CRE 287: Women and Black Lives Matter: An Interview with Marcia Chatelain

 CRE 287: Women and Black Lives Matter: An Interview with Marcia Chatelain

1.      Women are not bending the demands of respectability -they are carving out space for black women to fight for justice.

2. The BLM movement mobilized by the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray (etc.)

a.      mobilized unprecedented mass movement against police brutality and racism

3.      Black women were assaulted, killed and victimized by police such as :

a.      Rekia Boyd, Michelle Cusseaux, Tanisha Anderson, Shelly Frey, Yvette Smith, and Eleanor Bumpurs            

4.      Women are targeted exactly as men are

a.      Shootings, police stops, and racial profiling

b.      Also experience police violence in distinctly gendered ways

                       i.      Sexual harassment and sexual assault

                           ii.      Such cases fail to mold our analysis of the broader picture of police violence

                       iii.      Have not drawn equal public attention or outrage

c.      Growing number of women, including those who started the BLM movement, have refucused our attention to how police brutality impacts women

d.      Also looking at how the poor, elderly, gay, and trans people are impacted

e.      Articulating why a movement for racial justice must necessarily be inclusive

f.        Say her Hame =documents and analyzes black women’s experiences of police violence and explains what we lose when we ignore them

g.       Not only miss the facts

h.      We fail to grasp how laws, policies, and culture underpin gender inequality are reinforced by America’s racial divide

5.      How are black women affected by police brutality

6.      How are they shaping the concerns, strategies, and future of Black Lives Matter

II) Marcia Chatelain -professor of history at Georgetown University

1.      Creator of #Ferguson Syllabus

a.      Crowdsourced reading materials from Twitter and elsewhere to help teachers discuss Ferguson and race in their classrooms

2.       and author of South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration

III) How Chatelain is related to BLM

1.      She participated in student-led actions like die-ins and social media campaigns as a student

2. Beloved observer and the participant by incorporating movement into her teaching and encouraging students to get involved.

IV) Black Lives Matter was created by three black women

a.      Alicia Garca, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi

                        i.      After George Zimmerman’s acquittal for Trayvon Martin’s death

                   ii.      Women organized marches, die-ins, protests, and otherwise led various response to police brutality

3.      Why are women playing such a key role in the movement

a.      Women across generations participating in this movement

b.      Particularly, young, queer women playing a central role

c.      They are organizing on behalf of victims of police brutality and cruelty broadly

d.      Remind us that women are among the victims

e. Fighting for their lives and all others.

4.      Research released by the African American Policy Forum and Columbia University showed that in New York in 2013 -53.4 percent of all women stopped by police were black

a.      Compared to 55.7 percent of all men were black

b.      Women face gender-specific risks from police encounters

                              i.      Sexual harassment, assault, strip-searching and endangering their children

5.      More recently: between January 1, 2020 and June 20, 2020 there have been 238 fatal shootings of women by police. See We Still deserve Safety in Announcement

a.      Blacks are twice as likely to be fatally shot compared to whites

                         i.      Black women and girls representing only 13% of U.S. population, were 19% (47) of those shot by police

                           ii.      Black women 1.4 times more likely than white women to be killed by police using fatal force

                           iii.      1.2 to 2.7 times more likely to have a fatal encounter.

b.      Native Indian/Alaska Native Women are 1.1 to 2.1 times more likely to be killed by police using deadly force than white women and have more than 3 times the number of fatal encounters with law enforcement as white women

c.      These stats rarely make it into the news or media.

6.      Any conversation about police brutality must include not only black but other women

a.      They are profiled and targeted by police in incredibly gendered ways

b.      Sexual violence and intimidation is part of the black women’s experience with racial profiling

c.      See announcement for more recent cases

7.      Sexual harassment, exploitation and assault occur in the home and detention centers as well as on the streets

a.      Black women are targets of violence inside homes and private spaces

b. Black women are fighting to be recognized, and this does not diminish what is happening to black young men.

c.      Historically, women activists were also targeted by police

d.      Sexual violence of civil rights activists experienced in places like Mississippi Parchman Farm raised the consciousness of what happens to women fighting for prison reform

e.      Women like Fannie Lou Hamer were abused behind the walls of a detention center

8.      Why do we know the names of such people as Michel Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray but rarely do we talk of black women killed by police, such as Rekia Boyd (See announcement)

a.      Conversation about police violence mostly framed around the endangerment of men of color

                             i.      Killing black men is a reproductive justice issue for women who have the right to see their children live in safety

                           ii.      Feminist interrogation of state power is also a critique of structural inequality

                        iii.      Forcing the conversation to be about gender and racial politics means that women must be in the forefront of this movement

                    iv.      Articulating that black lives does not only mean men’s lives or cisgender lives or respectable lives or lives that are legitimated by state power or privilege

b.      Movements for racial justice are often framed in terms of men

c.      Abolitionist movement to civil rights -key issues framed around concerns that racial injustice harmed masculinity

d.      Today’s movement that centers on women, girls must be included

                         i.      As we see our daughter's die, our mothers are unable to support their families due to the death of their partners or other family members

                            ii.      Reproductive justice issues inherent in all of this

1.      Violence undermines the ability to keep families and communities strong

2.      Stress of violence and intimidation affects child protection and child development

3.      Anxiety of parenting a child of color in a world where they are often targets can shape the decision to have children and one’s approach to parenting.

9.      What are the challenges of trying to address issues of domestic violence against black women

a.      A leading cause of death

b.      Calling police seldom spells safety for either black men or women

c.      Ensuring the safety of black women and children is very real right now

d. Given the reality of mass incarceration, Black women must weigh whether they can trust law enforcement.

e.      We must consider alternatives to current approaches to policing

                               i.      Which relies on a labor force that does not come from a particular community

                                  ii.      Alinates communities in the name of public safety

                         iii.      Consider Project NIA which encourages alternatives to calling police on youth.

                       iv. See the announcement Sending Unarmed Responders Instead of Police in the announcement.

f.        Movement has not only put the spotlight on gendered police violence against cisgender and trans women and poor black women, their families and communities

g.       But also -looked at structural issues such as the state of our schools, unemployment, access to public spaces

h.      Also. Undocumented youth are being targeted and sexually abused, and their mass incarcerated and mass deportation.

10.  BLM is a bottom-up organization but is it leaderless

a.      There are leaders -but we tend to ignore the women that are leading this, much like we forgot Ida B. Wells and the Niabara movement and Ella Baker in the Civil Rights movement

b.      These are sexist and racist attempts to undermine women and their contribution.

                             i.      We would rather concentrate on some charismatic male but this is not the case.

11.  Girls and young women, some still teenagers, are taking stands and making us know the problems they face

a.      The women in BLM not concerned with representing the race in a particular light, or bending the demands of respectability politics

b.      They are concerned with carving out a space for black women to fight for justice, from trans women who are dying for it to women in elective office to attorneys representing protestors to little girls holding up signs for Rekia Boyd, for sorority members vigiling in front of police stations, to college women wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts on campus.

12.  This is the history, the present and the future of any movement that is to be successful..it must be inclusive..