Masked Violence against Black Women and Girls

Abstract

Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 175 Ashley L. Smith-Purviance Masked Violence against Black Women and Girls In May 2020, mass media outlets widely reported the murder of twenty-seven-year-old Breonna Taylor in Louisville, KY.1 Two months later, in July 2020, some news outlets also reported the story of Grace, a fifteen-year-old Black girl in Michigan who was incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic for not completing her online schoolwork.2 These two incidents are connected: violence against Black girls in schools and classrooms is inextricably linked to the anti-Black state violence that Black women and girls face in society and in their homes. The violence that Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Korryn Gaines, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and many more have experienced results from the same interlocking systems of oppression that marginalize the suffering of Black girls in 1. Taylor had been killed two months earlier, in March 2020. See Errin Haines, “Family Seeks Answers in Fatal Police Shooting of Louisville Woman in Her Apartment,” Washington Post, May 11, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com /nation/2020/05/11/family-seeks-answers-fatal-police-shooting-louisvillewoman -her-apartment. 2. Brande Victorian, “15-Year-Old Black Girl Sent to Juvenile Detention Center for Not Completing Her Online Schoolwork during the Pandemic,” Madame Noire, July 14, 2020, https://madamenoire.com/1176948/15-yearold -black-girl-sent-to-juvenile-detention-center-for-not-completing-heronline -schoolwork-during-the-pandemic. 176 Ashley L. Smith-Purviance schools.3 However, there is a lack of exploration about how these systems —schools, criminal justice, juvenile justice, law enforcement, and media—operate together and simultaneously shape and enact violence against Black women and girls. Assault and violence against Black women and girls that result in murder are masked forms of Black death.4 Information about their deaths is rarely shared across mass media platforms. Brittney Cooper argues that there is much less outrage surrounding Black death when it is Black women and girls who are murdered. She suggests that one reason is that they are often killed in their homes rather than in public spaces and therefore there is less public recognition.5 Because their murders often occur in containment and confinement, Black women and girls’ narratives become hidden, covered up, and written off in ways that deny their victimization and justify the violence they face.6 I have come to understand these kinds of “erasures” as endemic to the structure of this antiBlack world, which only sees us when we are “dead and dying.”7 Indeed, we would not know about Breonna Taylor’s life and that she was an “essential” worker if she had not been killed. A recent 20/20 documentary segment about her murder shows how Breonna Taylor was at first considered a suspect in her own murder case for months, which diminished 3. Treva Lindsey, “The Lack of Mobilized Outrage for Police Killing Black Women Is an Injurious Erasure,” Bustle, June 3, 2020, https://www.bustle.com /p/the-lack-of-mobilized-outrage-for-police-killing-black-women-is-injuriouserasure -22953764. 4. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 5. Brittney Cooper, “Why Are Black Women and Girls Still an Afterthought in Our Outrage over Police Violence?” Time, June 4, 2020, https://time.com /5847970/police-brutality-black-women-girls. 6. Beth E. Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Kimberlé Crenshaw, Andrea Ritchie, Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, and Luke Harris, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women (New York: African American Policy Forum, 2015); Lashawn Harris, “#SayHerName: Black Women, State Sanctioned Violence & Resistance,” Organization of American Historians, https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2020/history-for-black-lives /sayhername-black-women-state-sanctioned-violence-resistance (accessed April 12, 2021). 7. Patrice D. Douglass, “Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying,” Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (January 2018). Ashley L. Smith-Purviance 177 the availability of accurate information about her death.8 Criminal legal systems, law enforcement, and mass media outlets mask the violence against Black women and girls when they withhold or...