2 Visions of Black Feminism: #FastTailedGirls, #YouOKSis, #SayHerName

In chapter 1 we considered hashtags created to address violence against women that trended on Feminist Twitter, within wider Twitter networks, and in some cases within the larger public sphere. As that chapter illustrates, many of the hashtags that interrogate issues of gendered violence on Twitter are started by women of color, then picked up by others to address overarching experiences shared by women across racial, ethnic, religious, class, and other social identity categories. Yet what is missing from much of the mainstream commentary about trending feminist hashtags is not only that women of color often lead creative and political work on popular hashtags but also that they regularly create and lead racial and ethnic in-group conversations about feminist issues. These in-group hashtags provide critical challenges to feminist and ethnic counterpublics by centering intersectional frameworks and experiences.

For example, while much was celebrated about the #YesAllWomen hashtag following the Isla Vista shootings, women of color created #YesAllWhiteWomen to address how the original hashtag was appropriated in the service of a kind of “mainstream” or “white” feminism that is understood to be blind to intersectional politics—after all, it is not the case that all women experience the same forms or severity of sexism. Likewise, Mikki Kendall, whom we discuss in greater depth later in the chapter, created the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen in response to prominent white feminists on Twitter coming to the defense of self-proclaimed male feminist Hugo Schwyzer despite years of mistreatment of women of color online.1 #YesAllWhiteWomen and #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen were disparaged by some as divisive and unreasonable for pointing out that women of color face unique forms of oppression.2 Similarly, it was only with intentional pushing from women of color and white allies in the feminist counterpublic that journalists in 2017 corrected their initial attribution of the #MeToo hashtag from Alyssa Milano to Tarana Burke, who had originated the hashtag several years earlier.

In this chapter we focus on hashtags often ignored or excluded from celebratory accounts of Feminist Twitter and Black Twitter—those created by Black feminists to challenge the gatekeeping narratives in both. We consider, in particular, the significant role that Black women play in Twitter counterpublics and how these women, through hashtag activism, insist on a politics of intersectionality. Black women’s voices on Twitter challenge not only mainstream narratives about race, gender, and sexuality but also those within gender and race counterpublics themselves.

For this chapter Jamie Nesbitt Golden, cocreator of the hashtag #FastTailedGirls, has contributed a reflection on pages 36 to 37.

Black Feminist Thought Moves Online

Black people are instrumental to the success of social media, and to the success of Twitter specifically. According to a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center, Black Americans use Twitter more than any other racial demographic in the United States.3 Black women especially use social media platforms to grow awareness about intracommunity concerns, turning Twitter into a town forum to discuss important topics. Here we examine three Twitter hashtags that raised awareness about Black feminist interests among narrow and broad audiences. The hashtags #FastTailedGirls, #YouOKSis, and #SayHerName are among those that illustrate the power of Black feminist politics online.

The roots of Black feminism in the United States can be traced to the work of Anna Julia Cooper in A Voice from the South in 1892. Cooper wrote, “[The colored woman] is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both.”4 Cooper’s words express the unique positionality of Black women who battle both racism and sexism at the same time as not independent but intersecting experiences. This “double jeopardy” has also been discussed by other Black feminists, including Frances Beal, whose 1969 pamphlet (an early form of social media) detailed how Black women are economically disprivileged in relation to both Black men and white women.5

In 1977 the Combahee River Collective published a statement that included the first use of the term “identity politics.” The collective wrote, “This focusing upon our own oppression is the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end someone else’s oppression.” The collective articulated the particular nature of their perspective as Black women radicals, stating, “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”6 Their words laid the foundation for the Black feminist legal theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s solidifying the concept in the term intersectionality in 1989. Crenshaw’s work in relation to discrimination law details that race and gender hierarchies don’t have an additive negative effect but rather intersect and interact to produce uniquely discriminatory realities for those multiply marginalized. In her canonical text, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Crenshaw explains, “My objective there was to illustrate that many of the experiences Black women face are not subsumed within the traditional boundaries of race or gender discrimination as these boundaries are currently understood, and that the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the women’s race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately.”7 Since then, Crenshaw’s distillation of the term “intersectionality” has become popular not only in academic scholarship but also in popular culture, activism, and politics.

Social media, for example, have allowed terms like “intersectionality” and “identity politics” to circulate and reach broader audiences. One of the authors of this book, Moya Bailey, coined the related term misogynoir, which has similarly diffused through online spaces largely owing to other Black women’s embrace of the term. Misogynoir describes the “particular brand of hatred directed at Black women in U.S. visual & popular culture.”8 A large body of scholarship has documented the stereotypical and dehumanizing way Black women have been depicted in U.S. films and on television, but even on social media sites such as Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter, examples of misogynoir are rife. For example, the hashtag #RuinABlackGirlsMonday was created to share photos and selfies of voluptuous white women who are portrayed as being more attractive than Black women, particularly because they have physical characteristics associated with Black women without being Black. Black women’s lived experiences and the way those experiences can be understood through intersectionality and misogynoir animate the hashtags discussed in this chapter.

#FastTailedGirls Challenge the Narrative

Longtime bloggers and real-life friends Mikki Kendall and Jamie Nesbitt Golden were early adopters of Twitter, joining the platform in 2009 and 2008, respectively. In 2013 they teamed up on a digital effort they dubbed “Hood Feminism,” drawing on their Black working-class roots and the everyday grappling with and subverting of gendered power by the women in their families.9 These women, they note, would likely eschew the term “feminist” because of its association as something for privileged white women. During the time they were building Hood Feminism, singer R. Kelly performed with Lady Gaga at the November 24, 2013, American Music Awards, sparking a Twitter debate about his continued celebrity despite his predatory sexual behavior toward Black girls.10 Spurred by this conversation on Twitter and a blog post inspired by Michonne Micheaux on “Fast Black Girls,” Kendall tweeted on November 29, “If I did a chat for #FastTailedGirls as part of a greater discussion of Black women’s sexuality would y’all participate?” In less than twenty-four hours the hashtag was trending on Twitter.11 In total, over 20,000 tweets containing the hashtag appeared, the vast majority of which were posted the day following Kendall’s request.12 Among these tweets there emerged a core network of 131 unique users, mostly Black women, whom Kendall and Golden led in a coordinated conversation about the ways Black girls are dehumanized, objectified, and then punished for men’s predatory behavior toward them.

The terminology “fast-tailed” in AAVE (African American Vernacular English) is used to describe young women who are supposedly overeager and sexually curious or promiscuous. Such language absolves men interested in underage girls of their prurient interests and reflects misguided respectability politics that operate as a form of victim blaming and perpetuate misogynoiristic ideas about Black women and girls. As Kendall details on the #FastTailedGirls hashtag, “One of the reasons #fasttailedgirls was so specific in focus is because while we all experience #rapeculture we don’t all do it the same.”13 With the hashtag, Kendall names not only the way Black girls are blamed for their victimization but the ways in-group members are complicit in that victimization.

While #FastTailedGirls tweets focus on the sexualization of Black girls within the Black community, they also make clear connections to and critiques of larger white supremacist tropes that have constructed Black women and girls as “always rapable.” In the discourse of the hashtag’s intracommunity critique, the uplifting of Black women’s stories through personal testimony and larger systemic critiques happen simultaneously. Black women use the hashtag to reflect on their girlhoods, sharing stories of being told that they were acting too grown up for their age for undertaking simple everyday behaviors, and having to counter assumptions that they were seeking adult male attention as children. Hashtag creators Kendall and Golden respectively tweeted, “Some 40–60% of Black girls are sexually abused before 18. Many don’t report it because they know they’ll be called #FastTailedGirls,” and “#FastTailedGirls is why 20-something dudes are allowed to have 14 y.o. GFs. It’s why R. Kelly got off.” Kendall further tweeted that “15 year old me believed every ‘you’re grown where it matters’ lie. That’s what you say when grooming prey. #FastTailedGirls”; and “I need y’all to understand that if you can blame a 14 year old for her own murder because #FastTailedGirls then I hope you go to hell.” Other top users of the hashtag make up a who’s who of Black feminist twitter. @FeministaJones, for example, offered “#FastTailedGirls is why when our daughters go missing, they get no media airtime. They’re not ‘innocent’ or precious. Must be runaway hoes,” and @HoodFeminism wrote, “This is about telling our stories and healing however we can. #FastTailedGirls.” @GradientLair, the Twitter account for the Black feminist blog authored by user @Trudy, tweeted “Fast Tailed” Girls: Examining The Stereotypes and Abuse That Black Girls Face #FastTailedGirls,” along with a link to a post expanding on the need for and the background of the hashtag.

Despite starting as an intracommunity conversation, the hashtag was covered by several mainstream outlets, including NPR, Bustle, and XOJane. No doubt building on the success of Kendall’s earlier (and to some, controversial) 2013 #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen hashtag, #FastTailedGirls provided a candid conversation on misogynoir and its deleterious effects.14 The hashtag picked up additional steam when actress Rashida Jones tweeted that young pop stars should “#stopactinglikewhores,” sparking renewed debate over how Black girls are represented in the media and how people of color internalize these representations.

Notably, this hashtag preceded the feminist hashtag evolution we traced in the last chapter and offers critiques of both feminist and Black uplift narratives that exclude the intersection of Black women’s experiences with sexual violence. For example, @FeministaJones also tweeted, “The Black Power movements (or whatever) are deeply rooted in supporting BM [Black Men] above all else, even those who abuse BW [Black Women] & girls #FastTailedGirls,” and @deluxvivens offered a critique of the limitations and privilege of reclaiming sexist language in the feminist movement with “want to know why so many woc [Women of Color] loathe #slutwalk? check out #fasttailedgirls.” Here we see Black women on Twitter calling out and calling in both Black men and white women whose political efforts toward liberation have relied on tactics too narrow to fully include Black women’s experiences. The hashtag then is an enactment of a politics of intersectionality and insists on the political legitimacy of Black women’s experiences and critiques.

Several users popular in other networks we discuss in this book linked their own hashtag conversations to those happening on #FastTailedGirls. For example, @JennMJackson, the creator of the hashtag #YesAllWhiteWomen, directed users following her hashtag to check out stories being told on #FastTailedGirls, tweeting, “#YesALLWhiteWomen meet #FastTailedGirls. This is why it’s not #YesALLWomen.” Others connected #FastTailedGirls to the next hashtag we examine here, #YouOKSis, noting the way the ideologies that construct Black women and girls as always sexually available make #YouOKSis interventions necessary. Here it is clear that members of these networks understand their hashtag use and creation as activism as they self-reflexively position the hashtag in relation to other on- and offline activist causes.

Black women using the hashtag also expressed catharsis in being able to share their stories, and began a conversation for shifting communal norms. Actress Reagan Gomez-Preston offered, “If we don’t stick up for our girls, and stop blaming them for the actions of grown men, who will? SMH. #FastTailedGirls.” Her words were a call to action to do away with this accusatory trope. Feminista Jones added that communities need to “‘Turn off’ the accusations of being #FastTailedGirls and the street harassment many begin experiencing at age 11.”15

In 2017, the hashtag came full circle when R. Kelly was once again in the spotlight for allegedly creating an abusive sex ring of teenagers in his multiple homes around the country. The revived interest in Kelly’s abhorrent behavior resulted in a new hashtag campaign, #MuteRKelly, and a revival of #FastTailedGirls. Author Jamilah Lemieux wrote, “Black women writers, like Mikki Kendall and Jamie Nesbitt Golden, have written articles and used hashtags like #FastTailedGirls to draw attention to not only Kelly’s behavior, but cultural norms that allow Black girls to be treated as if they have the sexual agency of adult women in a world in which far too many adults of all races believe that Black girls are more ‘mature’ than their peers.”16

Teaching Intervention with #YouOKSis

Just six months after #FastTailedGirls trended, Twitter user @FeministaJones began #YouOKSis. She tweeted, “If each of us who witnesses #streetharassment is brave enough to ask, ‘You OK sis?’ we might make a difference, however small.” Mia McKenzie of the now defunct blog Black Girl Dangerous replied, “@FeministaJones Can this be a thing? Can we, like, start a national #YouOKSis? Campaign?”

The hashtag prompted a robust discussion among Black women about experiences with street harassment and bystander intervention. As Jones explained in an interview with TheGrio.com, “A lot of the conversations about street harassment in the mainstream media only show white women as the faces of victims. Rarely do you see Black women as the face of the victim.”17 Jones alludes to the fast-tailed girls conversation by talking about the ways Black women are not believable victims of sexual violence. By using the term “sis,” Jones, like Kendall and Golden, and like much of Black Twitter conversation, calls on AAVE and references Black codes of speech that interpolate other Black folks as kin—in this case, Black women as sisters.18 #YouOKSis thus centers Black women’s experiences of street-based sexual violence but also has the capacity to hold other women’s stories, as “sis” recalls the use of “sisterhood” and “sister” in the larger feminist movement.

#YouOKSis first appeared following Jones’s original tweet on July 7, 2014, and trended over the next three days as users heeded McKenzie’s call to participate. Unlike many of the other hashtags examined in this book, the popularity of #YouOKSis extends well beyond a single burst of activity. Only 21 percent of the nearly seven thousand tweets in our data set were posted within a week of Jones’s original tweet, and the hashtag persisted with dozens or hundreds of new tweets per day through June 30, 2015, the end of our data collection window. The longevity of the conversation can be attributed to Jones herself, who, along with other women of color, regularly attached the hashtag to news stories they shared about street harassment. Indeed, the most popular co-occurring hashtags with #YouOKSis included #StreetHarassment, #WeGotYouSis, and #YesAllWomen, suggesting connections with broader conversations about harassment and other forms of violence against women.

From its inception, #YouOKSis offered users and observers real-time storytelling and modeling of the need for bystander intervention. In this case, the hashtag users make clear that because of the intersections of racist and sexist assumptions about Black women and girls, their harassment and abuse often happen in public, with little outrage or formal intervention. The hashtag is a directive to compel bystanders to simply ask the victim-focused question, “You OK Sis?,” as a demonstration of a politics of care for women of color being harassed, as well as a clear protest against their treatment.

Using #YouOKSis, many adult Black women shared stories of helping other women and girls in situations when no one else moved to do so, and also encouraged men and other people with privilege to similarly step in. Performer @PiaGlenn, for example, recalled through a series of threaded tweets a harrowing experience that happened only the day before in which a man spat on her and yelled threats at her in a subway station as bystanders looked on after she rejected his advances.19 Explaining that “It’s literally about getting from point A to B without feeling under attack. And it’s constant. #YouOKSis,” Glenn detailed how her recent experience was just one of many that she and other women face on a daily basis in public spaces. Similarly, user @tajhntee live-tweeted the aggression she observed on the train toward other Black women and told her own stories of being harassed on the street on the way home from such daily activities as her job as a nurse or attending a yoga class with a friend. The ordinary places and behaviors in these stories worked together to illustrate that “safety” is not something enjoyed by women of color in even the most mundane public spaces.

Exchanges like those seen in the below thread, on which hashtag creator @FeministaJones notes the prevalence of men presuming access not only to women’s bodies but to their property and environment, and the resulting replies of commiseration as well as comfort, are common in the network.

Beyond storytelling, the tag directly critiqued toxic masculinity and male entitlement. @0hBehave shared, “I gotta tell men I’m underage or have a boyfriend for them to understand I’m not interested bc ‘No’ won’t work #YouOKSis,” and @afemal3pr observed in response to one of the common excuses used to downplay the violence of street harassment that “‘It’s just a compliment’ [is] men’s sense of entitlement and inability to handle rejection. #YouOKSis.” Male user @chaddgway noted, “Men need to pay attention to #YouOKSis to understand how their privilege, hyper masculine, patriarchal and predatory behavior needs to stop.” Other male allies in the network, including @____PantheR and @Soulfulbrotha, used the hashtag to share stories of Black women being assaulted and murdered on the street by intimate and prospective partners, actively soliciting and sharing various stories from Black women, who recounted details of being harassed, assaulted, insulted, and stalked by men in a range of public places during both their childhood and adulthood. Perhaps most important, these few men in the network responded to other men who attempted to derail the conversation. For example, @Soulfulbrotha replied to one user who suggested that the hashtag was “sad” and put “Black men and Black women at war” with “Stop trying to sabotage the hash tag peon,” and @____PantheR replied to Black men who suggested that the idea that speaking to women on the street is threatening was simply a stereotype with “An unlimited amount of women can say otherwise,” “Look up #YouOkSis.”

The hashtag also documented the ultimate consequence for Black women who reject men or face violence from romantic partners. For example, also employing the next hashtag we discuss, @FeministaJones tweeted, “#SayHerName: On Janese Talton-Jackson, Mary Spears And How Street Harassment Is Killing Black Women #YouOKSis,” along with a link to a Hello Beautiful blog post discussing the 2014 and 2016 murders of the two women by men who responded with violence after their advances were rejected. This tweet and post connect the larger phenomenon of the violence Black women face from intimates and strangers to the invisibility of these stories in larger conversations about violence against both women and Black Americans. In this vein the hashtag also became something of a place for memorialization (which we discuss more below with #SayHerName) as users shared the names and stories of both cisgender and transgender Black and Latinx women killed by partners, would-be partners, and on the streets by men; these included Shanique Bellamy, who was six months’ pregnant when she and her two children were shot while sleeping; Dominique Tibedeaux, teen Sakia Gunn, Keisha Jenkins, Tamara Dominguez, and others.

#YouOKSis was taken up by media-makers in the Black public sphere on and off Twitter. Notably, NewsOne Now, the news program of TV One—a network aimed at African American adults—brought Jones on to discuss the hashtag as an entrée for conversations about bystander intervention and misogynoir. The Grio, a news site that targets African Americans, also covered the hashtag. #YouOKSis was subsequently covered in mainstream news outlets, including the Atlantic, Mic.com, and Forbes.

#YouOKSis succinctly summed up a call to intervene in the everyday violence of intersecting marginal identities that many women of color recognized. The hashtag has remained relevant, resurfacing in 2018 conversations about #MeToo, as well as the headline-grabbing abusive behavior of rapper XXXTentacion.20

Black Women’s Lives Matter: #SayHerName

While campaigns that protest state violence faced by Black men have garnered high-profile attention at various points in U.S. history, Black feminists have long challenged this limited focus, arguing that state-sanctioned violence has a unique and disproportionate effect on Black women.21 Whether in Reagan-era propaganda that popularized the mythological figure of the “welfare queen” as justification for divestment from social service programs or in the contemporary realities regarding the high rates of eviction and homelessness Black women face, the state has been and remains violent toward Black women.22 As Crenshaw pointed out in her legal work on intersectionality, even state-sponsored policy seeking to address systemic inequities has been negligent in acknowledging or addressing intersectional oppression. In recent years, the deaths of Black women and girls like Aiyana Stanley-Jones and Sandra Bland as the result of overzealous police officers sparked activism that led activists and scholars to insist we “say her name” to prevent the erasure of women of color victims of violence.

In 2015 the African American Policy Forum, cofounded by Crenshaw and Columbia Law School, hosted a weeklong webinar series dedicated to discussing the state of Black women and girls in the United States. The event, titled “Her Dream Deferred,” offered daily streaming of panel discussions accompanied by real-time Twitter conversations. #HerDreamDeferred, evocative of Langston Hughes’s 1951 poem about the Black nihilism of Harlem, did not resonate widely as a hashtag, but the first day’s webcast conversation, on Monday, March 30, 2015, included a different one, #SayHerName, concise enough to gain popularity. The day’s conversation began with emotional testimony from Martinez Sutton, the brother of Rekia Boyd, who had been shot in the head by an off-duty police officer and left brain-dead. Martinez Sutton, who had to pull the plug on his baby sister, struggled to speak through tears, noting that a fatal shot to the head is not how white women are treated by police officers over interpersonal conflict or even crime.23

After Sutton’s powerful introduction, scholar and activist Andrea Ritchie discussed sexual violence committed by police, referencing Daniel Holtzclaw, an officer accused and subsequently convicted on eighteen counts of rape, sodomy, and burglary, who targeted vulnerable Black women on the fringes of society who he knew would fear coming forward or would not be believed. The day’s conversation detailed other ways Black women and girls have been targeted by police violence, including the cases of Tanisha Anderson and Michelle Cusseaux. The presenters argued that without a racial justice analysis that includes Black women and girls, the systemic nature of state violence can never be fully addressed.

Thus, #SayHerName, a more academic and policy-rooted hashtag than those we looked at earlier in this chapter, represents a clear melding of the Black feminist impulses that animate #FastTailedGirls and #YouOKSis with the various #BlackLivesMatter networks we examine later in the book. #SayHerName began by focusing on the extrajudicial murders of Black women by police but evolved to shed light on all state and communal violence faced by Black women. For example, the Twitter account for BYP100 (Black Youth Project), a Chicago youth-based racial justice organization, shared infographics of statistics, such as “Rape & sexual assault are the 2nd highest crime committed by the police,” along with the hashtags #SayHerName and #BlackWomenMatter.

From its inception, #SayHerName embraced a diverse group of women of color, including LGBTQIA and nonbinary Black people. In May 2015 the AAPF capitalized on the growing use of the hashtag by releasing a report titled Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality against Black Women and organizing a national day of action on May 21, 2015.24 The day of action allowed more names to come to the fore and expanded the reach of the hashtag. The Say Her Name report included the story of Mya Hall, a Black trans woman who was shot by National Security Agency Police after driving into a restricted area and failing to respond to orders to stop. The report also included the story of the New Jersey 7, seven Black lesbians who were arrested on charges of assault, with some subsequently convicted of those charges, after defending themselves from street harassment. The AAPF report, which is intended as a resource for the media, organizers, researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders to better understand and address Black women’s experiences of profiling and policing, took on the task of challenging the common assumption that Black women and girls are victims of the state only through their relationships with Black men who have been killed and harmed by police violence.

But it was after the July 2015 death of Sandra Bland—and in the midst of the mainstream breakthrough of the Black Lives Matter movement—that the #SayHerName hashtag reached a tipping point in visibility. Bland, who was found hanging from a plastic trash bag-turned-noose in a Texas jail after being arrested, inexplicably, for assault following a traffic stop by an overzealous officer, became the most visible victim on the #SayHerName hashtag. Her death was ruled a suicide, prompting a wave of protests as people questioned how someone successful, happy, and starting a new job in a few weeks could deteriorate to the point of wanting to end her own life, and after video footage of the arresting officer throwing her to the ground and threatening her with his taser surfaced. Among the high-profile figures who spoke out about Bland, actor Jessie Williams of ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy tweeted a series of twenty-four questions about Bland’s treatment and subsequent death. Other celebrities, including comedian Margaret Cho, Broadway star Audra McDonald, singer Keyshia Cole, and reality star Kim Kardashian West, all tweeted using #SandraBland, contributing to her hashtagified name alone reaching 200,000 mentions by July 16, 2015.25

Our #SayHerName data include almost 170,000 tweets sent by more than 60,000 unique users, connected by more than 75,000 retweet and mention links between May 1, 2015, and May 1, 2017. Unsurprisingly, the hashtag trended on the National Day of Action organized by the AAPF as the kickoff event for the campaign (May 21, 2015) and in mid-July 2015, as the public became aware of the suspicious circumstances surrounding Bland’s death. The hashtag continued to trend periodically, often during events associated with the criminal and civil proceedings related to Bland’s death and with similarly suspicious deaths of Black women in police custody.

#SayHerName is ideologically and discursively connected to the broader Black Lives Matter movement, with #BlackLivesMatter appearing alongside #SayHerName more often than any other hashtag by a considerable margin. Additional hashtags emerged alongside #SayHerName, including several related to Bland (such as #JusticeForSandy and #SandySpeaks) and the chilling #IfIDieInPoliceCustody, through which Black people interrogated the state of police-citizen relations by preemptively calling for action should they too one day die under suspicious circumstances while in police custody.26 The hashtag was connected to related intersectional feminist hashtags, including #MeToo and #BlackTransLivesMatter, and to broader discursive memes of resistance against oppressive state power such as #NeverForget, a phrase commonly invoked in reference to the Holocaust but also invoked in this network in the context of commemorating victims of racist and misogynistic violence. The hashtag was also used to commemorate the women victims of the June 2015 white supremacist shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and users immediately connected the church’s history of resistance to the larger goals of the network.27

As the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign heated up, activists pushed for Democrats to acknowledge women victims of police violence. Candidate Bernie Sanders was interrupted on two separate occasions by Black Lives Matter protesters demanding he “say her name.”28 During a chance meeting at a D.C. restaurant with Sandra Bland’s mother, Sanders promised to say her name during a debate. On October 13, 2015, he followed through, responding to an audience question asking about Black Lives Matter during the first Democratic primary debate: “Black lives matter,” Sanders said. “The reason those words matter is the African-American community knows that on any given day, some innocent person like Sandra Bland can get into a car and then three days later she’s going to end up dead in jail.”29 His naming of Bland prompted a Google search surge of her story as more members of the general public became aware of her death.

Actor and musician Janelle Monáe, who has participated in multiple hashtag streams we discuss in this book, took her frustration to the recording studio, creating “Hell You Talmbout,” both an ode to those recently slain by police violence and a call to action. The lyrics chant:

Aiyana Jones, say her name

Aiyana Jones, won’t you say her name?

Sandra Bland, say her name

Sandra Bland, won’t you say her name?

Monáe continues to name Black men and women slain by extrajudicial violence, hauntingly including both recent and historical victims, among them fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman.30 Monáe uses “say her name” and “say his name” to link these murder cases across time, space, and gender, giving listeners a sense of the long durée of racist violence in the United States. A similar commitment to historical memory is seen in #SayHerName tweets highlighting historical cases of state violence against Black women, such as the 1984 killing of Eleanor Bumpers by the NYPD, alongside more recent ones.

As a digital utterance engaging a variety of political demands around visibility, state violence, feminism, and racial justice, #SayHerName plays two primary roles on Twitter. First, it eulogizes women of color killed as a result of misogynoiristic violence, insisting that their lives and stories matter. On Twitter, this came to include cis and trans Black and Latinx women and girls killed by police or while in police custody, as well as those killed as the result of a larger culture of neglect regarding the safety of Black and brown women. Second, it demands visibility of these stories in the name of specific interventions into systemic and intersectional forms of oppression. This visibility is frequently accompanied not only by the invocation of names and stories but also by statistics, political demands, and calls for policy interventions. For example, the Chicago-based activist organization BYP100 (Black Youth Project) frequently posted real-time videos of protest actions in Chicago and elsewhere related to the deaths of women of color, as well as news and updates pertaining to planned future actions and locations. These #SayHerName videos were created during a twenty-six-city coordinated effort and included speeches by a diverse range of activists, from Rekia Boyd’s brother, to the founders of the AAPF, to legal advocates commenting on the cases of Shelly Frey, Shantel Davis, and Alberta Spruill.

At the Chicago #SayHerName action, Shelly Frey’s advocates told the story of how she and friends were approached by an off-duty police officer-turned-security guard who fired at them. Frey’s mother choked back tears as she said her daughter left behind two young children. The poet Aja Monet offered words of affirmation for Black women in the wake of all the ways they are demonized in society and subsequently made disposable. In D.C., #SayHerName organizers’ videos highlighted the hail of NSA gunfire that killed Mya Hall, a trans woman misgendered in early reports of her death, as well as the death of Natasha Mckenna in Alexandria, Virginia, while in police custody. The creators of these videos wanted to make sure that even those who were unable to attend in person would be able to bear witness to the stories of these lives through Twitter and the hashtag #SayHerName.

Further, the AAPF and Color of Change shared informational statistics and action items about violence against Black women and girls alongside the hashtag, including the statistics that Black women are “3 to 4 times more likely to be incarcerated than white women,” “Black girls are 6x more likely to be suspended than white girls,” and “Black women are 243% more likely than white women to die from pregnancy or childbirth related causes.” These informational tweets usually included links to studies or policy recommendations that members of the #SayHerName network could read and share further.

As these tweets reveal, Black activist and advocacy organizations, including BYP100 (@BYP100), Color of Change (@ColorOfChange), and the AAPF (@AAPolicyForum), which popularized the hashtag and released the corresponding report, played a central role in the network, tweeting data, statistics, and action items that offered members of the network a variety of ways to seek justice for women of color victims. Other advocacy organizations, including the abortion rights organization NARAL Pro-Choice America (@NARAL), offered support and content that contributed to the visibility of the hashtag and focused on building offline political alliances.

Thus, #SayHerName fully embodies the integration of an online and offline activist network in which the hashtag is used both to insist on the value of Black women’s lives and to drive attention to activist organizations, protests, academic and policy research, and particular political and civil interventions that members of the network can further. Tweets are used to advertise particular offline commemorative and protest events, to engage the network in organized online discussions about the connections between cases of violence against Black women, girls, and femmes and police accountability policy, to make demands for change, and to draw in members of other networks.

Top #SayHerName tweets also worked through storytelling and reminders of particular cases of state violence and complacency in the deaths of Black women. For example, popular tweets in the network reminded people of Lavena Johnson, Rekia Boyd, and Sandra Bland, who died in 2005, 2012, and 2015, respectively. Many top users tweeted the names of these women along with their ages and manner and place of death, eulogizing them much as an obituary would but with the demand for justice. Among other women memorialized on the hashtag were Shantel Davis, Shelly Frey, Natasha McKenna, Korryn Gaines, Yvette Smith, Keisha Jenkins, and Lamia Beard. These and other women’s names were often hashtagged, resulting in a high co-occurrence of #SayHerName with names. It was common for users to simply list the names of cisgender and transgender Black (and sometimes Latinx) women murder victims, accompanied by #SayHerName, in threaded tweets—several top users in the network did this, including @JennyVSmile, who focused on sharing the names and smiling photos of murdered transgender women along with links to news stories and family fundraisers.

While the specific circumstances surrounding each case shared on the hashtag are unique, what the cases have in common is violence or neglect from state actors, intersectional concerns about oppression, and an insistence that Black women are valuable. Many of the stories and statistics shared on the hashtag speak to the way state-enabled violence against Black women can happen in less public spaces than that against Black men or question the legitimacy of official accounts of suicides, accidents, and murders that fail to take into consideration police abuse and neglect. Black women also used #SayHerName to talk about intracommunal violence against Black women that leads to state intervention in Black communities, in turn enabling state-sanctioned violence against Black women and families. While some popular #SayHerName tweets included brutal, graphic descriptions that recalled histories of violence against Black bodies, other popular tweets in the network center stories about how much Black women victims are loved and how valuable their lives are to their families and communities.

Media that reflect the niche nature of the Black public sphere, including Black Entertainment Television (BET) and the Huffington Post’s “Black Voices,” were active in the network. These sources engaged in the network and participated in and elevated the visibility of formal chats organized by activist organizations. However, mainstream outlets, including CNN, Teen Vogue, and the Guardian, also paid attention.

Together with #FastTailedGirls and #YouOKSis, #SayHerName reflects what sociologist Ruha Benjamin calls Black Afterlife, “the stubborn refusal to forget and be forgotten.” In a few memorable characters these hashtags buoy the introduction of nuanced and complex concepts into conversations about both racism and sexism. The specificity of these hashtags introduces observers to the intersectional nature of Black women’s oppression. Benjamin connects Black Afterlife to scholar Zhaleh Boyd’s “ancestral co-presence,” of which Benjamin writes, “Hashtag signifiers, like #SayHerName, [are] gathering points that make present the slain and call upon recent ancestors—Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Ayana Jones, and so many others—as spiritual kin who can animate social movements.”31 Both Boyd and Benjamin see the power of hashtags to thread together both people who have survived violence and those taken by it, further complicating our idea of what is irl (in real life).

Trust(ing) Black Women

While the hashtags in this chapter have not seen the kind of mainstream attention as #MeToo and #YesAllWomen, what we document here (and in chapter 3) testifies to the complexity of counterpublics engaging in technological networks. First, it is clear that Black women, who occupy positions in multiple counterpublics and carry with them multiple identities, have found Twitter to be a productive tool for highlighting misogynoir, sharing survival strategies, and calling both intra- and intercommunity members to account. Second, this work speaks comfortably and clearly both to the larger Black public sphere (or Black counterpublic), wherein discourse and communal knowledge about experiences with anti-Black racism are centered and resisted, and the feminist counterpublic, where collective critiques of male violence have long been centered but in which white women’s experiences have often taken precedence. Thus, here we see those who are multiply marginalized from mainstream narratives about violence and safety, as well as from the popular discourses of the margins themselves, effectively use Twitter to speak truth to power. Outside observers from a diversity of communities are thus allotted access to the personal stories of Black women that challenge long-standing cultural tropes that normalize their victimization.

Notably, while not as systematically deployed as Elon James White’s use of #TheEmptyChair, some Black men in these networks have challenged other Black men’s attempts to derail the hashtags and contributed to their visibility. This act of solidarity is particularly heartening insofar as the intra-community violence hashtags such as #FastTailedGirls and #YouOKSis address most often come from other Black men. The impact of in-group members speaking to others on Twitter who share their social status can profoundly influence behavior.32 Hashtags provide an opportunity for education on these issues, as well as a relatively low-stakes opportunity for folks to practice allyship and intervention. Together, Black feminists have used hashtags in ways that expand the utility of the hashtags and bring about more complex and nuanced conversations than would otherwise be available in public debates on race and gender. While the reach and visibility of these hashtags do not always match those of feminist hashtags such as #MeToo, their influence in the Feminist Twittersphere is undeniable, as women of all backgrounds report that Black women and Black feminist thought have a disproportionate influence on how they understand the most pressing issues of the day.33