Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color is a very important twenty-first-century document. It reminds us how little in the way of material progress has been made during the last century in purging our societies of officially condoned racist violence. At the same time, Andrea Ritchie’s multifaceted and unrelenting antiviolence practice over the last decade, to which her book bears witness, reveals extraordinary progress in the way we conceptualize state violence and antiviolence strategies. She does not urge us simply to add women of color to the list of targets of police violence—a list that is already longer than anyone would wish. She asks us to consider what the vast problem of state violence looks like if we acknowledge how gender and sexuality, disability, and nation are intermeshed with race and class. In other words, Ritchie’s feminist approach reminds us that the job of purging our worlds of racist violence is far more complicated than advocates of simple police reform would have us believe. It is not only Black women and women of color who are “invisible no more” but also the immensity and complexity of the problem of rooting out the nexus of racist violence.
Reading Ritchie’s text, I was immediately reminded of We Charge Genocide, the petition presented to the United Nations in 1951 by William L. Patterson and Paul Robeson. We Charge Genocide also documented hundreds of cases of racist violence, both legal and extralegal, in order to solidify the argument that if one took seriously the UN definition of genocide, then people of African descent in the United States would certainly be considered the targets of a genocidal strategy. This petition against genocide reflected a broader approach forged by the Civil Rights Congress and anchored in the development of international solidarities against US racism. Ritchie’s work also calls forth Ida B. Wells’s 1895 The Red Record, which documented countless descriptions of lynchings in the aftermath of slavery. In each of these efforts, the unifying theme is the impossibility of eradicating racist violence without radical transformation of the social, economic, political, and cultural contexts that produce it.
Like its antecedents, this is a difficult book to read. Because we encounter case after case of excessive, traumatic force, including systemic sexual violence, this is a book that dares us not to turn away. It challenges us to acknowledge the human dimension of this violence, which should not be effaced in abstract statistical accounts. A close-up account from the person who litigated many of these cases, has engaged in activist work with various antiviolence organizations and agencies, and authored or coauthored central policy reports, this book is testimony of a life devoted to collective struggle and radical social transformation.
—Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz