2.1 Partie II, Chapitre I
Note 44: Cheng: « Dehumanizing and
deadly consequences spawn from these myths of black bruteness. Multiple recent
studies have shown the tendencies of white research subjects to overestimate
the size, speed, and age of black people. Such « formidability bias,»
scientists argue, can expectedly « [promote] participants' justifications
of hy- pothetical use of force against Black suspects of crime» (Wilson,
Rule, and Hugenberg 2017, 59). Take the tragedy of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice,
who, while playing with an Airsoft toy gun in a Cleveland park on November 22,
2014, was shot and killed by police officer Timothy Loehmann.5 In his signed
statement to investigators, Loehmann declared that Rice « appeared to be
over 18 years old and about 185 pounds» (Loehmann 2015), He wasn't that
little kid . . . you're seeing in pictures. He's a twelve-year-old in an adult
body» (Stahl 2016)» Formidability myths go beyond overestimations of
how resilient black bodies look (exteriorities). These myths concurrently
enable un- derestimations of black bodies' capacity to feel (interiorities). In
a 2014 study, researchers found that white children, beginning as early as age
seven, believe their black peers to possess reduced susceptibility to physical
pain. Much injustice has historically sprung from white denials of black
nociception. « Pain bias,» sometimes called the « racial empathy
gap,» is complicit in the societal normalization of black trauma (Wade
2013; Silverstein 2013; Forgiarini, Gallucci, and Maravita 2011).10 Physicians
today prescribe lower and fewer doses of pain medication to black patients,
including black children (Hoberman
160
2012; Hoffman, Trawalter, Axt, and Oliver 2016; Graham 2014).
Police use more severe physical force on dark- skinned bodies (Buehler 2017).
Therapists, through buy-in of the Strong Black Woman trope, disproportionately
trivialize black women's requests for mental healthcare (West, Donovan, and
Daniel 2016). Or we could look back to the era of US chattel slavery, during
which white doctors forced black women to undergo childbirth without anesthetic
chloroform, even when infants had to be delivered « with the aid of the
blunt hook» (Schwartz 2006, 167).11 Slaveholders' assumptions that black
women were generally « strong enough to endure any pain» further
warranted their subjection to every other abuse, including rape (Wyatt 2008,
60; see also Staples 1970).»
Note 46: Richardson: For as long as Black
women have organized publicly, there has been a cultural code of decorum for
all who dare to enter the public sphere. Brittany Cooper explains in her 2017
book, Beyond Respectability, that calls for refinement date as far back as the
1890s, during the era of post-Reconstruction. Black Baptist women endeavored to
create counter-discourses of Blackness through « adherence to temperance,
cleanliness of person and property, thrift, polite manners, and sexual
purity.» In terms of visual communication, the politics of respectability
dictated that Black women leaders of social movements adopt a « culture of
dissemblance» (Hine, 1989, p. 912) or « self-imposed secrecy and
invisibility» (Higginbotham, 1993, p. 194). Modest clothing that erased
the Black woman's body (and sexuality) was encouraged. Black women within the
church were discouraged from making loud, individual displays of protest.
Public, corporate prayer was a preferred form of civil disobedience
(Higginbotham, 1993, p. 224).for post Reconstruction era Black women to define
themselves and reclaim their bodies. It is true that the Black church served as
an enclave where African American women could plan their public addresses with
great care and col- laboration. The silencing of Black women's voices led to
the articulation of a discrete, Black feminist movement that flourished
alongside the Black Power Movement of the 1970s.» « Black feminism,
or womanism, may have remained a scholarly abstraction were it not for the rise
of social media in the 2000s. In 1994, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1994/2005, p.
282) coined the term « intersectionality» to describe further «
how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of
intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not
to be represented within the discourses of either feminism or
anti-racism.» Still, no sustained social movements led by Black women
dominated the American political landscape during the 1980s or 1990s. The
Internet rebooted visible, collective womanism in two phases.» « In
the Web 1.0 paradigm, Black feminists experimented with their digital voices.
Blogs such as Gina McCauley's What About Our Daughters (Rapp, Button, Fleury-
Steiner, & Fleury-Steiner,
161
2010), K. Tempest Bradford's The Angry Black Woman (Curtis,
2015), and Brittney Cooper's Crunk Feminist Collective (Boylorn, 2013) quickly
became required reading material for Black women in the early 2000s. In this
fashion, the affordances of Web 1.0 rewarded individual, standout digital
personalities with coveted access to traditional media, but did not yet offer a
path to collective leveraging of the Internet for social movement formation.
The Web 2.0, read/write version of the Internet shifted this focus--from
singular womanist bloggers--to a plurality of connected Black feminists online.
Shortly after Twitter's launch in 2006, African Americans began to visit the
social media platform more than any other ethnic group. By 2014, more than 26%
of African Americans were convening on Twitter at any given time of day, while
only 16% of Whites were doing so (Smith, 2014). So-called « Black
Twitter» (as it was dubbed by blogger Choire Sicha in 2009) comprised
African American voices from all over the world. Initial academic explorations
into Black Twitter found that African Americans were engaging in lively games
of the « dozens» (Florini, 2014) or live-Tweeting hit television
shows such as Shonda Rhimes's Scandal (Everett, 2015) or How to Get Away with
Murder (Williams & Gonlin, 2017). The digital frivolity gave way to fury,
however, after the Trayvon Martin murder trial in 2013. When George Zimmerman,
who is half-White, was acquitted of killing the unarmed, Black teenager in
Sanford, Florida, Alicia Garza took to Facebook to write a love letter to Black
people. Her friend, Patrisse Cullors, reposted it to Twitter with a hashtag:
#BlackLivesMatter (Garza, 2016). Neither of the women said that they ever
expected the Tweet to become a global movement. In many ways though, this
moment may have been inevitable, since the socially conservative politics of
respectability silenced many groups of willing Black women activists for
decades.
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