“I had to fight my uncles. I had to fight my brothers. A girl child ain’t safe in a family of men.” So said Sofia, the hefty, feisty woman in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (and immortalized by Oprah Winfrey in the film adaptation). In a novel highlighting protagonist Celie, an incest survivor who ultimately […]
Police Violence
McKinney and the History of Policing Black Women’s Bodies
Last Friday, a white police officer in McKinney, Texas, Cpl. Eric Casebolt, responded to a call about an incident at a teenage pool party. While there, he grabbed—by the hair—bikini-clad Dajerria Becton, a 15-year old African American girl who was a guest at the party, wrestled her to the ground and held her there with […]
#SayHerName: Remembering Black Women and Girls Killed by Police
Aiyana Jones. Rekia Boyd. Tarika Wilson. Duanna Johnson. Kayla Moore. The list of Black women and girls victimized by police violence stretches on endlessly. The simple act of speaking their names has power. It symbolizes a refusal to forget these women and who they were. It honors the lives they lived and the loved ones […]
NEWSFLASH: DOJ Finds Rampant Racial Bias Among Ferguson Police
While the Department of Justice has chosen not to bring criminal charges against Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson—who fatally shot Black teenager Michael Brown last year—the DOJ has found evidence of rampant racial bias on that city’s police force. The DOJ spent the last six months investigating Ferguson’s police department, examining arrest and ticketing records […]
How #BlackLivesMatter Became the Word of the Year
For the first time in its history, the American Dialect Society voted for a hashtag as 2014’s Word of the Year. The phrase in question is #BlackLivesMatter, the resounding call to arms that went viral after the 2013 trial trial of George Zimmerman—who shot and killed teenager Trayvon Martin—saw Zimmerman walk free. It gained traction again […]
Six Months After the Killing of Michael Brown
Michael Brown was gunned down by police in his Ferguson, Missouri, neighborhood six months ago today. Trayvon Martin, killed by a self-appointed “vigilante,” would have turned 20 years old last Thursday. Also last week: the 16th anniversary of the death of Amadou Diallo, who was shot at 41 times by NYPD when reaching for his […]
Women Claiming the Streets, Women Claiming Community
The streets have always been a site of political struggle, but this year, how women have been positioned on the streets is a lesson in community building and feminist solidarity. While the Ferguson, Missouri, protesters became a huge story in 2014—even coming close to being named Time‘s Person of the Year—few may remember just how […]
Police Kill Black Women All The Time, Too—We Just Don’t Hear About It
Reprinted from Bustle with permission Protestors in New York flooded the streets last week, toting signs that blazed with images and phrases about cruel injustice. Just a week after similar events in Ferguson, a grand jury ruled that Daniel Pantaleo–the NYPD officer who put Eric Garner, a 44-year-old, Black, Staten Island man, in a chokehold that led to Garner’s […]
Taming the Law Enforcement Beast: What’s Changed Since Ferguson
Today in New York, a grand jury voted not to indict white police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, a black man who died after Pantaleo placed him in a chokehold (a tactic that’s banned by the NYPD). The decision comes less than two weeks after a Missouri grand jury made the same […]
Ferguson: “A Grave Injustice”
The following is the statement of Eleanor Smeal, founder and president of the Feminist Majority Foundation: The Feminist Majority Foundation is outraged at the decision not to indict Darren Wilson. This should have been a public trial. Wilson should have been charged immediately after the shooting of Michael Brown, who was shot at least six […]