Sandra Bland Research Articles

Review: The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea, by Christopher J. Lebron

Review: <i>The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea</i>, by Christopher J. Lebron

Sandra Bland at the cross: A womanist reading of Mark 15:40-47

How do women who lack power and privilege experience the cross? How do women who lack power and privilege view privileged men at the cross? How do such questions probe issues of Jesus’s death in the Markan passion narrative? This article employs a womanist hermeneutic of “gazing” to interpret differently the complexity of women in close proximity to death while interrogating one particular woman’s close proximity to death in contemporary memory: Sandra Bland. Particularly, a womanist hermeneutic of gazing coupled with a womanist hermeneutic of suspicion provides a liberating space for nuanced engagement with the women who gaze upon Jesus’s crucifixion from afar. Recognizing specifically that the Gospel of Mark uses the Greek word βλέπω ( blepō) to identify “seeing” as a metaphor for belief, how does a womanist understanding of the Greek term θεωρέω ( theōreō, which the gospel writer uses sparingly) crack open the text for contemporary audiences? Engaging issues of power, privilege, and death in relationship to the “gaze” of Mark 15:40-47, this article highlights that the women who attempt to anoint Jesus’s body in the Markan narrative, because of their gender in the highly charged testosterone environment of a militarized imperial execution, have more “skin in the game,” different from the privileged position of men in the text. What happens when women are confronted with men who exhibit high levels of masculine testosterone and masculine identity? Like Sandra Bland, they are closer to death. Accordingly, thinking through the women who go to anoint Jesus with contemporary women today means that women who are often closer to death must continue the analytical work of “gazing”, as found in Mark 15:47 to the point that returning the “gaze” produces change for those closest to death (e.g., black and brown bodies close to militarized imperial violence).

Voices on Diversity: Combating Racial Inequality to Increase Diversity

As part of our commitment to amplifying the voices of underrepresented scientists, we are publishing the insights and experiences of a panel of underrepresented scientists in a series of questions and answers. Here, they discuss ways that the scientific community can combat racial inequality and increase diversity. These are the personal opinions of the authors and may not reflect the views of their institutions.

Black Lives, Black Words: Transnational Solidarity and Collective Artistic Activism

In 2015, playwright Reginald Edmund started the Black Lives, Black Words international project in Chicago with a series of performances responding to the Black Lives Matter movement. Black Lives, Black Words aims at exploring Afrodiasporic experiences in multicultural cities such as Chicago and London, drawing on the lives of local communities but aiming to become a catalyst for change worldwide, while at the same time transferringthe discussion to the theatre in order to empower unheard voices in the artistic field. This article analyses three short plays that were performed at the reopening of the Bush Theatre in London in March 2017: The Interrogation of Sandra Bland, by Mojisola Adebayo, The Principles of Cartography, by Winsome Pinnock, and My White Best Friend, by Rachel De-lahay. By examining the three thematic and aesthetic axes of these plays, namely, amplification and choral performance, cartographies of struggle and white solidarity, I establish a parallel between the theatre productions and the Black Lives Matter movement, from which the project draws inspiration. At the same time, I argue for their potential to forge solidarity networks transnationally by dealing with social and political issues affecting Black communities across the US and the UK.

Womanist Spirit and Womanist Healing for Sandra Bland and George Floyd

Womanist thought offers a holistic worldview from which to interpret the deaths of Sandra Bland and George Floyd. Alice Walker, in the novel Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, introduces the Grandmother Spirit, a figure of the Great Spirit, an important element in Walker’s definition of what it means to be “womanist.” The Grandmother informs the action of Grand Mothers, both living and ancestor, who offer potential healing to Black people under violence, including death at the hands of police. The article analyzes one episode in the novel, Lalika’s arrest and rape by police, and the appearance of an ancestral Grand Mother, Saartjie Bartmann, who sustains Lalika. After exploring this visitation of spirits, the article turns to the cases of Sandra Bland, for whom no ancestor appeared, and George Floyd, for whom his mother and a host of Grand Mother witnesses, did appear. The article concludes with an examination of Walker’s essay “This Was Not an Area of Large Plantations,” in which she meditates on intergenerational interconnectedness and truth-telling and suggests art as a site of imaginative justice.

Impact of the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights on Police Transparency &amp;amp; Accountability

The United States, home to 5% of the world’s population & 25% of the world’s incarcerated population, is the largest hotspot of mass incarceration in human history. Many factors have contributed to rising incarceration rates over the past 50 years, including the War on Drugs and the 1994 crime bill. One piece of legislation with impact on policing in the United States is the Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights (LEOBOR), which serves to minimize accountability and transparency within police departments by granting rights to police officers that aren't granted to other public or private employees, such as interdepartmental investigations and classified personnel files. LEOBOR is state policy in the states where Freddie Gray (Maryland), Sandra Bland (Texas), Breonna Taylor (Kentucky), & George Floyd (Minnesota) were murdered by police and where Rodney King (California) was beaten on tape, and this legislation has a substantial impact on police investigations and discipline. There has been very little academic study on this legislation and its impact. In this study, I seek to examine the difference in rates of incarceration, police spending, police salaries, on-duty shooting of civilians, the number of officers who have been charged for an on-duty shooting, and the number of decertified officers between states with and without LEOBOR in effect. These statistics will give a detailed comparison of accountability and transparency in states that do and do not have LEOBOR in effect.

Social Media Representations of Law Enforcement within Four Diverse Chicago Neighborhoods

The perception of excessive use of force by law enforcement towards minorities has become an increasing focus of attention in the national media and public consciousness. With greater ability to record conflicts using smartphones and dissemination of videos via social media, the public may more readily judge the circumstances of law enforcement interactions. The purpose of this study was (a) to understand the general sentiment about law enforcement on social media among communities of color in Chicago, (b) to see if local or national incidents of police conflicts with people of color were mentioned, and (c) identify key themes within these social media posts. Publicly available social media posts were collected from four ethnically and socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods in Chicago. Using a five-person team and keyword searches, the posts were reviewed for content and abstracted if they pertained to law enforcement. They were then analyzed in stages of open, axial, and selective coding methods. Eight main themes were identified. These included the following: (a) law enforcement participation in the community, (b) law enforcement activity in the neighborhood, (c) posts regarding criminal activity, (d) immigration, (e) political protests against police, (f) African American men and law enforcement, (g) sympathy with Sandra Bland case, and (h) #Blacklivesmatter. There appears to be chasm of trust between law enforcement and communities of color. Our findings may help inform law enforcement, public policy-makers, and social workers in their efforts to better address these issues and to institute policies and interventions that not only bridge this gap but also strengthen and empower these communities.

I’ve Got Something to Say: Gender, Race, and Social Consciousness in Rap Music, by Matthew, Oware. 2018. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, Switzerland. 240 pages. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 978‐3319904535.

I’ve Got Something to Say: Gender, Race, and Social Consciousness in Rap Music, by Matthew, Oware. 2018. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, Switzerland. 240 pages. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 978‐3319904535.

The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic

The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic

Dehumanizing Slave Personhood

AbstractAfrohumanism is crucial to the forward-looking “project of thinking humanity from perspectives beyond the liberal humanist subject, Man” (Weheliye 2014: 8). It is another question, however, whether such a humanist approach provides the best historical analytic for understanding slavery and its carceral afterlives. This question becomes particularly pressing when we consider that today’s prison-industrial complex, like the American slaveholder of the past, extracts profits by strategically exploiting—rather than denying—the lucrative humanity of its captive black and brown subjects. To illustrate these claims, this article examines a seldom-discussed slave case, United States v. Amy (1859), which was tried before Supreme Court chief justice Roger B. Taney two years after his infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Centering on the figure of the legal person rather than the human or the citizen, United States v. Amy alerts us to the lethal legacy of slave personhood as a debilitating mixture of civil death and criminal culpability. Nowhere, perhaps, is that legacy more evident than in viral videos of police misconduct. And nowhere do we see a more vivid assertion of black counter-civility than in the dash cam video of the late Sandra Bland’s principled, outraged response to her pretextual traffic stop by Trooper Brian Encinia. The essay closes by considering Bland’s arrest and subsequent death in custody in the context of her own and other African Americans’ efforts to achieve and maintain a civil presence in an American law and culture where black personhood remains legible primarily as criminality.

Landscapes of impunity and the deaths of Americans LaVena Johnson and Sandra Bland

On July 19th, 2005, American Army Private First Class LaVena Johnson died in Balad, Iraq, just 8 days shy of her 20th birthday. On July 13th, 2015, almost 10 years later, 28-year-old Sandra Bland’s life came to an abrupt end in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas. Both women’s deaths were ruled suicides, and both women’s families and friends reject these judgments. Instead, they insinuate foul play by the state, which directly governed the militarized spaces within which the women both died. At first glance, these women appear to have had very different life trajectories, one a United States soldier and the other a Black Lives Matter activist. However, in both of their cases, the ruling of the suspicious deaths as suicides illustrates the state’s attempt to render their deaths banal, and thereby diminish the state’s own culpability. In understanding the unremitting acts of violence, on women’s bodies, especially women of color, this paper focuses on how a Black feminist praxis extends feminist notions of an ethics of care.

Hot in the Striped Boy's Heart

Jan Beatty’s fifth book, Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), won the 2018 Paterson Prize. The Huffington Post called her one of ten “advanced women poets for required reading.” She worked as an abortion counselor, in maximum-security prisons, and directs the creative writing program at Carlow University. July 10, 1040: Lady Godiva, wife of the Earl of Mercia, rides naked on horseback to force her husband to lower taxes. July 10, 2015: Sandra Bland was pulled over by a state trooper for an alleged traffic violation. I could ride bare-breasted bareback (if my hair were long) trail through a city (if I could convince my husband, if he might contemplate my modesty) to lower injustices (if he were to look) my fuzzy mound to decide be fair (if I could) to the people fair as the under of hand ride (if I were on a horse) several centuries (if I may part my river of hair to show the man he might stare at my hilly breasts, if he) think himself an emperor, I a lady, might he not lower woman like tax (might) bones not beat ground like hooves (if my new clothes were no clothes) (if I stripped and mounted, nude, if only to change) my lesser-ribbed counterpart (if I have to) I undress for him, for every life (if I want) to save (if that includes my own) (if I weren’t afraid to) say either of our names (if the officer could have seen her and her mother, too) if my body brought better, (if) it means something Lady Godiva traversed the city bare (if many wars ago) hitched hips to horse (as if a lover) the same day Sandra Bland was arrested (might if a woman ride a thing she not be driven beneath it?) Ashanti Anderson is a poet and screenwriter. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside. You can read more of her work in Poetry, Crab Fat Magazine, and Foothill. She currently lives in Texas. If by Ashanti Anderson Hot in the Striped Boy’s Heart by Jan Beatty It’s hot in the loading bridge, hot in the birth canal, it’s hot in the striped boy’s heart – we’re two women driving to D.C. for an abortion in my beater sea-green Le Mans with the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll sticker on the bumper. It’s hot living in my car with the mattress in the back, the windshield wipers disintegrating and so it’s raining all the way to D.C. and my friend is terrified, let it go too long with a guy she loves but he couldn’t care and she can’t face her parents. Borrowed money from the waitresses we worked with, saline solution for a second-trimester abortion, it’s hot in the Silverman’s T-shirt I’m still wearing from sixth grade with gold and blue stripes, hot in the men’s store buying my first real shirt with my girlfriend Patty. I was a boy then, not yet a woman following the sightlines from the silver hood ornament to the double yellow. Hot in the Pontiac trunk of clothes and boxes and the cheap hotel in Silver Springs for the early morning procedure, two women in their twenties out of state for treatment, hot in this traveling altar, these bodies run amok. Body of light, body of doubles. Body of never telling anyone, never seeing her again. Hot in the striped boy’s heart in this car dragging home with no talk, still bleeding. WORLDLIT.ORG 87 ...

Sassy Mouths, Unfettered Spirits, and the Neo-Lynching of Korryn Gaines and Sandra Bland

Abstract This work develops and conceptualizes a new theory, Post Traumatic Slave Master Syndrome, that is utilized to critically correlate historic patterns of lynching Black women to contemporary violent state (actor) responses to Black women’s resistance, specifically relating to the neo-lynching of Korryn Gaines and Sandra Bland. This work deviates from the tradition of analyzing the history and contemporary effects of racism and white supremacy, patriarchy, lynching, policing, and state-sponsored violence from the perspective of the effects upon the victim and instead critiques how white supremacy affects the perpetrator. This chapter contributes to ensuring that Black women resisters continue to #SayHerName.

Sandy still speaks: the digital afterlives of Sandra Bland

ABSTRACTThe story of technology’s use in the Black Lives Matter movement is a battle between competing narratives of temporality: white state institutions and storytellers invest in a gaze which sees Black life as simply headed toward Black death, while Black Lives Matter activists and artists understand Black lives as worthy of care and able to bring social change even after death. This essay examines the visual afterlife of Sandra Bland, a Black woman who died in police custody in 2015. The contrast between the “official” institutional videos of Bland’s last days and her own self-produced “Sandy Speaks” videos demonstrates the push between temporalities narrating Black life and death. The 2018 documentary Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland provides a site for analyzing these various digital traces and how in death Bland resists containment by a racist state or even the limited confines of a documentary narrative.

Social Media and the New Newsreel

The online circulation of raw footage from live streams, cell phones, and police dash-cams has fueled much political dissent in recent years, from Occupy Wall Street to the protests surrounding the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and others. This essay looks at experimental moving image works made in response to these contemporary dynamics of protest. It offers a comparative analysis of short digital videos by Jem Cohen and Alex Johnson, both of whom embrace the newsreel as a radical genre, making direct reference to earlier generations of filmmakers who did the same. Cohen’s Gravity Hill Newsreels (2011) offer a series of immersive observational studies of the Occupy demonstrations and Zuccotti Park encampment. In a more directly referential mode, Johnson’s Now! Again! (2014) appropriates Santiago Alvarez’s Now! (1965), a Cuban newsreel made by animating photographs depicting the civil rights struggle. Johnston juxtaposes this imagery with media coverage of protests in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of Michael Brown in August 2014. Fifty years ago, radical filmmakers of Alvarez’s generation urged newsreel audiences to recognize themselves as a social body, sharing a stake in the struggles depicted on screen. Today, the currency of “newsreel” as a political mode of experimental media is less certain. Although the experimental videos at issue here could be read as nostalgic for conditions of cinematic exhibition long since eclipsed by the dominance of social media, I argue instead that they engage the current mediation of political unrest in order to explore the indeterminacy of the social body to which it gives rise. Calling attention to rifts in the visual field and the seams that bind one historical moment to another, these works are guided by a desire to grasp the historicity of newsreel as a form enlisted to play a participatory role in social protest. In each case, newsreel provides new forms for responding to urgent events that cut against the temporality and visual codes of social media, opening up new space to share the world differently.

The Aesthetic Insurgency of Sandra Bland’s Afterlife

The death of Sandra Bland on July 13, 2015, coupled with the dashcam footage that documented the verbal and physical violence she experienced as Texas law enforcement officials arrested and detained her, marked a critical historical moment in the Black Lives Matter era. Yet, the “Sandy Speaks” videos she recorded in the months preceding her death left profound digital traces of her words and thoughts. This article combines historical and cultural analysis to observe how theater, poetry, and visual art focused on Sandra Bland, what I term aesthetic insurgency, create platforms to resist police violence against Black women.

On the Death of Sandra Bland: A Case of Anger and Indifference

Trooper Brian Encinia conducted a traffic stop on Ms. Sandra Bland in Prairie View, Texas, on July 10, 2015. Ms. Bland was not cooperative. She swung her fist at him. Trooper Encinia verbally escalated the situation. He arrested her. She struggled with him outside of her vehicle. She was taken into custody and charged with a felony. She was taken to the Waller County Jail. The jail staff ignored both her history of depression and numerous cut marks on her arm. The jail staff did not place her on suicide watch. She could not raise her bail. Ms. Bland rolled a plastic trash can liner into a noose and hung herself in the cell. She was pronounced dead on July 13, 2015. Larger issues concerning de-escalation in police–citizen encounters and jail suicide are also examined.

Bereaved Black Mothers and Maternal Activism in the Racial State

Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 713 Erica S. Lawson Bereaved Black Mothers and Maternal Activism in the Racial State Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation and is, in that sense, depoliticizing. But I think it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility. —Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence Honor your son and his life, not the circumstances of his alleged transgressions. I have always said that Trayvon was not perfect. But no one can ever convince me that my son deserved to be stalked and murdered. No one can convince you that Michael deserved to be executed. —Sybrina Fulton, letter to the Brown family, Time The death of a beloved compels us to find new meanings in a permanently altered reality. For some Black mothers, grief over the violent and unexpected death of their child can lead to activism to change unjust social relations. Here, I speak of maternal grief as “public motherhood ” rather than as a private expression of pain.1 A public expression of grief, as noted by Judith Butler in the epigraph, can furnish a 1. See Lorelle Semley, “Public Motherhood in West Africa as Theory and Practice ,” Gender and History 24, no. 3 (November 2012): 600–16. 714 Erica S. Lawson type of political community. In the United States, maternal activism is evidenced by Mothers of the Movement, a group comprised of African American women whose children have been unjustifiably and violently killed.2 Indeed, for some bereaved Black mothers, the transformative possibilities of maternal politics informed by grief often emerge from the everyday impacts of structural racial violence. Some Black parents mourn their children who are entrapped in “punishing circuits of surveillance , containment, repression, and disposability,” which sometimes result in their deaths.3 Mothers of the Movement and Black Lives Matter articulate the concern that the disposability of Black lives is driven, in part, by the economic and racial injustice that sustains capitalism at the nexus of race and the manufactured fear of Blackness.4 In recent years, an alarming number of Black men and women have been killed in the United States. Many of these deaths have resulted from, although they are not limited to, Black people’s encounters with law enforcement agents and armed private citizens. In view of violence as a social problem, attempts have been made to upend its root causes. In addition to programs and policies—most recently, former President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative to provide opportunities for racialized young men—efforts include activism on the part of bereaved mothers and fathers to make sense of the deaths of their children and to 2. See Will Drabold, “Meet the Mothers of the Movement,” Time, July 26, 2016, http://time.com/4423920/dnc-mothers-movement-speakers. The Mothers of the Movement, listed here with their respective child’s name in parenthesis , are Sybrina Fulton (Trayvon Martin), Lesley McSpadden (Michael Brown), Gwen Carr (Eric Garner), Geneva Reed-Veal (Sandra Bland), Cleopatra Pendleton-Cowley (Hadiya Pendleton), Maria Hamilton (Dontré Hamilton ), and Lucia McBath (Jordan Davis). Among other goals, the Mothers of the Movement aim to advocate for an end to gun violence and to promote criminal justice reform. 3. Henry A. Giroux, Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (New York: Routledge, 2012), 3. 4. Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Travis Linneman, Tyler Wall, and Edward Green, “The Walking Dead and Killing State: Zombification and the Normalization of Police Violence,” Theoretical Criminology 18, no. 4 (2014): 506–27; Barbara Ransby, “Ella Taught Me: Shattering the Myth of the Leaderless Movement,” Colorlines, June 29, 2015; Sidney M. Willhelm, “Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Experience in America,” Journal of Black Studies 10, no. 1 (1979): 3–19. Erica S. Lawson 715 advocate for legal and social change. As well, in the interest of ensuring that we not lose sight of the number...

The Myth of the Litigious Society: Why We Don't Sue. By David Engel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

The Myth of Litigious Society: Why We Don’t Sue. By David Engel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.This is a book to be grateful for. It is a joy to teach, and a wellargued corrective to previous ways of thinking about responses to injury. It is a humane and compassionate text, bringing attention to embodied and emotional experiences of injury, and role that these experiences play in channeling reactions of those in pain, those who have been harmed. The best books help us understand our own substantive and theoretical areas; they help us extend our analysis. Engel's book is indeed one of best I have read lately. As I read, I find myself wanting to take insights from The Myth of Litigious Society and travel with them-beyond study of litigation and settlement and into study of legal mobilization and social movement activism.It is a particular strength of this work that to do so is possible; book opens a set of questions that invite us to think more deeply about individuals' reactions-litigious and not-to trauma. And, Engel's analysis shows us that so much of what we think we know is based on assumption that people are rational actors-economic self-determining individuals. He is persuasive, and clear: the decision-tree model [of legal claims making] is deeply flawed. ... [It constructs] an unrealistic image of injury and response that bears little relationship to injuries as they actually occur, or to victims as they actually live, breathe, and cope with dire circumstances in which they find themselves (36). So-called rational choice explanations miss-as Engel points out-cultural explanations. They also, and perhaps most importantly, miss emotional, cognitive, and physical explanations for activism.In some very evocative passages, and quoting others' powerful meditations on pain, Engel notes that when people have experienced trauma, and are in pain, very structure of their lives collapses (39-40). They live through hour-by-hour and even minute-by-minute attempts to endure (39-40). They do not have emotional margin to ponder future, or plan for better days; they exist in struggle, and their pain and struggle constitute their very identities, which limits their ability to make legal claims. In his book, Engel is clear: we cannot expect injured people-those individuals whose injuries have transformed their identity in ways that defy their powers of explanation (46)-to make coherent demands upon corporate and state actors.Here, Engel is writing about personal injury and potential to claim tort harm. But we can, I believe, extend this understanding beyond individual harm caused by a workplace accident, or a tripand-fall incident. Reading about life as struggle to survive, I think about pain of Philando Castile's partner, Sandra Bland's family; I imagine trauma of 60 women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual predation, and pain of genocide felt through generations of lived experience of Water Keepers who held line against Dakota Access Pipeline. Indeed, pain and trauma at heart of #BlackLivesMatter and #NoDAPL movements, are both motivating forces and constitutive elements of movements.To notice this pain is not to call movements or their founders irrational, or to argue that their decisions are impulsive or ill- considered. It is not to argue that their demands are incoherent- though state often perceives them as such: reparations for slavery and return of stolen land are simply not part of public policy conversation. …

“I'm Giving You a Lawful Order”: Dialogic Legitimacy in Sandra Bland's Traffic Stop

On July 10, 2015, a young African American woman named Sandra Bland was stopped by State Trooper Officer Brian Encinia for failing to signal a lane change. What began as a routine traffic stop quickly devolved into shouting, a physical confrontation, and Bland's subsequent arrest. We use discourse analysis to examine the rapid escalation of this encounter with a focus on procedural justice (Sunshine &amp; Tyler 2003) and the dialogic approach to legitimacy (Bottoms &amp; Tankebe 2012). In analyzing the transcript of Sandra Bland's traffic stop, we address several key questions: How is procedural justice manifested linguistically? Can the dialogic legitimacy framework be used to understand the dynamics of individual police-citizen interactions? The conclusions of this analysis provide an interdisciplinary view of how procedural justice and legitimacy are manifested and negotiated in a police-citizen interaction.