black women killed by police—the first of its kind—organized by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) (see insert for vigil photo). I stood next to Kayla Moore’s sister Maria, along with family members of Tanisha Anderson, Rekia Boyd, Miriam Carey, Michelle Cusseaux, Shantel Davis, Shelly Frye, and Alberta Spruill, as we remembered not only how their daughters, sisters, or aunts had been killed but also who they were. And we envisioned what justice for them would look like. It was the first anti–police brutality event I had ever been to where I hadn’t left feeling frustrated, angry, or saddened at the erasure of Black women’s experiences and voices as targets of police violence and leaders in struggles against it. Instead, I felt whole in resistance.
One year later, at an event marking the second National Day of Action to End State Violence Against Black Women, Girls and Femmes, I stood behind a person wearing a BYP100 hoodie proudly proclaiming “Through a Black Queer Feminist Lens.” Tears came to my eyes—I never imagined I would be able to be a part of a broad-based movement that embraces a politic that has, until now, been limited to much smaller formations, relegated to the margins of feminist movements and movements for racial justice, never in the leadership of a national movement fighting police violence. After two decades of meetings, rallies, marches, conferences, and conversations on racial profiling and police brutality exclusively focused on Black and Brown men (and never Indigenous men) where I was a lone voice—never the only one, but often the only one in the room—calling for attention to Black women and women of color’s experiences of policing, asking people to at least say “Black and Brown men and women,” feeling like I was constantly talking under water, I suddenly felt like I had popped above the surface.
The tears returned many times that day, as once again I watched actions unfold across the country—from a banner drop at a Chicago White Sox game, to an MTV News video, to Black Lives Matter’s tribute to women lost to state and interpersonal violence and to women whose leadership inspires (which originated as a high school art project), to a projection of the names of Black women killed by police onto the walls of the US Department of Justice.8 Later came tears of rage and sorrow as I learned that on that very day, San Francisco Police had shot Jessica Nelson Williams, a mother of five, described by her family as a loving, caring, strong, and talented woman.9 While Jessica’s killing prompted the resignation of the San Francisco police chief, it rammed home the reality that even on a National Day of Action to End State Violence Against Black Women, Girls, and Femmes, no Black woman is safe from police violence.
There is no question that the shroud of invisibility around Black women’s and women of color’s experiences of police violence has been irrevocably lifted in the post-Ferguson moment and movement. It has been forcefully pushed aside by young women on the front lines in Ferguson and by bloggers and organizers across the country who were speaking out in the days and months following Mike Brown’s killing, who were outraged at Dajerria Becton’s assault in McKinney, who rose up in widespread protest following Sandra Bland’s death in police custody, and who unapologetically demanded attention and action around #AssaultatSpringValleyHigh and the rape of thirteen Black women by Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, and who demanded justice for Rekia Boyd.
In the past I had to hunt down and unearth women’s experiences of policing from archives, reports, transcripts of testimony, listservs, interviews, and one-on-one conversations. Now social media makes it possible to share these stories in unprecedented and unfiltered ways, coupled with insistence that we organize around them with as much fervor and indignation as we do for cases involving men. Now I have access to so many women’s stories that I can’t keep track of them all, and struggled with decisions about which to include in this book. Now it is much rarer to see an event, rally, or public statement around police brutality that doesn’t mention at least one woman. It seems that we will never go back to the time when Black women and women of color were expected to organize and lead marches protesting police violence against men but to remain silent about our own experiences and those of our sisters and trans and Two Spirit siblings. Our experiences and realities can no longer be ignored.
But we still have a long way to go. Organizers of events for the National Day of Action described resistance to placards featuring women’s names, with men insisting that all victims of police violence be represented—which was ironic, given that women’s identical demands were so consistently ignored in the past. Some have hurled homophobic and transphobic abuse at Black queer women leading or speaking at rallies, marches, and direct actions—sometimes while these very same women made sure that the men attacking them wouldn’t be attacked by the police. An early 2015 New York City rally for Rekia Boyd, a young Black woman killed by an off-duty Chicago police officer, drew fewer than one hundred people, while rallies for Mike Brown and Eric Garner had drawn thousands night after night just a few months before.
In many arenas, women of color’s experiences of policing continue to be shrouded in invisibility, or token visibility, in conversations around racial profiling, police violence, and mass incarceration. Sandra Bland’s mother is often the only mother of a woman killed by police invited to speak on police brutality, and no family members, chosen or original, of trans people killed by police are ever lifted up by mainstream civil rights leaders or in mainstream media to speak out on the issue. Numerous books and studies focused exclusively on Black men’s experiences of policing continue to be published; analyses of the issues continue to presume men of color as the primary and sole targets of racial profiling and police brutality.
Nevertheless, we are at an unprecedented moment of awareness of Black women and women of color as subjects of police violence. This represents a culmination of decades of labor and resistance within movements against violence and for police accountability, LGBTQ liberation, and reproductive justice, which has produced an analysis of policing that inextricably incorporates race, gender, gender identity, and sexuality.
As Angela Y. Davis points out in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, the evolution of this intersectional analysis has been a long and collective process, grounded not in the halls of academia but in movement formations and lived realities of activists on the ground.10 Throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, Davis herself led the way in articulating a gendered analysis of police violence and criminalization of women of color which profoundly inspired and shaped my, and many others’, evolving understanding.11 In Resisting State Violence, published in 1996, Joy James calls out the lack of such an analysis among advocates for women’s rights and racial justice. She also points readers to Black Women Under Siege by New York City Police, a 1987 report compiled by the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College decrying the framing of police attacks on Black women like Eleanor Bumpurs as isolated incidents, instead naming them as “part of an historical and recently increased trend.”12 The Audre Lorde Project’s long history of fighting police violence against women and queer and trans people of color and producing razor-sharp intersectional analysis has also deeply informed this work. In 2000, ALP wrote of broken windows policing in New York City, “The presence and actions of women and trans people of color, and particularly youth, sex workers, and homeless people, are always likely to be deemed ‘disorderly,’ causing ‘quality of life policing’ to curb our freedom of movement and legitimize and even facilitate police violence towards us.”13 Beth Richie, one of the founders INCITE!, in the early 2000s urged us to “take as a starting point the need to interrogate the ways that gender, sexuality, race, and class collide with harsh penal policy and aggressive law enforcement.”14 The “INCITE! Critical Resistance Statement: Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex,” drafted in 2001 by women of color working within movements challenging violence against women and prison and police violence, highlighted the invisibility of women of color targeted for police violence. The statement called on movements to develop strategies to address “how entire communities of all genders are affected in multiple ways by both state violence and interpersonal gender violence,” and to “center stories of state violence committed against women of color in our organizing efforts.”15 In 2002, Anannya Bhattacharjee answered the call in “Whose Safety? Women of Color and the Violence of Law Enforcement,” a publication of the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment and the American Friends Service Committee, which documented stories and patterns and provided an analysis of police violence against women of color that still resonates more than a decade later.16
This analysis extended beyond local policing. In the wake of 9/11, ALP partnered with the American Friends Service Committee to convene grassroots LGBTQ organizations from across the United States for discussions about the impacts of the “war on terror” on LGBTQ people of color and on our communities. In 2003, we drafted a statement describing the increased violence against all marginalized communities fostered by a climate of white supremacy, militarization, and rampant racial profiling.17 In 2006, as enforcement of immigration laws intensified, ALP issued another statement that emphasized, “When it comes to enforcement, visibly LGBTSTGNC [lesbian, gay, bisexual, Two Spirit, trans, and gender-nonconforming] immigrants of color, undocumented folks, low wage workers, women, youth and elders who are LGBTSTGNC POC [people of color] are exceptionally vulnerable to all facets of the detention and the prison industrial complex.” ALP opposed “all provisions to build more walls, fund more border enforcement units.”18 These statements, too, carry similar resonance today.
This intersectional analysis of law enforcement violence, collectively elaborated by Black feminists, feminists of color, and grassroots organizations led by women and LGBTQ people of color over decades, remained largely invisible within larger movements for racial justice and police accountability. Thankfully, Black queer feminists who founded Black Lives Matter and BYP100, along with the organizations that came together to articulate A Vision for Black Lives, as well as groups like AAPF and the Transforming Justice Coalition, have seized upon the post-Ferguson moment to advance a more comprehensive understanding of police violence, one that uncompromisingly centers the experiences of women and queer and trans people of color.
While the current level of discourse around women’s experiences of policing is unprecedented in volume, it is not unprecedented in fact. Even more invisible than police violence and criminalization of women of color has been resistance to these phenomena throughout history. The names of Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color harmed by police may not have not rolled off the president’s tongue or popped up in the pages of People magazine. But we have said them, repeated them to each other, blogged about them, testified about them, insisted their names be read at rallies, and demanded that their stories, and countless others like them, be at the center of our movements. And in so doing, we have followed in the footsteps of a long line of women who have pushed back against the notion that state violence and racial justice are exclusively the purview of Black men and men of color, with “race women” typecast in the role of supporting actors and sorrowing family members.
Here, I endeavor to render visible our long-standing resistance to state violence against women. Though I am most familiar with specific acts of resistance within the Black community, I recognize and honor that Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women, throughout history, have also vigorously resisted police and state violence. Indigenous women and gender-nonconforming people resisted and continue to resist colonialism at every stage. As Angela Davis points out, “Women resisted and advocated challenges to slavery at every turn,” in ways “often more subtle than revolts, escapes, and sabotage.”19 Likewise, immigrant women consistently challenged violence and exclusion at the nation’s borders. A few of their names have come down through the historical record—Pine Leaf Woman, Lozen, Buffalo Calf Road Woman, Moving Robe, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth—but countless others, and their means of resistance, remain buried in history.
According to Danielle McGuire, during the civil rights movement, “in order to reclaim their bodies and their humanity, African-American women called on a tradition of testimony and truth-telling that stretched back to slavery,” a tradition kept alive by Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s documentation of women’s experiences of lynching, alongside those of men, in The Red Record.20 We also know, thanks to McGuire, that much of the organizing preceding struggles around school segregation in Little Rock and the Montgomery bus boycott focused on police violence against Black women. For instance, in the 1940s, Daisy Bates, an NAACP leader and advisor to the Little Rock 9, a group of students who integrated a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the face of violent state and community resistance, called on white and Black leaders to address police brutality and abuse of Black women. In 1942, the newspaper Bates ran, the State Press, published photographs of two officers who raped Rosa Lee Cherry, a nineteen-year-old student at Little Rock’s Dunbar High School, prompting the officers’ indictment.21 In 1946, the inaugural meeting of the Montgomery Women’s Political Council, called by Mary Fair Burks, started with her own testimony about being beaten by a white police officer, and “nearly every woman at the meeting chimed in with similar stories of brutalization.” Later, led by Jo Ann Robinson, an unsung leader of the boycott, the organization “repeatedly confronted the city commissioners with complaints about police brutality.” In 1949, a group of organizations including the NAACP and the Negro Improvement League came together to form the Citizens’ Committee for Gertrude Perkins, a twenty-five-year-old Black woman raped by two Montgomery police officers as she walked home late one night. The group resisted efforts to frame Gertrude as a “common street woman” or to justify the assault on her on that basis.
McGuire’s research also reveals that at the height of the civil rights movement, in 1963, Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, and Jeanne Noble, president of the Black sorority Delta Sigma Theta, published a report documenting an investigation, conducted by twenty-four women’s groups, of the treatment of women civil rights activists by police and jailers in the South. The report documented instances of rape, sexual assault, strip searches in front of male prisoners and officers, and violent, degrading, and unsanitary cavity searches. Height followed up by convening a meeting of women’s organizations in Atlanta in 1964 at which an interracial coalition was formed to address the issue. Yet, writes McGuire, stories of sexual violence against women civil rights activists “garnered neither the media coverage nor the organizational support necessary to stop them from happening.”
A decade later, women’s and racial justice groups once again came together in a campaign focused on sexual violence in Southern jails when Joan Little was charged with the murder of a police officer, Clarence Alligood, who attempted to rape her in a Beaufort County, North Carolina, jail. According to McGuire,
In 1974 Joan Little became the symbol of a campaign to defend black womanhood and to call attention to the sexualized racial violence that still existed ten years after Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The Free Joan Little campaign brought disparate activists and organizations, each with their own resources and agendas, into a loose but powerful coalition. Feminists and women’s liberation organizations spoke out against sexual violence and advocated a woman’s right to self-defense; civil rights and Black Power groups saw the Little case as another example of police brutality and Southern injustice; opponents of the death penalty and prison reformers hoped the case would draw attention to their emerging campaigns.
Predictably, Joan’s prosecution focused on old familiar tropes, framing her alternately as “a prostitute,” “a madam,” diseased, and lesbian, and always as a conniving seductress who had lured Alligood into her cell to kill him and escape, rather than recognizing him as a sexual predator supported by the full weight of white supremacist patriarchy and unfettered access to Black women’s bodies.
Local grassroots groups rallied around the case as Concerned Women for Justice, joined by regional and national organizations including the National Organization of Women, the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, the National Black Feminist Organization, the Black Panther Party, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Angela Y. Davis published an article in Ms. magazine that placed Joan’s case in historical context. Rosa Parks helped found a Detroit chapter of the Joan Little Legal Defense Committee. Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of freedom singers Sweet Honey in the Rock, wrote a song that became the anthem for the Free Joan Little movement. At her July 1975 trial in Wake County, North Carolina, Joan’s defense raised the long history of sexual violence against Black women, and Alligood’s long history of sexual violence against Black women in the Beaufort County jail. Joan testified in her own defense, recounting how Alligood told her no one would believe her over a police officer if she reported his assault, much as Daniel Holtzclaw told his victims four decades later. Ultimately, the jury acquitted Joan of Alligood’s murder.22
Five years later, women’s groups and racial justice organizations would come together again around police and sexual violence—this time, the failure to investigate it. In 1979, members of the Combahee River Collective, founded in 1974, organized with white feminists and Black organizers to demand police accountability in the investigation, or lack thereof, of the murders of twelve Black women in Boston. The group published a pamphlet highlighting the fact that “the police . . . handled the situation as if there was no reason for concern,” telling one mother who reported her fifteen-year-old daughter missing that she had “probably gone off with a pimp.”23
Since then, however, for the most part the mainstream women’s movement’s has largely failed, beyond isolated moments of engagement, to take up Angela Y. Davis’s 1985 call to become fearless fighters against police violence and to stand in “passionate solidarity with the racially and nationally oppressed people who are its main targets,” including and especially Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color.24 This glaring and frustrating abandonment of women targeted for police violence has mirrored and is the product of the antiviolence movement’s growing investment in law enforcement–based approaches to domestic violence and sexual assault, as brilliantly documented in Beth Richie’s Arrested Justice, Mimi Kim’s Dancing the Carceral Creep, and Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, among others.25
The same has been true, until recently, of the mainstream LGBT movement, even though it is commonly understood to have its roots in resistance to policing of queer and trans communities. Decades before the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, during a 1943 raid of a gay bar in San Francisco’s Chinatown, two lesbians fought back, leading to a “small riot” during which dozens were arrested.26 In May 1959, fed up with daily demands for identification and arrests for prostitution, vagrancy, and loitering, and sparked by another nightly round-up of patrons, Black and Latinx transgender women, street youth, and gay men rose up against police harassment at Cooper’s Donuts, a popular gathering place in Los Angeles.27 Between 1965 and 1970, a group of homeless gay and trans youth in San Francisco, many of whom traded sex, came together as Vanguard, “an organization of, by, and for the kids on the streets,” to fight police harassment and abuse through organizing, publications, and direct action.28 Vanguard played an instrumental role in sparking the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot, where “drag queens” fought back when police tried to arrest them for doing nothing more than being out. Three years later, on a hot June evening in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, police attempted to arrest trans women and butch lesbians under anti–cross-dressing laws. Trans women of color and street youth led the revolt against police harassment and abuse. The following year, as documented by Regina Kunzel and publicized by transgender activist and filmmaker Reina Gossett,29 a march held to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising ended at the Women’s House of Detention, where members of the Black Panther Party were being held, with chants of “Free Our Sisters! Free Ourselves!”30 Stonewall leaders Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson later organized as STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) to fight the criminalization of and support the survival of transgender street-based youth. A decade later, a violent and homophobic 1982 raid on Blue’s, a Black working-class gay and lesbian bar in New York City, coming at a time of increased police attacks on Black lesbians in Washington Square Park and renewed arrests of “men wearing women’s clothing” on Long Island, prompted activists to organize once again. They framed police violence against LGBTQ people as “part of increasing right-wing violence and police abuse directed at Black, Latin, Asian and Native peoples, women, unionists, undocumented workers and political activists,” emphasizing that “your race, class, sex and sexual identification all affect how police treat you.”31 Yet in the four decades following Stonewall, mainstream LGBTQ organizations increasingly focused on securing the right to marry and on collaborating with law enforcement to increase penalties for homophobic and transphobic violence (“hate crimes”) but remained largely silent about ongoing policing and criminalization of LGBTQ people, primarily LGBTQ people of color. This left under-resourced grassroots organizations—led largely by people of color and low-income LGBTQ people—to continue to document ongoing police violence against LGBTQ people of color and advocate for systemic change.32
Nevertheless, protest occasionally erupted around individual cases of police violence against women of color. In the 1970s, police harassment and violence against women in Black liberation movements often prompted public outcry. The campaign in support of Assata Shakur highlighted the fact that she had been shot by a New Jersey state trooper while she held her hands raised in the air in surrender, and that she was further brutalized by New Jersey police officers as she lay shackled and partially paralyzed in a hospital bed. In 1979, the fatal shooting of Eulia Love by Los Angeles police officers summoned to resolve a dispute about her gas bill led to widespread criticism. Similarly, New Yorkers vociferously protested the 1984 killing of Eleanor Bumpurs during an eviction.
In 1994, New Orleans exploded in outrage when police officer Len Davis put a hit out on Kim Groves, a Black mother of three, and had her killed after she filed a complaint against him for pistol-whipping a young man in her neighborhood. Chicagoans took to the streets of the city’s South Side in 1999, chanting, “It’s a cell phone, not a gun! Police training 101!” after LaTanya Haggerty was shot in 1999—the same year Amadou Diallo was killed. In LaTanya’s case, officers claimed to have mistaken her cell phone for a gun, whereas in Diallo’s, they claimed to have mistaken his wallet for a gun. Also in 1999, residents of Riverside, California, held weekly protests at city hall and the district attorney’s office after Tyisha Miller, a nineteen-year-old Black woman, was shot twenty-two times by officers who had been called for help because she was found unconscious and having a seizure.
In 2003, New Yorkers once again protested when Alberta Spruill, a fifty-seven-year old Black woman described as a devout churchgoer and hardworking city employee, died of a heart attack after police threw a concussion grenade into her apartment during a drug raid conducted at the wrong address.33 The same year, hundreds of members of the Vietnamese community and immigrant rights activists held protests and vigils after Bich-Cau Thi Tran, a Vietnamese mother of two who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was shot and killed by San Jose, California, police as she was pointing a vegetable peeler at the door to a locked bedroom (see photo insert for image of poster demanding justice). They formed the Coalition for Justice and Accountability, which originally advocated for less lethal responses such as Tasers, but reevaluated its position after Taser use was shown not to decrease the number of fatal shootings but in fact increased the number of incidents in which people were tasered in nonlethal situations.34
As time went on, more general campaigns were launched beyond individual cases. Throughout the 2000s, Muslim advocacy groups challenged religious profiling and inappropriate searches of Muslim women wearing hijab, particularly at airports, while immigrant rights groups such as the National Network of Immigrant and Refugee Rights; Coalición de Derechos Humanos in Tucson, Arizona; and Human Rights Watch documented sexual violence against immigrant women at the Mexican border and during raids in the US interior. In 2002, grassroots organization Sista II Sista began documenting police sexual harassment of young Black and Latinx women in a Brooklyn neighborhood, screening a video and performing skits on the subject at a street fair across from the local precinct. At the same time, groups like the Audre Lorde Project, FIERCE, Community United Against Violence and more were documenting police violence against queer and trans women of color.
In 2005, INCITE! launched a national campaign to fight law enforcement violence against women of color at its third Color of Violence conference, held in the Treme quarter of New Orleans. The campaign culminated in the creation of the INCITE! Organizer’s Tool Kit on Law Enforcement Violence. The first of its kind, the 120-page booklet features fact sheets on different forms and contexts of police violence against women and trans people of color, tools for documentation, and ideas for resistance centering women and trans people of color’s experiences drawn from organizations across the country. It was launched in 2008 at a daylong preconference institute at the Critical Resistance ten-year-anniversary conference, and since then has been widely distributed at activist gatherings across the country.
In 2006, Washington, DC, passed legislation allowing for the declaration of Prostitution Free Zones (PFZ), areas in which people whom police ordered to “move along” were subject to arrest if they failed to do so, as were any group of two or more people congregating “for the purpose of prostitution.” As activists pointed out, the legislation merely codified existing policing practices but placed greater numbers of women of color, trans and not trans, profiled as or engaged in prostitution at risk of arrest and police abuse. Different Avenues, a DC-based harm-reduction organization, conducted a participatory action research project documenting the impacts of PFZs as part of a broader campaign to strike down the legislation, led by the Alliance for a Safe and Diverse DC. Activists including Sharmus Outlaw, a Black trans woman and outreach worker for Different Avenues, testified to the harmful impacts of PFZs during DC council hearings on the legislation, describing profiling and targeting of queer and trans people of color in public spaces and removal of the sex trade to more isolated and dangerous parts of the city where transgender sex workers in particular were exposed to greater violence. Activist Che Gossett describes how, as part of the campaign, members of the alliance sought to address residents’ concerns about condoms, lubricants, and other litter in neighborhoods designated as PFZs through cleanup days conducted under the slogan “Throw out litter, not people.” Eventually, efforts of DC organizers and threats of legal challenges to the legislation led to the repeal of PFZ legislation in 2014.35
A year before, in May 2013, an Arizona State University social work student named Monica Jones, a Black trans woman, was walking down the street when she was arrested for “manifesting an intent to prostitute.” Members of the Sex Workers Organizing Project in Phoenix packed the courtroom the day her case was heard to support her challenge to the constitutionality of the statute she was arrested under (see the photo insert for image of “We Stand with Monica Jones” poster). When the challenge was rejected, Monica vowed to fight on. She proclaimed, “It’s time that we end the stigma and the criminalization of sex work, the profiling of trans women of color, and the racist policing system that harms so many of us.” She appealed her conviction and led a national and international campaign to call attention to the discriminatory impact of laws like “manifesting an intent to prostitute” on women of color, and trans women of color in particular. Ultimately, Monica’s appeal was successful, because the word of the arresting officer had been given undue weight in the trial, and the case against her was dismissed.36 Monica continues to organize for sex workers’ rights and to highlight police violence against Black women of all gender identities.
Despite these efforts, women’s experiences, as well as a gendered analysis of racial profiling and mass incarceration, continued to prove elusive in the growing discussion of the impacts of racialized criminalization prompted by the 2010 release of Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking book The New Jim Crow. On a plenary on the subject at the July 2010 NAACP Convention, I argued that it was no longer tenable to approach issues of racial profiling, police violence, and mass incarceration without taking gender into account. I asserted that in order to effectively tackle these issues, we need to have a complete picture, one that reflects the full extent of the problem as it affects all members of our communities and that reflects how policing of gender and sexuality are used as tools in policing of race and class. The NAACP took up this charge with the release of the 2014 report Born Suspect: Stop and Frisk Abuses and the Continuing Fight to End Racial Profiling in America, which documents young women’s and LGBTQ people’s experiences of policing, and calls for comprehensive profiling bans that would provide protection on as many fronts as communities of color are policed.
Meanwhile, individual cases of police violence continued. In October 2011, I joined a group gathered in a park near the New Providence shelter in New York City for a vigil, organized by Queers for Economic Justice, to commemorate and protest the police shooting right outside the shelter of Yvonne McNeal, a Black lesbian in her mid-fifties, and member of a QEJ support group. The year before, QEJ had released a groundbreaking research report documenting police violence against low-income LGBTQ New Yorkers, including significant rates of sexual harassment against low-income queer and trans women, and high levels of ticketing, arrest, and physical violence.37
That same year, after two NYPD officers were acquitted of raping a woman they had picked up for being intoxicated, I wrote an op-ed to the New York Times calling for increased attention to systemic police sexual violence, as I had on several other occasions when stories of police rape surfaced. As usual, the Times didn’t publish it. However, People’s Justice for Community Control and Police Accountability (a citywide coalition that grew out of the 1990s Coalition Against Police Brutality, rekindled following the 2006 killing of Sean Bell) and Black Women’s Blueprint (an organization formed in 2008 to create a blueprint for change centering Black women’s experiences of state and interpersonal violence) joined forces to circulate my op-ed as a call to action on police sexual violence. In so doing, they emphasized “the need to incorporate women’s experiences into discussions of police violence and develop systemic approaches to sexual abuse by the police.”
Unfortunately, none of these grassroots efforts was successful in permanently integrating women of color’s experiences into the national conversation around racial profiling and police violence.
Until now.
In the days and months after Eric Garner and Michael Brown were killed in 2014, as the conversation turned once again to the ways in which police violence targets Black men, I struggled to find time to once again write a piece highlighting the fact that it’s not just Black men who are targeted. I quickly found I didn’t need to; almost immediately, blog posts began to appear with increasing frequency calling for attention to Black women killed by police: Tanisha Anderson, killed by Cleveland police just months after Mike Brown was killed by Darren Wilson; Miriam Carey, a thirty-seven-year-old dental hygienist whose family had been calling for truth and justice in her case since she was shot in October of 2013 by Secret Service and Capitol Hill police with her thirteen-month old child in the backseat of her car; Yvette Smith, a forty-seven-year-old caretaker killed by police responding to her 911 call about a disturbance in her home in February 2014; Tarika Wilson, mother of five, shot with her infant child in her arms during a SWAT drug raid, prompting weekly marches in her hometown of Lima, Ohio; Aiyana Stanley-Jones, a seven-year-old Black girl killed by Detroit police as she slept during a police raid, to name just a few of the most frequently raised cases.38
In November 2014, AAPF held a day-long forum entitled “In Plain Sight: Toward Engendering the Fight for Racial Justice in the 21st Century,” during which I had the honor of speaking on a panel on police violence with activists Ashley Yates and Johnetta Elzie, fresh from the frontlines of Ferguson. We were two generations of Black women meeting in a conversation affirming that we could not be a part of a struggle to end police violence as anything less than our full selves—Black women, some of us queer, and insisting on a voice and recognition that we were not only in the streets for Black men but also for ourselves. I left inspired. Several months later, at a “Reclaim MLK” march in New York City, Rachel Gilmer, then associate director of the AAPF, and I talked about reports we were both planning around Black women’s experiences of policing and decided to join forces. That winter, AAPF founder Kimberlé Crenshaw, Gilmer, and current AAPF Associate Director Julia Sharpe-Levine coined #SayHerName in response to the absence of Black women’s names and stories of police violence in protests and on social media. In May 2015, AAPF released a report I coauthored with Kimberlé Crenshaw, entitled Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, updating it in July 2015 to include Sandra Bland’s story. Since then, AAPF has hosted town halls, webinars, and activist camps aimed at lifting up the experiences of Black women in conversations around police brutality and for racial justice.
Meanwhile, organizing around cases involving Black women and trans and gender-nonconforming people gained traction. In October 2014, Juan Evans, a Black trans man, was arrested by the East Point, Georgia, Police Department during a routine traffic stop. Because he had left his wallet at the office, he provided his birth name and social security number. The officer accused him of lying about his identity. When Juan explained that he was transgender, the officer said he would force him to submit to a gender search on the side of the road. Juan refused, saying, “You don’t have the right to search my genitals.” Laughing in Juan’s face, the officer responded, “I have the right to search your mother’s genitals to find out who you are.” He handcuffed Juan and took him to the precinct, where he was once again threatened a forcible gender search. Throughout the encounter, police officers referred to Juan as an “it” and “thing,” and repeatedly asked him about his genitals. Like so many trans and gender-nonconforming people, this was not the first time Juan experienced disrespect, ignorance, and abuse at the hands of the police. Juan turned his violation into victory. In a video about the incident, he fiercely said, “East Point Police Department, I will not give you my courage, I will not give you my dignity, I will not live in fear of you. And I will not let you shame and humiliate me into submission. . . . I will unapologetically tell you who I am . . . and you don’t have the right to arrest me for being trans. . . . All that was said, and all that was done, I still stand with my dignity intact.”39
A week after the incident, Juan returned to the police precinct with one hundred community residents and members of the Atlanta-based Solutions Not Punishment Coalition (SNaPCo), a trans-led coalition that works to build the power of people most likely to be victims of violence and most likely to be arrested and harassed by police, including trans and gender-nonconforming people of color, current and former street-level sex workers, and formerly incarcerated people (see Stop Police Profiling in photo insert). They supported Juan’s demand for an investigation, an apology, and, most importantly, a change in East Point police policies and practices. Later, Juan asked reporters, “I just wonder how many other people have been humiliated like this at the hands of the East Point police. How many others were outed in their jail cell in front of other inmates?”40 The action won immediate and public apologies from the mayor, city council, and chief of police. But the coalition demanded more: new policies and in-depth training for all officers. Six months later, in April 2015, SNaPCo secured what they had demanded: the most progressive policies for police interactions with transgender people to be enacted by a US police department. Juan, sitting at the head of the table throughout the final negotiations, described the outcome as “a huge victory for everyone in my community.” The coalition also worked with the City of Atlanta to urge its administration to adopt similarly comprehensive and progressive policies. Dee Dee Chamblee of LaGender, Inc., an anchoring organization of SNaPCo, declared, “Trans and gender-nonconforming people suffer at the hands of law enforcement every day and the community has finally said ‘enough.’”41 Tragically, Juan Evans passed away July 14, 2015, leaving behind a community in mourning and committed to continuing to fight on in his name.
October 2014 also marked the time when OKC Artists for Justice, founded by Grace Franklin and Candace Liger, began tirelessly organizing around Daniel Holtzclaw’s sexual assaults of thirteen Black women and girls, calling attention to the case, holding protests in the courtroom, and supporting survivors, as described in greater detail in chapter 5. Although the group met with resistance from both white feminists and Black men to their message that “Black women matter,” they were nevertheless successful in piercing the bubble of silence around the case and challenging antiviolence and Black Lives Matter advocates to speak out and take action. Most importantly, as Liger put it in a Facebook video, “we do it to make sure these victims know that they’re not alone, and quite frankly, they hear us.”
In January 2015, Jessie Hernandez, a seventeen-year-old Latinx queer person, was shot by Denver police as she sat in a car with friends in an alley. Police dragged her out of the car, slammed her to the ground, handcuffed her while unconscious, and searched her as she lay limp and motionless. Buried Seedz of Resistance (BSeedz), a local group organizing with queer and trans youth of color, immediately went into action, reaching out to the family to offer support. They silk-screened hundreds of T-shirts and bandanas with images of Jessie for the funeral, set up a memorial in the alley where Jessie was killed, and held healing circles for youth and members of her community. BSeedz and Jessie’s family challenged the criminalization of her memory under the slogan Jessie Vive, ensuring that Jessie was remembered as a friend, an older sister, a lover, and a pillar of her community.42 Six months later, in June 2015, in Jessie’s name the organization shut down the Denver Pride march after local prosecutors announced that no charges would be brought against the officers responsible for her death. BSeedz has continued to call for accountability, as the BSeedz organizer Mimi Madrid evoked the original spirit of Pride: “Pride began as a revolutionary uprising to defend our bodies, to defend our identities and to defend our spirits. . . . We’re tired of the police just taking us out, picking us off. . . . So this is about bringing back that sacredness, [those] roots of uprising back into Pride.”43 Meanwhile, Jessie’s family continues to mourn her loss: her sister Jo Hernandez said after the killing, “It was cruel how they ended you; they took half my heart and it will never be repaired. I see you watching me from up above. You’ll never be forgotten my angel.” (See insert for image of “Rest in Power Jessica Hernandez” poster.)
On April 9, 2015, the City of Chicago was preparing for the criminal trial of Dante Servin, a police officer who killed a young Black woman named Rekia Boyd in March 2012. Rekia had been standing with friends in a park, doing what young people do: talking loud, laughing, enjoying life, full of Black girl magic. Servin, an off-duty officer, approached the group and told them to quiet down. They had some words and turned to leave. As they did, one of the group pulled out a cell phone. Servin claims he thought it was a gun, and shot at the group, using his service weapon. He hit Rekia in the back of the head, killing her instantly. Servin’s trial on charges of involuntary manslaughter finally began after a three-year struggle by Rekia’s family, supported by Women’s All-Points Bulletin (WAPB). Three weeks later, on April 20, all charges against Servin were dismissed. The judge ruled that Servin could not be convicted of involuntary manslaughter because his actions had clearly been intentional, a failure of what had already been a half-hearted prosecution. Family members, including Rekia’s brother Martinez Sutton, who has been a tireless voice demanding accountability for her death, and activists, although demoralized, came together to plan the next steps in the campaign to get justice for Rekia. BYP100 began to work alongside Black Lives Matter and Ferguson Action toward a National Day of Action to End State Violence Against Black Women, Girls, and Femmes on May 21, 2015, timed to coincide with a Chicago Police Board hearing on Rekia’s case. The Chicago chapters of BYP100, Black Lives Matter, WAPB, and We Charge Genocide mobilized for the hearing. The campaign to fire Servin was on.
As documented by Project Nia’s powerful video We Are Rekia’s Haven, Rekia’s family, members of BYP100, and allied organizations powerfully took over and shut down Chicago Police Board meetings month after month, demanding justice for Rekia and calling for Servin’s termination (see insert for photo of BYP100 members).44 In November 2015, the Board finally recommended that Servin be fired. The recommendation was adopted by Chicago police superintendent Gerry McCarthy—days before he himself was fired in connection with the cover-up of the October 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald. While focused on a single officer, Chicago-based organizing under the #SayHerName banner inspired grassroots organizing across the country. Project Nia director Mariame Kaba blogged: “The #FireServin campaign has not simply been about holding one officer accountable. It’s also been about making visible the neglected forms of violence experienced by Black women and girls across this country and beyond. By calling for CPD to #FireServin, organizers in Chicago have centered the state violence experienced by all Black women and girls.”45
Almost a year after the campaign began, just days before the second National Day of Action on May 19, 2016, which was timed to coincide with the Chicago Police Board hearing that would act on the recommendation to fire Servin, he resigned so that he could keep his city pension. Not missing a beat, local activists turned up the heat on a #DontPayDante campaign, launched the month before by groups including Black Lives Matter Chicago, Assata’s Daughters, and Fearless Leading by the Youth. They demanded that Servin’s pension be cut and funds redirected to Chicago State University, the only predominantly Black university in Illinois, and Rekia’s brother’s alma mater, where budget cuts threatened to close the doors.46
Meanwhile, the second National Day of Action unfolded in response to a call to
acknowledge the forms of violence experienced by our women, girls, and femmes. We must fight against the criminalization of Black victims of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and abuse. We must resist the policing of Black gender expression, sexuality, and bodies. We must condemn the passage and defense of gender discriminatory legislation. We must break down the narrow standards of respectable Black womanhood and femininity deemed acceptable. We must #SayHerName.47
Among the organizing efforts that took root in response to the call was a campaign to demand justice for Alexia Christian, a Black woman shot to death while handcuffed in the back of an Atlanta Police Department patrol car. Alexia’s family, as well as activists from Women on the Rise and the Racial Justice Action Center, demanded an investigation and release of videotape documenting exactly what led up to the moment when Alexia was shot ten times by the officers who arrested her, dogging Atlanta’s police chief and testifying before the Atlanta Citizen’s Review Board.48 Another, led by the Dream Defenders, a group that came together in the wake of the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, focused on the deaths of Ashaunti Butler, Dominique Battle, and Laniya Miller, three young Black girls who drowned as officers stood by after the car they were driving went into a pond following a police chase.49 Still another, led by Cat Brooks and the Anti-Police Terror Project in Oakland, demanded justice for Yuvette Henderson, a woman shot by a security guard after being accused of shoplifting at a Home Depot.50
In June 2016, activists across the country organized around the case of Jasmine Abdullah, the founder of Black Lives Matter Pasadena, a twenty-nine-year-old Black lesbian organizer who had been arrested, charged, and convicted by an all-white jury of “felony lynching,” an offense involving taking a person out of police custody—generally speaking, with a mob—with the intention of killing them. The law had been enacted, ironically, to protect members of the Black community. Before her arrest, Jasmine was one of many who traveled to Ferguson in outrage and solidarity after seeing police tear-gas Black girls as young as seven and describes herself as “activist, freedom fighter, organizer.” In an infuriating move believed by many to be retaliation for her activism, Jasmine was charged with felony lynching after police accused her of trying to “unarrest” a Black woman whom police were pursuing after a dispute with a restaurant owner. Jasmine and other activists had just come from an August 2015 peace march commemorating the police shooting of a nineteen-year-old unarmed Black youth by Pasadena police. Jasmine was the first Black woman to be convicted under the statute, which had also been used to charge a Black woman member of Black Lives Matter Sacramento. Although sentenced to ninety days in prison, Jasmine was released after three weeks under the tremendous public pressure of a nationwide #FreeJasmine campaign.51
The following month, in July 2016, BLM Los Angeles began an occupation of city hall that would last over fifty days when the Los Angeles Police Commission ruled that the August 2015 shooting of Redel Jones did not violate the department’s use-of-force policy. Jones, described by her husband as kind and caring, a self-taught computer whiz and student of holistic health care, was killed by police who were looking for a woman suspected of robbing a pharmacy. They claimed that Redel ran away from them and then charged at them with a knife when they approached her. Eyewitnesses say that she was not approaching the officers but moving away from them when she was shot. Activists chanted her name monthly at police commission hearings in the year between her shooting and the decision not to hold her killers accountable.52
Nationally coordinated actions continued. After police killed Korryn Gaines, on August 1, 2016, and after the murder of Skye Mocabee—the seventeenth trans woman to be killed in 2016—Black Feminist Futures issued a national call to join the Defend Black Womanhood campaign by building community altars to express outrage at police killings of Black women by the state and indifference to the loss of Black women’s lives, to “mourn and grieve collectively and publicly, to amplify the names of who we have lost.”53 Groups in more than twenty cities responded by creating living memorials (see photo insert for image of one altar).54
Though the most visible organizing around women’s experiences of policing since 2014 has focused on Black women and girls, Indigenous communities in Arizona and Washington have come together to protest the police killings of Loreal Tsingine (discussed in chapter 4); Jacqueline Salyers, a member of the Puyallup tribe and mother of three shot by Takoma, Washington, police; and Renee Davis, a mother of three shot by King County, Washington, sheriffs on the Muckleshoot reservation. In Washington State, Puyallup tribe members’ Justice for Jackie campaign has contributed to efforts to change the law concerning police accountability in use-of-force cases (see the insert for a photo of a Justice for Jackie rally).55
Groups like the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance have challenged multiple forms of police profiling while seeking to redefine security. As organizer Sasha Wijeyeratne put it, “Our communities will redefine security for themselves, without law enforcement agencies that routinely profile and harass South Asians and Muslims as terrorists, Southeast Asians as gang members, and LGBTQ API people as targets for harassment. . . . As LGBTQ APIs, we are in solidarity with all Black and brown people experiencing profiling from police, from ICE, and from all state agencies.”56 Asians for Black Lives have consistently staged actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and Black Lives Matter activists came out in support of Theresa Sheehan, a Japanese woman shot by police seeking to remove her from her room on the grounds that she required assistance due to mental health issues.57
At the same time, groups like Southerners on New Ground (SONG) and Mijente have steadily been organizing campaigns focused on violations of the rights of immigrant women, both at the border and in the interior of the country. Immigrant women–led organizations such as Mujeres Unidas y Activas have played a key role in coalitions such as the San Francisco Immigrants Rights Coalition, which has successfully challenged police-immigration collaboration since 2011. And, beginning in January 2015, communities across the South came together through SONG to ask “What would it look like if LGBTQ people, Black folks, Brown folks, immigrants, women, working class and poor people could live Free From Fear in the variety of places we call home?” In response, the multiracial organization has mounted a series of campaigns in cities across the South to win protections from profiling, immigration enforcement, and police violence.58 Cross-community collaborations in challenging police violence are growing across the country, whether in the form of solidarity between Black and Indigenous communities59 or between Black and immigrant communities.60
It is not as though women of color have been completely absent from the narrative of police brutality until now. But more often than not, up until recently, they have been typecast solely as grieving mothers and family members. The power of women of color who have all too often been thrust into that role cannot be overstated. Mothers of children whose lives were stolen by law enforcement—including Iris Baez, Katadou Diallo, Mesha Irrizary, Harriet Walden, Margarita Rosario, Hawa Bah, and, more recently, Gwen Carr, Lesley McSpadden, and countless others—have moved mountains and led movements in the name of justice for their children and family members. In Chicago, mothers came together to demand attention and organize around the plight of survivors of torture at the hands of Chicago police commander Jon Burge, contributing to a successful movement for his prosecution and for reparations to his victims. Over fifty family members came together as Families United for Justice, successfully organizing for the appointment of a special prosecutor in cases of police killings in New York State.61 Mothers Against Police Brutality groups exist across the country. Siblings and other relatives too have organized to obtain justice—sisters, such as Maria Moore, who has ensured that Kayla Moore’s dignity and the full complexity of who she was is respected in the struggle for justice in her case; brothers, such as Martinez Sutton, Rekia Boyd’s brother, who is one of the few Black men who has tirelessly organized around a case involving a Black woman; the powerhouse Cynthia Howell, the niece of Alberta Spruill and founder of Families United for Justice; and daughters, such as Erica Garner, who has consistently spoken truth to power in her father’s name, have been fierce and dedicated leaders in movements for police accountability. Chosen family, too, have come together to honor the memories of trans community members like Mya Hall.
Women who have lost partners to police violence—such as Nicole Paultre Bell, whose fiancé, Sean Bell, was killed in a hail of fifty bullets by the NYPD on their wedding day—have also been powerful advocates. As I was finishing this book, I was haunted by the story of Diamond Lavish Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter, who were in the car when an officer killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop as Diamond recorded the interaction on video. Mother and daughter had both so deeply internalized the need to remain preternaturally calm—even the child, at four years old—to survive the incident. Diamond, like so many others before her, went straight from the precinct where she was held for hours after the killing to a protest demanding justice for Philando. And, like so many others before her, she had to pick up the pieces after her loved one’s death without many resources or support.62
I am constantly reminded of the strength and fierceness of family members who fight for justice and for the memories of their loved ones in the face of criminalizing and dehumanizing narratives deployed to cover up the killing. The words of Cassandra Johnson, Tanisha Anderson’s mother, echo those of many: “I will not stop, as all of the rest of the mothers have said, until I get some answers.”63
Yet we often overlook the violence that family members face as they struggle for answers and accountability. For instance, many of the Black women who were lynched—such as Laura Nelson—were tortured and killed for challenging the unjust treatment of family members. Few may recall that the incident that sparked the 1965 Watts Uprising in Los Angeles involved not only the beating and arrest of a Black man, Marquette Frye, following a traffic stop, but also the police assault and arrest of his mother, Rena Price, who came to his defense and long suffered the consequences of that experience.64 New York City’s Justice Committee, which has worked tirelessly on behalf of families who have lost loved ones to police violence for more than two decades, continues to highlight police abuse of Ramarley Graham’s mother and grandmother. In 2012, Graham’s grandmother, Patricia Hartley, witnessed police officers kill her grandson in front of her in their home. When she cried out, Officer Richard Haste pushed her into a vase, telling her to “Get the f**k away before I have to shoot you, too.”65 Patricia was immediately taken to the police station and interrogated there for seven hours without an attorney present. When Ramarley’s mother, Constance Malcolm, went to the station to demand answers and secure her mother’s release, she was tackled to the floor and assaulted by police officers. She later said, “There’s nobody standing up for us mothers. We standing here, we have to fight for justice.”
Sometimes, women who seek to simply bear witness to police abuse of members of their communities are targeted. For instance, in 2013, protests erupted in my Brooklyn neighborhood in the wake of the police killing of sixteen-year-old Kimani Grey. Late one night, I found myself in the local precinct trying to negotiate the release of several Cop Watchers who had been arrested while trying to document and deter police violence at the demonstrations. One of them was Thenjiwe McHarris, now of the organization Blackbird, who was violently thrown to the ground by police as she tried to document an arrest. A year earlier, in 2012, Makia Smith was stuck in traffic when she saw cops surrounding a boy on the ground and began filming. She later said, “I was hoping that if they saw me, then maybe they would stop doing what they were doing.” An officer ran toward her screaming, “You want to film something, bitch? Film this!” Makia tried to get back into her car, but the officer grabbed her phone, threw it to the ground, dragged her by her hair, and threw her on the hood of her car as her two-year-old screamed in the backseat. As they arrested her, police threatened to turn Makia’s child over to child protective services, prompting her to ask a young woman by the side of the road, a complete stranger, to take her until the child’s grandmother could pick her up.66
Yet even these experiences have historically been relegated to the margins, and mothers’ and family members’ leadership taken for granted.
How did the experiences of Black women and women of color become more visible in the wake of Ferguson? What made this historical moment different? Though similar challenges to the erasure of women’s experiences of state violence had been made before, in many cases they were made by women whose leadership in civil rights movements had been all but erased. Later, individual woman of color activists, academics, and small groups of grassroots organizers worked to interject women’s experiences of police violence into the discourse around racial profiling, police brutality, and violence against women. Yet we faced an uphill battle, pushing back against the overwhelming weight of a narrative centered around straight, cisgender Black and Brown men, attempting to raise women’s experiences with virtually no resources or air time. This time, no doubt a combination of factors played a role in increasing visibility, foremost among them the emergence of a new generation of Black women leaders on the front lines and in the leadership of the post-Ferguson movement who forcefully pushed back against male-dominated groups and narratives, proudly proclaiming, in the words of Ferguson activist Tef Poe, “This ain’t your grandparent’s civil rights movement.”67 For these young women, intersectionality is a given in organizing in ways it was not in the 1990s or even in 2009, when Oscar Grant was killed. The advent of social media played a key role: Previously when women came forward and spoke at rallies, public hearings, investigations, and community meetings, their stories went unheard, filtered out of the conversation by mainstream media and racial justice organizations. Now we can post our stories and organizing messages directly, no longer dependent on intermediaries to lift them up. Whatever the factors contributing to the opening, now that we have seized the moment, the challenge is to continue to push past resistance, continuing invisibility, and silences to firmly seat gendered experiences of racial profiling and police violence at the center of our analysis.
It is also time to push past the challenge of visibility to analysis and action. How does centering the experiences of Black and Indigenous women, women of color, immigrant women, and Muslim women change the conversation? What does a holistic resistance to police violence look like? How do our experiences shape our organizing strategies, our policy demands, our litigation and legislative advocacy? I penned an article in Colorlines in honor of the second National Day of Action to End State Violence Against Black Women, Girls, and Femmes, in which I outlined seven starting points for shifting and expanding policy agendas to incorporate the realities of women’s experiences of policing. These include focusing on racially gendered sites of profiling, such as antiprostitution enforcement, as well as on gendered forms of police brutality such as police sexual violence and the use of force against pregnant women. However, I concluded with a caution: “Of course, changing police policies is not a panacea to police violence against Black girls, women and gender nonconforming people. To strike at the root of the issue, we need to transform our responses to poverty, violence and mental health crises in ways that center the safety and humanity of Black women and our communities.”68
That is what the Vision for Black Lives, the policy platform collectively developed in 2015 and 2016 by dozens of organizations that make up the Movement for Black Lives begins to do. It calls for an end to racialized gender policing and police abuses of trans and gender-nonconforming people, accountability for and prevention of police sexual violence, and an end to the fees, fines, and bail that keep women in police custody, there to be assaulted or die of racially motivated neglect. It urges decriminalization of drug and prostitution offenses—two of the top pathways to policing, criminalization, and prison for Black women and women of color—and demands reparations for those who have been targets of the war on drugs and the enforcement of antiprostitution laws.69 Perhaps most importantly, the platform calls for “investments in Black communities, determined by Black communities, and divestment from exploitative forces including prisons, fossil fuels, police, surveillance and exploitative corporations.” It sets forth a bold vision for Black liberation and the liberation of all peoples that can be further developed and guide us as we step into treacherous times ahead.