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Picture Source: Photographer unknown; used by http://madamenoire.com/50822/white-women-do-it-too-8-things-black-women-cant-get-away-with-doing/; article written by L. Nicole Williams (April 16, 2011 )

The picture I chose, is one that I had seen in Madam Noire magazine a while ago in 2011. I’ve always thought this image was powerful, and had its own meaning to for the people of the world to understand. This picture was attached with an article named, “White Women Do It, Too: 8 Things Black Women Can’t Get Away With”. [Article written by L. Nicole Williams (April 16, 2011)] It was an article that described “stereotypical” things that white women can do with very little reticule, and black women cannot do. Some of the stereotypes discussed were “black girl bitch face”, “Black women being loud”, and many others; it showed how white women and black women are set to different standards. A white woman is put to a higher standard than a black woman. You never hear the stereotypes of a white woman speaking loudly, or having her “bitch face on”. Society today, as in older times, have separated the image and characters of these women.

In At the Dark End of the Street, I saw this question and it jumped out at me due to my topic of my research paper. The question was “Why isn’t Negro womanhood as important as white womanhood?” (pg. 24). Even in modern times, we still face issues of inequality. For the research paper, I chose the subject around the portrayal of black women in sports through media. It’s hard growing as a young female athlete trying to find someone on television who looks just like me. Don’t get me wrong they were there, but do you hear about them often. Do you even know what channels to find them? Many Black female athletes and other women of the world contribute so much to the world, but we get very little recognition on how powerful the contribution was to the world. In the book it talks upon unfair injustices (rapes/even political injustices). As women we need to come together and help each other grow.

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print.

@afsgsw5110

aisforaudre-blog

This is so real -- it’s definitely worth exploring the ways in which white women can experience a degree of freedom and safety that Black women cannot, and often times, perhaps as we’ve seen historically through the readings in a lot of ways, at the expense of Black women’s ‘womanhood.’

femmemystake-blog

Who cries when black women die? I’m not asking that as some type of rhetorical, poetic question, meant to move you toward ferocious finger snaps. I want to know. Who cries when black women die? Further, who cries when black women are killed? Mary Spears was killed. The man who killed her did so ...

In the article above, Mychal Smith speaks of the lack of attention the murders and sexual assaults of black women receive. The article is largely calling out black men who engage in street harassment.

Although it is an important issue, the article fails to take into account racial sexual violence that black women encounter throughout their lifetimes. In The Dark End of the Street, Danielle McGuire explores the history of such violence, and the ways in which black women pushed back against it. In Jim Crow times, public transportation was a dangerous place for black people. Black women not only experienced physical racial violence, but sexual violence as well. Since bus drivers were in charge of upholding segregation, they were granted police powers, leading to rampant abuse. Black women would experience sexual and physical violence at the hands of police and the drivers themselves, all white men.

Although this type of violence didn’t take place on the street per se, it was still a public place. Although the author does not touch on white men and street harassment, perhaps the history of racial violence still plays a role in the current climate. One could hypothesize that the 21st century black woman still faces greater threats of violence from the white man. However, the way in which this violence is carried out might look different than black male street harassers.

McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print.

Smith, Mychal Denzel. “Feministing.” Feministing. N.p., 2015. Web. 16 Feb. 2016.

eu6211-blog

Of course the history of racial violence still plays a role in today’s climate! Just take a look at Daniel Holtzclaw.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/21/us/oklahoma-city-officer-daniel-holtzclaw-rape-sentencing/

aisforaudre-blog

I think this is a really interesting consideration -- how the legacy of white sexual violence against Black women plays out contemporarily in the intra-racial instances of street harassment Black women have with Black men. There’s an interesting interrelatedness, I feel, between the characterizations of Black women as lascivious and always sexually available and indeed un-rapeable and without the bodily autonomy afforded to white women (to some degree), and the ways in which Black men can or choose to engage in patriarchy and misogyny. It’s definitely a both and situation, and like most things -- the violence of white supremacist patriarchy and misogyny intimately structures how even Black people can relate to each other.

Charlene Carruthers has spent her adult life fighting for equality. As the national director for Black Youth Project 100 and a board member for black reproductive justice organization SisterSong, she helps lead a collective of black millennial activists who are dedicated to creating change in

Reading At the Dark End of the Street, particularly throughout chapter three; “Walking with Pride and Unity,” I thought about this article from refinery29, a website whose mission is to be a media-brand for “smart, creative and stylish women everywhere,” where Charlene Carruthers, National Director of the activist organization Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), was interviewed about the importance of not telling ‘incomplete stories.’ Here, she is quoted talking about the importance of embracing the Black feminist tradition of testimony and intersectionality saying, “All of our identities and experiences reflect the kind of systemic oppressions that impact our lives. And so it's important. Black people are whole people; we don't come to this work in pieces, and if we're going to have any type of solution that is actually meaningful, we have to include all of who we are.” She goes on to say that this work, of organizing, of Black liberation then is about a “commitment to seeing people as their full selves and the systems of oppression that impact them.”

Placing this interview within the history of organizing for Black liberation laid out in At the Dark End of the Street, it becomes especially important that someone like Charlene Carruthers, a queer Black woman from the South Side of Chicago, is telling this story and doing this work. I’m called to think about how when there was a refusal to tell complete stories -- when the Black feminist tradition of honest testimony was sidelined by the politics of respectability and patriarchy, people like Rosa Parks, who through reading I have learned was a fierce freedom fighter, become a “secondary figure” (107), relegated to a “symbol of virtuous Black womanhood ... worthy of protection” (88) who was noted for her “quiet dignity, prim demeanor, and middle class propriety” (87) and not for the impossibly skilled activist and organizer and fighter that she was.

As McGuire notes, it was not just Rosa Parks who “was written out of the story of the Montgomery bus boycott” (107), it was also the “thousands of working-class women who made Montgomery “the Walking City (107).” Here I think of the larger importance of telling complete stories as well. Carruthers notes in the article that telling incomplete stories will beget incomplete solutions, but beyond the inability to imagine greater solutions -- or perhaps through digging deeper into what it means to tell incomplete stories -- one finds that the inability to name and hold someone’s humanity is also deeply reinforcing of the violence and erasure that allows for so much of the violence Black women, Black queer people, Black disabled people, etc. face. Writing women out of history not only diminishes their fundamental contributions to our struggles for liberation, but it makes it impossible for us to hold the realization of humanity -- which is to say we maintain the compounded racial, sexual, and gender violences that beget these struggles for liberation in the first place.

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Daniel Holtzclaw must be brought to justice for his crimes against 13 Black women. This is police brutality.

Reading Under the Sting of the Lash: Gendered Violence, Terror, and Resistance in the South’s Convict Camps, it is impossible to not draw intimate correlations between the experiences of Black women examined in the article, and the recent case of Daniel Holtzclaw, convicted to 263 years in prison, after routinely raping and assaulting over a dozen poor, Black women in Oklahoma. This particular attention to poor Black women, is reminiscent of the ways in which the vagrancy statutes used in the post-emancipation period targeted poor and landless Black people as well (368).

As was examined in the article, Holtzclaw utilizied the threat of violence, the force of the state – realized as the threat of “prolonged encounters with the state (again)” as one woman was quoted saying, and the threat of (re-)incarceration to sexually assault them. It is a chilling reminder of the ways in which the state, and those charged with legitimizing it interpersonally has consistently worked primarily to confirm white male supremacy on the bodies of Black women.

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We must all say her name.

Reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, particularly chapter fourteen, I am called to reflect on the ways in which Black women and femmes are forced to deal daily, not only with the various ways in which violence manifests itself upon their bodies as Black people, but the unique and inextricable ways this violence is compounded and intensified because of their genders. In chapter fourteen, Jacobs discusses the instances in which her master would try to coerce her into sex and the consequences for when she refused. Pages 118-119 demonstrate this; from the physical abuse Linda endured via the cutting of her hair by Dr. Flint, to the instances in which he beat her. What Jacobs is trying to portray ultimately, as she says, is that “slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for woman,” which is to say that it is important to name the gendered racial violence Black women, girls, and femmes endure because not doing so, not acknowledging the threat of fatality in refusing the abuse and violence they deal with under misogynoir and patriarchy, maintains said violence and often times kills Black women, girls and femmes.

Contemporarily, this part of the book reminds me of the recent murder of Janese Talton-Jackson who, as reported by For Harriet, an only community that encourages the storytelling of Black women and femmes to give space and voice to their experiences, was murdered by a man for refusing his advances. Like Linda, in Incidents, the compounded violence of racism, misogynoir, and patriarchy work to uniquely deny women and femmes bodily autonomy, the right to say no, or the right to dictate when, where, and with whom they would like to engage romantically or sexually.

The machinations of anti-Blackness, misogyny, and patriarchy have institutionalized the presupposed availability of women and femmes, Black women and femmes especially, to men, to the extent that it becomes logical to some people to believe that women, girls and femmes who refuse men, who resist historical violence that denies them autonomy, deserve to die. This current movement for Black lives consistently seeks to address the myriad violences that Black people endure – but as Jacobs said, while slavery (which by extension can contemporarily be used here to mean the structural realities of anti-Blackness and white supremacy) is bad for all Black people – it is especially detrimental and often fatal for Black women, girls and femmes, which is why it has to be as much a part of the conversation as everything else.

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