[News] Do You Know Their Names?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

inquest.org <https://inquest.org/do-you-know-their-names/>
Do You Know Their Names?Kimberlé Crenshaw - September 7, 2023
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I am standing in an air-conditioned auditorium thinking about Michelle
Cusseaux and the countless other Black women killed by the police whose
deaths “no one was paying attention” to. My audience on this balmy spring
day is mostly made up of public interest lawyers, students, and faculty. I
am remembering the courage that Michelle’s mother, Fran Garrett, exhibited
after Phoenix police killed Michelle in her own home. Michelle’s story,
like those of too many others, would have ended when Sergeant Percy Dupra
stole her life had she not been born to a tenacious mother who refused to
let her daughter’s name be forgotten.

Fran was determined that her daughter’s life and death would not be reduced
to obscurity, another statistic that no one counted. Michelle was killed
just five days after a cop gunned down Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
After seeing the community protests taking shape there, Fran decided to
march Michelle’s casket to Phoenix City Hall. In this brave act of protest,
she joined a powerful tradition of Black women resisting and denouncing the
state violence that directly threatens them and all too often destroys
their families.
<https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1632-sayhername>

Fran’s march to the Phoenix City Hall was a flare in the night. Fran’s
radical act—literally placing her daughter’s casket at the door of
municipal power—not only demanded that Michelle be seen but also rendered
visible the police killings of other Black women. The sorrowful procession
of Michelle’s coffin to city hall left a searing image that spoke to the
many ways in which Black women’s fate has been left in the hands of police
while their stories have been marginalized and sometimes erased.

While Brown’s killing justifiably sparked a wave of nationwide protests
over lethal police shootings of Black men, the killing of Black women such
as Michelle had yet to be memorialized in widespread activations and
denunciations. Fran offered a powerful and moving witness to the fact that
Black women were also losing their lives in circumstances that spoke to the
disregard of Black life and family bonds. There was no sound reason for
their stories to be banished to the shadows of our collective
consciousness, mere afterthoughts in the litany of savagery that has come
to constitute anti-Black state violence.

Fran’s act reminded us all of the obvious fact that slain women’s mothers
don’t grieve for them any less, their children don’t cry for them any less,
their siblings don’t mourn them any less, and we should not protest their
killings any less than we do the killings of their brothers, fathers, and
sons.

Six months later, as I look out at the audience, I wonder who among them
will know Michelle’s name. Would they know of any other daughters who were
stolen like Fran’s was? Or was the erasure of these horrific losses
difficult to interrupt because of the reflexive ways that the very notion
of anti-Black police violence defaults almost exclusively to our endangered
sons? To make the patterns of erasure visible—and audible—I invite the
audience to join me in doing something new. I ask those audience members
who are able to do so to stand. I tell them, “When you hear a name you
don’t recognize, take a seat and remain seated.” I promise to invite the
last person standing to tell the seated audience what they know about the
person whose name no one else recognized.

Then I call out the names, slowly, deliberately, and loud enough for even
those seated at the very back of the auditorium to hear: Eric Garner, Mike
Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, and Freddie Gray. I’m always a bit
surprised when one or two people don’t recognize even those first few
names, but fewer than a handful have taken their seats by the time I lift
up Gray. The vast majority of people recognize these men and know the
common risks that link their fates: they are Black and did not survive an
encounter with the police.

I pause for a moment and ask the audience to look around. The room is quiet
and still. People take in what they have demonstrated: group literacy about
the vulnerability of Black people to police violence. At the moment, it
seems a completely obvious reading of social knowledge that is minimally
necessary to ground any conceivable collective action.
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I continue. I say “Michelle Cusseaux.” And then comes that whoosh of
dozens, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands of people taking their
seats. It is the sound of silence. The sounds of people taking their seats
mount as I continue the roll call: “Tanisha Anderson, Aiyana Stanley-Jones,
Kayla Moore, India Kager, Shelly Frey, Korryn Gaines.”

One person is left standing after Kager, but I continue anyway so people
can hear more names. Yet the point still hangs over us. The silence about
Black women who have been killed by the police has distorted our collective
capacity to respond. We cannot address a problem we cannot name. And we
cannot name it if the stories of these women are not heard.

The African American Policy Forum’s (AAPF) #SayHerName campaign
<https://www.aapf.org/sayhername> began in earnest against the background
of this profoundly disturbing reality: The deaths of Black women who were
killed by the police barely registered a blip in the national news. Fran
and so many others were grieving and protesting the loss of their loved
ones all too often without the support and recognition of their
communities, the media, and sometimes even their own families. Something
had to change.

If the conditions don’t fit the prevailing frames of reference, it is
extremely difficult to draw attention to an unfolding crisis. From the
outset, the #SayHerName campaign has sought not only to recognize and
memorialize the deaths of Black women killed by police but also to
confront, contest, and dismantle the interlocking systems of state power
that continue to routinize and normalize those killings. The deceptively
simple imperative to “say her name” has been a critical component of that
work that operates on different levels.

On one level, the directive to say her name is a plea for equality of
attention to ensure that violence against Black women be treated with the
same urgency and awareness as violence against their brothers. But even the
simple act of name-saying raised a host of challenges involving the actual
capacity to do so. So many names were unknown because of the same
imbalanced dynamics of gender recognition that called the #SayHerName
project into being in the first place.

By uncovering these neglected stories and giving them names, faces, and
personal histories, we sought to reverse this long-standing pattern of
malign neglect in real time—to restore these overlooked victims of state
violence to a position of honor and equity in spaces where lost lives are
being protested. That seemingly straightforward imperative required more
than a demand. We needed to explain just why and how Black women victims of
state violence had, for generations, not played a significant role in the
narrative of the lethal policing of the Black community. That realization
opened onto another one: We had no readily familiar ways of imagining the
risks associated with Black women’s encounters with police.

Vulnerability to police violence is an experience girls and women killed by
police share with Black men. What they do not share in common with their
fallen brothers is the same public attention, communal outcry, or political
response. This is not to say that Black men have received too much
attention. They have not. It is to say that while Black male encounters
with state violence have served as a battle cry for contesting police
power, Black female encounters—with few exceptions—have not. The erasure of
Black women, regardless of the circumstances, speaks to the consequences of
the deaths occurring outside of the readily available narrative of
anti-Black police violence.

The #SayHerName campaign was launched to fill in the blanks about police
violence against Black women as a necessary step in changing the reality of
police violence against Black women. In order to do so, the campaign
centers survivors.
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*Excerpted from* #SayHerName: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and
Public Silence
<https://bookshop.org/p/books/sayhername-black-women-s-stories-of-state-violence-and-public-silence-forum-policy-american-african/15727803>*
by Kimberlé
Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum, with a foreword by Janelle
Monáe. Copyright © 2023 by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Reprinted with permission
from Haymarket Books.*

*Image: Robert Fairchild
<https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1632-sayhername>/Flickr/*Inquest
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