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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Do You Know Their Names?</h1><h1 class="gmail-reader-title"><font size="2">Kimberlé Crenshaw - September 7, 2023</font><br></h1></div>
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<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<div><a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1632-sayhername" target="_blank"><img width="252" height="392" src="https://inquest.org/wp-content/uploads/f=auto,w=1024,h=1024/sites/3/2023/09/9781642594522-f_large-b5158e01fb5c6f17da8d8113891b64c5.jpg20230809-15-1sz4wj0.jpeg" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;"></a></div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
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<p>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.” </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The African American Policy Forum’s (AAPF) <a href="https://www.aapf.org/sayhername">#SayHerName campaign</a>
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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p><em>Excerpted from</em> <a target="_blank" href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/sayhername-black-women-s-stories-of-state-violence-and-public-silence-forum-policy-american-african/15727803" rel="noreferrer noopener">#SayHerName: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence</a><em> 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.</em></p>
<p><em><sub>Image: <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1632-sayhername" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Robert Fairchild</a>/Flickr/</sub></em><sub>Inquest</sub></p>
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