It is no secret that the fight for [Black] freedom is usually centered on the black man—the straight black man to be exact.
This isn’t to minimize the effects of police brutality against black men, seeing as this rampant violence is responsible for the loss of the lives of 119 black men, specifically, this year alone according to a database of fatal shootings compiled by The Washington Post.
That being said, people often ignore the underlying fact that black women also suffer from the negative effects of police brutality. We’ve seen it in incidents such as the Texas pool party video that circulated in 2015, in which an officer aggressively shoves an unarmed, 15-year-old black girl—who happened to only be wearing a bikini—into the ground and sits on top of her.
We’ve seen police violence against black women play out in cases such as that of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old woman who died in police custody after being arrested following a routine traffic stop.
Not only is the plight of black women often erased, but their contributions tend to be co-opted, minimized and forgotten just a much. In fact, Black Lives Matter was created by three black queer women—Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors—after George Zimmerman was acquitted for the 2013 murder of Trayvon Martin.
After its initial creation and success, these women put a significant amounts of work into “moving the hashtag from social media to the streets,” Alicia Garza wrote in A HerStory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement in which she covers the history of the movement, theft of black queer women’s work, and the appropriation of black struggle.
Black women leading Black movements isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.
Journalist Deron Dalton wrote the follwing in an article last year dedicated to acknowledging the women behind the BLM movement:
“According to Cullors, Black women have always led Black movements. Ella Baker, Diane Nash, and Fannie Lou Hamer are Black women leaders who were critical in developing movements, and their names aren’t heard often. Cullors said women are on the front lines, strategizing, organizing and developing policy in Ferguson and around the country.”
The black women who continue to stand on the front lines for their brothers in the Black Lives Matter movement are not only fighting for them but for all members of the black community affected by violence fueled by white supremacy.
“Black women are actually more prone to be abused by a police officer than by anybody else,” Garza told The Washington Post. She cited the white police officer in Oklahoma City who was on trial for sexually abusing as many as thirteen black women in 2014.
“They are not being murdered at the same rate as black men, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t being severely traumatized,” she said.
Initiatives such as #SayHerName have been started in order to document the stories of incidents of police violence against black women specifically, seeing as their stories aren’t as publicized as those of black men.
#SayHerName started a year ago but is still relevant today. When we say “black lives matter,” as many have pointed out, it is important to recognize that all black lives matter—including those of black women and queer black folk. Both their lives and labor matters, and it goes without saying that these things deserve to be acknowledged not only by the media, but by members within the movement as well as those outside of it.
