Black Lives Matter: l'intersectionnalité, une méthodologie analytique

3.2 Partie III, Chapitre III

Note 78: shoulder to 'pop,' tearing her rotator cuff and causing severe injury,»  according to the lawsuit.

Note 79: A 74-year-old grandmother is suing three Oklahoma City Police Department officers for excessive force after she said they allegedly broke her arm while serving an arrest warrant for her son last year.

Note 80 McDonlad: Chicago's police watchdog, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, has finished a 16-month investigation into the police raid of Anjanette Young, a social worker who was handcuffed naked by police when they wrongfully targeted her home to serve a search warrant for someone else.

Note 81 Linly: The Root reported that a 9-year-old Black girl was handcuffed and pepper-sprayed for seemingly no other reason than because she was panicked and refused to get into the back of a police car before seeing her father who she feared was hurt. And if you need an even clearer picture of white people's inability to recognize that a Black child is indeed a child, before she was pepper-sprayed, one officer literally told the girl, « You're acting like a child.»People who--like these officers--lose their ability to recognize a child being a child when Blackness is involved will likely see the cops' threats as warnings that the girl should have heeded, but if officers' handling of a visibly distraught 9-year-old who is crying and screaming for her father would also be appropriate for interrogating a terrorism suspect, cops might want to rethink the way they protect and serve.

Note 82 GUPTA: On March 13, a little after midnight, three police officers punched down the door of Ms. Taylor's apartment in Louisville, Ky. using a no-knock warrant in a late-night drug raid. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fearing an intruder, reached for his gun and let off one shot, wounding an officer. Another officer and the wounded officer returned fire, while a third began blindly shooting through Ms. Taylor's window and patio door. The two officers who shot Ms. Taylor six times face no charges, while a former police detective, Brett Hankison, was indicted on a charge of « wanton endangerment» for firing recklessly into a neighbor's apartment. Few police officers who cause deaths are charged or convicted. Since 2013, law enforcement officers across the country have killed about 1,000 people a year and Black people are about three times more likely to be killed by the police than white people, according to the crowdsourced database Mapping Police Violence. And since 2015, nearly 250 women in total have been killed by police officers, of which 48 -- about a fifth -- were Black, according to a Washington Post database. By comparison, there have been five cases since 2015 in which officers were charged with manslaughter or murder in an on-duty shooting of a white woman and three of them resulted in a conviction.

Note 83 The insider: A year after the launch of the #SayHerName campaign-- founded in 2014 to bring attention to Black women harmed by police violence-- officers in California shot Yuvette Henderson several times in the head and back with an AR-15. They had suspected her of shoplifting at a Home Depot and alleged that she had pointed a gun at them. While protesters closed the store and demanded surveillance footage of the fatal shooting, national news organizations, including Insider, barely covered Henderson's death. #SayHerName has become an integral part of the Black Lives Matter movement and mobilized grassroots operations nationwide to acknowledge the lives of Black women, girls, and femmes lost to police violence. Names like Atatiana Jefferson and Breonna Taylor entered the national conversation as organizers leveraged the campaign « to change the popular narrative about police violence in the wake of the killings of Black women,» said Karissa Lewis and Charlene Carruthers, activists with the Movement for Black Lives. « In 2015, this work led to the first national day of action calling for an end to state-sanctioned violence against all Black women and girls,» Lewis and Carruthers told Insider. « Over a dozen cities held actions, leading us to campaign work that shapes our movement today. That work plays a large role in more people and communities seeing themselves being valued for the first time in a mass movement for liberation.» Insider tracked 100 officers involved in the killings of these Black women. Through research, conversations with activists, court documents, and records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, we found that most of the officers involved did not face any consequences. Insider identified 14 of those 100 officers who had been fired or charged. One officer -- Scott Kadien, who killed Sandy Guardiola in 2017 -- resigned, though it wasn't clear whether he did so because of the shooting. No officer has been convicted.

Note 84 Maxouris: The #SayHerName campaign, launched in 2014, serves to raise awareness and support the families of the Black women and girls who fall victim to police brutality -- and who are often overlooked and forgotten. « #SayHerName is grounded in the sad reality that Black women and girls who are targeted, brutalized, and killed by police are all too often excluded from mainstream narratives around police violence, Including Black women and girls in police violence and gender violence discourses sends the powerful message that indeed all Black lives matter,»  it says. The campaign has worked to highlight the cases of dozens of Black women, including Atatiana Jefferson and Michelle Cusseaux, both killed by police in their home. « We're still in a period of time where we have to make people see that Black women are also the subject of anti-Black police violence,»  Crenshaw said. « It's one of the most consistent aspects of our experience across history. 

Note 85 Owens: Back in 2014, AAPF and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS) at Columbia launched the campaign to bring awareness to often forgotten or invisible victims and give their families support. The following May, « we hosted the first #SayHerName vigil in New York's Union Square,» she said. Relatives of at least 16 Black women killed by police assembled from around the country. Soon after, AAPF and CISPS released a groundbreaking report: « Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women.» Co-written by Crenshaw and Andrea J. Ritchie, a lawyer and activist, outlined the objectives of the movement, providing an intersectional framework for understanding Black women's susceptibility to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence.

Not 86 BBC: « The officers who entered Ms Taylor's apartment were not wearing body cameras that could record the unfolding events. Now, the Louisville police department says all officers must wear body cameras. « No-knock»  search warrants have been temporarily suspended. And the Louisville police chief was removed from his post when it was discovered that officers present at the fatal shooting of a black man during a protest did not have their body cams turned on.

Note 87: Crenshaw Launched in December 2014 by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS), the #SayHerName campaign brings awareness to the often-invisible names and stories of Black women and girls who have been victimized by racist police violence, and provides support to their families. Black women and girls as young as 7 and as old as 93 have been killed by the police, though we rarely hear their names. Knowing their names is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for lifting up their stories which in turn provides a much clearer view of the wide-ranging circumstances that make Black women's bodies disproportionately subject to police violence. To lift up their stories, and illuminate police violence against Black women, we need to know who they are, how they lived, and why they suffered at the hands of police. On May 20th, 2015, at Union Square in New York City, AAPF hosted #SayHerName: A Vigil in Memory of Black Women and Girls Killed by the Police. For the first time, family members of Black women killed by police came together from across the country for a powerful vigil designed to draw attention to their loved ones' stories. The family members of Alberta Spruill, Rekia Boyd, Shantel Davis, Shelly Frey, Kayla Moore, Kyam Livingston, Miriam Carey, Michelle Cusseaux, and Tanisha Anderson were present and supported by hundreds of attendees, activists, and stakeholders. That same week, AAPF and CISPS, in partnership with Andrea Ritchie, released a report entitled Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, which outlined the goals and objectives of the #SayHerName movement. The report provides an intersectional framework for understanding black women's susceptibility to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence and offers suggestions on how to effectively mobilize various communities and empower them to advocate for racial justice. Over the past five years, the #SayHerName campaign has expanded and increased its focus on direct advocacy. Since 2015, AAPF has hosted its annual #SayHerName Mothers Weekend in New York City, bringing together a group of mothers who have lost their daughters to police violence. The weekends served as a chance to learn more about the specific needs of the family members of Black women who are victims of racist state violence and provide a space where these mothers can begin to construct a community of support and a network for activism. Including Black women and girls in police violence and gender violence discourses sends the powerful message that indeed all Black lives matter. If our collective outrage around cases of police violence is meant to serve as a warning to the state that its agents cannot kill without consequence, our silence around the cases of Black women and girls sends the message that certain deaths do not merit repercussions. Please join us in our efforts to advance a gender-inclusive narrative in the movement for Black lives.

Note 88: found hanging in her jail cell three days after  being arrested following a confrontational traffic stop. 

Note 89: The Times's visual investigation team built a 3-D model of the scene and pieced together critical sequences of events to show how poor planning and shoddy police work led to a fatal outcome. The Time's magazine used crime scene photos to create a precise model of Taylor's apartment. They forensically mapped out and retraced the first bullet, fired by Taylor's boyfriend, and the 32 bullets that police shot in return -- through windows, walls and ceilings. Using interviews officers gave to investigators, The Magazine's team charted their movements as they carried out the raid. And they analyzed hours of 911 calls, grand jury proceedings and footage by the SWAT team that arrived after the shooting. Seven officers began the raid at 12:40 a.m, they didn't conduct a knock-and-announce raid. Inside, Taylor wakes up. Whether the police announce themselves clearly enough is a critical issue

in this story that we'll return to later on. Not knowing who's at the door this late, Walker grabs his licensed handgun. They rush to get dressed and walk toward the door. The bullets that go into the living area pass over Taylor's sofa and kitchen table and smash her clock. Three penetrate the wall and enter her neighbor's apartment. Those bullets also smash the kitchen table, hit a wall and shatter the patio doors at the rear. A pregnant woman, her son and partner were home. Hankison has been charged with wantonly endangering their lives. In total, the police fired 32 bullets, penetrating almost every room in Taylor's apartment. In 911 calls immediately after the shooting, Taylor's neighbors don't know police are carrying out a raid. And in statements police took afterwards, none of Taylor's neighbors heard the officers announce. This apartment's patio door was open. Two teenagers in this apartment heard a commotion but didn't hear the police announce through their open window, their mom said. And the family who lived directly above Taylor also heard nothing.

Note 90 RAY: While the founders of Black Lives Matter intended the motto to encompass all Black people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, a study we conducted with a team of researchers at the University of Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities found a

gender discrepancy in how the message of Black Lives Matter played out when it became a hashtag on Twitter. We analyzed a collection of 31 million tweets generated between August 2014 and August 2015 on Ferguson after the killing of 17-year-old Missouri resident Michael Brown by Darren Wilson, an officer for the Ferguson Police Department at the time. Our findings indicate that opponents to police violence used hashtags for multiple reasons, one of which was to name Black people killed by police. However, of the nearly 300 phrases

used as hashtags we collected, not even one named a Black woman or girl. Though

Black women are 13% of the women population in the United States, they represent 20% of women killed by police and nearly 30% who are killed while unarmed. About 36% of women killed by police since 2015 were killed in their homes, like Taylor. It is a troubling pattern of Black women's killings being justified as « caught in crossfire.» Still, we have to wonder how a $12 million settlement leads to justifiable police killing with none of the officers being held accountable for that killing. Instead, taxpayers' money, including Taylor's own, was used to pay her family for her death. In a subsequent study conducted in 2016, we found that beyond the differences in public outcry for Black women, news outlets also mentioned male victims of police brutality more often than female victims of police brutality.  We analyzed over 460,000 tweets generated between January 2016 and October 2016 and explicitly included the phrase #SayHerName. While journalists or news organizations retweeted nearly 40% of user accounts that mentioned Ferguson, only 18% of the retweeted users that tweeted about #SayHerName fell into that category. Our results show how news outlets contribute to police violence against Black women receiving less attention.

Note 91 KELLY: Crenshaw told NPR. « So Say Her Name is trying to raise awareness by insisting that we say their names because if we can say their names we can know more about their stories. What we want to do is say: That's a risk factor, but also when a Black woman is driving a car and a police officer doesn't like her response and so he threatens to taser her and

that escalates into that person being dead. These are also moments of anti-Black police violence, but they happen in different spaces than we imagine, they happen to different bodies than we can see, and so we want to insert awareness of these other moments so that the movement and the reforms can actually be more inclusive and we hope more productive.

Note 92 FAYARD: « Counterintuitively, thinking about a single person activates our humanity, compassion, and perspective-taking and makes us value lives in a way that thinking about a large number of people at once does not. This is explained by two related phenomena psychologists call the identifiable victim effect and the singularity effect. Numerous studies have indicated, under a variety of conditions, that learning about single individuals' stories moves us more than thinking about what researchers call statistical victims, or the large number of people affected by a situation. Thinking about single, identifiable victims may cause us to donate more money to help them and feel more distress and sympathy toward them. A likely reason for this difference is that thinking about identifiable versus statistical victims activates different thought processes. Identifiable victims prompt emotional responses, which then promote greater action on that person's behalf , whereas thinking about statistical victims initiates a more deliberate mode of thought, which may allow us to more easily rationalize not giving or not caring.

Note 98 Cooper: But when Black women and girls like Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tanisha Anderson, Atatiana Jefferson and Charleena Lyles are killed, it is often out of the public eye. And in a world where the pains and traumas that Black women and girls experience as a consequence of both racism and sexism remain structurally invisible and impermeable to broad empathy, these killings recede from the foreground quietly. Femininity is a weapon only if you're white. Black women have no such protections. Breonna Taylor's boyfriend tried to take care of his partner but could not. We keep missing the intersection of race and gender when it comes to Black women. 

Note 99: Coles Previous research has found that Blackness is associated with masculinity, leading to errors when categorizing Black women's gender or recognizing Black women's faces. Other studies have found that Black women and girls are more associated with threat and danger than are White women and girls. Feminist movements that focus only on issues that predominantly affect White women without addressing racialized sexism ignore the needs of Black women, who face higher rates of police abuses, including sexual violence, Coles said. Previous research also has found that Black women experience much higher rates of domestic and sexual abuse from partners than White women, and Black women are less likely to report this violence than White women.

Note 100: the specific hatred, dislike, distrust, and prejudice directed toward Black women. Misogynoir is rampant in ways that may not even be realized. The hashtag #SayHerName was created in 2014 to highlight misogynoir and how stories of Black women and girls often go overlooked, unnoticed and untold. These experiences range from police violence to sexual

assault and often go unreported. Two very apparent examples of misogynoir in the public sphere can be found in the stories of musician R.Kelly's victims and most recently, the events that transpired with rapper Megan Thee Stallion. Throughout R.Kelly's 30-year career, a number of women and girls, mostly Black and underaged, have made claims that R.Kelly has sexually abused them. Despite the growing number of accusations that have been made, it wasn't until recently when the 2019 documentary Surviving R.Kelly came out that these stories were given credence. Black women and girls who share experiences of abuse, trauma,

and assault are largely shunned, criticized and ignored. These experiences are questioned, scrutinized and dissected more than any other group. Many people are still unaware of misogynoir and how it manifests to collectively harm Black women. The first step to dismantling and disrupting misogynoir is awareness. Anti-racism education should explore misogynoir to increase awareness and understanding. When Black women share an experience, rather than questioning the experience or engaging in racial gaslighting and tone policing, it's imperative to simply listen. Also important is avoiding behaviors such as white

centering and defensiveness during these conversations. The voices of Black women are often muffled, stifled and silenced. Ask yourself what you are currently doing to amplify the voices of Black women. Lastly, consider how you are using your privilege, access and opportunity to uproot misogynoir any time it rears its ugly head.

Note 101 Wingfield: Research indicates that Black women are more ambitious and more likely to say that they want to advance in their companies than their white women counterparts, but are less likely to find mentors who will aid their climb up the corporate ladder. As sociologist Tsedale Melaku points out, sometimes this is a function of white executives' unfamiliarity and discomfort with Black women. As one attorney in Melaku's study notes, executives who rarely, if ever, have Black people in their personal or professional circles may be uncertain or uncomfortable interacting with them as peers. Other times, this lack of mentoring is a consequence of intentional exclusion when leaders make it a point not to include Black women in teams, as mentees, or on important projects. But either way, these patterns thwart Black women's mobility in organizations and their ability to realize ambitions and secure leadership roles. And Black women are left to struggle harder to access and advance in these professions, with occupational underrepresentation and wage disparities to show for it. Working in a profession dominated by men, Black women doctors are very attuned to the ways that sexism impacts their lives.

Note 102 Chapagain: African American women have been the victims of racist and sexist oppression for a long time.  Being black in color of skin, female in gender and economically underprivileged in male dominated society, African American women have been carrying triple consciousness. Despite this triple oppression, they have been resisting the repressions of different kinds and searching for their identity. Oppressed from black men and white men and women, African American women are in a persistent struggle to render meaningful participation and contribution in their society. Black men in America also do have the pungent experience of racism for being black and a former slave of whites. However, being dependent on black males, a black woman suffers more than her male partner because her man remains helpless even to question a white man's misbehavior upon his woman. Since, black men have been victims of racism; black women have been victims of racism, sexism and classicism. 

Note 103 The Independent: Black women make up just 10 percent of the population and account for 33 percent of all women killed by the police. They are « the only race-gender group to have a majority of its members killed while unarmed,» according to a study by the Fatal Interactions with Police (FIPS) research project, and cited by Professor Crenshaw. The same study found that 57 per cent of black women were unarmed when they were killed.

Note 104 Ritchie: A report I co-authored, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, was released on the eve of and in support of the first National Day of Action to End State Violence Against Black Women and Girls called for by Black Youth Project 100, Black Lives Matter, and Ferguson Action. Over thirty communities across the country responded to this call with vigils, direct actions, and protests. In July of 2015, a number of communities across the country similarly mounted light actions in the wake of Sandra Bland's death in police custody. 

Note 105: Sanchez:  In June, the Louisville Metro Council unanimously passed an ordinance called « Breonna's Law,»  banning no-knock search warrants. The ordinance regulates how search warrants are carried out and mandates the use of body cameras during searches. All Louisville Metro Police Department officers are to be equipped with an operating body camera while carrying out a search. The cameras have to be activated no later than five minutes prior to all searches and remain on for five minutes after. All recorded data also has to be retained for five years following an executing action, according to the ordinance. 

Note 106 Lockhart: At the beginning of 2020, a handful of cities and just two states, Oregon and Florida, had banned or otherwise restricted no-knock warrants.

Note 108 Adia: « women make 79 cents for every dollar men earn. But Black women earn only 64 cents on the dollar. Women of color are usually underrepresented in professional, high status jobs in law, medicine, academia, and business. When they do make it to these rarified roles but are the only ones in an organizational setting, they are more likely to doubt the company's commitment to inclusion and equity and thus are more likely to want to pursue opportunities elsewhere.

Note 110: Taylor Race, gender and class are at the center of the way we understand the structural, political and iconography of resistance. We live in a patriarchal society, which means men's, including Black men's, experiences and stories are privileged. It is by design we know about police killings of George Floyd, Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice, but know very little about the deaths of Alberta

Spruill, Shantel Davis, Shelly Frey, Kayla Moore, Kyam Livingston, Miriam Carey and Eleanor Bumpurs, who all were killed by police or died in their custody. The erasure of Black women's experiences is a resounding denial of humanity. Beyond the fact that this country was literally built on the backs of Black women, whiteness needs Black women to be a gender and racial wedge to sustain the power imbalance. Reckoning with how Black women are exposed and vulnerable in ways Black men could never be is a step toward upending implicit and explicit bias, discrimination, structural and institutional racism that prevents this country from being great. To redress how a woman can be roused out of her bed by strangers at her door who refuse to answer her calls to identify themselves, we have to understand that Black women have never in this country's history been afforded safety and security, even when they were innocent and resting in their own homes. 

Note 111: Banks: Black women's main jobs historically have been in low-wage agriculture and domestic service.1 Even after migration to the north during the 20th century, most employers would only hire black women in domestic service work.2 Revealingly, although whites have devalued black women as mothers to their own children, black women have been the most likely of all women to be employed in the low-wage women's jobs that involve cooking, cleaning, and caregiving even though this work is associated with mothering more broadly. Although black women have a longer history of sustained employment compared with other women, in 2017, the median annual earnings for full-time year-round black women workers was just over $36,000--an amount 21 percent lower than that of white women, reflecting black women's disproportionate employment in low-wage service and minimum and sub-minimum wage jobs. Black families, however, are more reliant on women's incomes than other families are since 80 percent of black mothers are breadwinners in their families. Despite black women's importance as breadwinners, the state has compounded the lack of protections afforded black mothers by failing to protect

black women as workers.6 In fact, state policies have often left black women vulnerable to workplace exploitation by excluding them from various worker protections. New Deal minimum wage, overtime pay, and collective bargaining legislation excluded the main sectors where black women worked--domestic service and farming. Although there have been inclusions since then, these sectors still lack full access to worker protections. The legacy of black women's employment in industries that lack worker protections has continued today since black women are concentrated in low-paying, inflexible service occupations that lack employer-provided retirement plans, health insurance, paid sick and maternity leave, and paid vacations. Over a third (36 percent) of black women workers lack paid sick leave.

Note 112: BlackBurnMore than 40% of Black women will experience domestic violence in their lifetime, according to the Institute of Women's Policy Research's Status of Black Women in the United States. In comparison, 31.5% of all women will experience domestic violence. A report from the National Center for Victims of Crime found that 53.8% of Black women had experienced psychological abuse, while 41.2% of Black women had experienced physical abuse. More disturbingly, Black women are 2.5 times more likely to be murdered by men than white women.  In the overwhelming majority of these cases -- 92% -- the person who killed them knew their victim.  56% of these homicides were committed by a current or former intimate partner.  Nearly all --92% -- of these killings were intra-racial, which means that they were committed by a Black man against a Black woman. What, then, can be done about the epidemic of violence facing Black women? The first and perhaps most important thing that we can all do is address the root causes of domestic violence, such as the objectification and degradation of women in media, rape culture, harmful gender norms, the pay gap, and other forms of inequality. The underlying causes of domestic violence are the same for all women -- and are often more pronounced for Black women. By taking on these issues directly, we can reduce the incidence of domestic violence for all women -- and in particular, Black women who are even more impacted by these factors. We can also work to combat racism.  We know that one of the main reasons that Black women do not report or seek help for domestic violence is racism. By championing anti-racist policies and challenging racism in our personal lives, we can dismantle one of the major hurdles to reducing the incidence of domestic violence in the Black community.  At the same time, we should focus on intersectionality -- which means acknowledging the way our different identities intersect. For example, a Black woman will experience domestic violence differently because they face both racism and sexism.  A woman with a disability may face an additional challenge in getting access to services. By being mindful of these realities, we can better understand and advocate for equality.