Intersectional Understandings of Brutality: State Violence and Sexual Assault
“We must all stand against both the continual, systematic, and structural racial inequities that normalize daily violence as well as against extreme acts of racial terror.”
— Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
When I was about 15 years old, my neighborhood threw their annual summer block party where vendors, community organizers, and residents alike would congregate to mingle, provide resources, and promote their respective businesses. This year, like most years, the small park was densely populated with familiar faces from the neighborhood and each of my family members took a role in working the event. This time, I was supposed to help my younger sister face paint the little kids.
At the block party, police from the area would survey the park regularly, talk to residents, and allow children to see the inside of their patrol cars. As I leisurely said my greetings and viewed each booth on the way to mine, my walk was cut short when I recognized someone was trying to get my attention. I heard a low “hey” and turned to find a police officer, whom I have seen before when I danced with his son at our after-school program. When I made eye contact and greeted him, he muffled something along the lines of “Is this the model show?” as he eyed me up and down.
In response, I uttered a tightlipped “thank you” recognizing the precarity of the situation, despite what desire I had to scoff at this adult man. My shorts suddenly felt too short, and my t-shirt quickly felt too tight. I briefly gestured towards the items I was holding in my hands and retreated to my booth where I would proceed to look for my mother to tell her about my discomfort.
In that moment, my mind only considered the “what-ifs.” What if my mother was not so close by? What if there were fewer people around? What if I were to be arrested by him, alone in a police car?
If this officer, in uniform, was willing to come onto me, an obvious child and friend of his son, so openly in broad daylight, I wondered what the limits of his power would be in private where it would be my word against his.
Black women, existing at the cross-section of Blackness and womanhood (among other identities), are vulnerable to the whims of the state from both the standpoint of racialized physical abuse and a patriarchal sexual violence that work in tandem to produce a unique, intersectional experience with the carceral system and policing institution. As Kimberlé Crenshaw contends in her piece “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989), “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism.”[1] In other words, it is not just the compounded threat of death and sexual violence, but race and sex behave as modifiers to one another, as they are inextricably intertwined. The formation of racial others, Black others, modified gender expectations to produce stereotypes that created an inherited, pornotroping legacy for Black women. In other words, because Black women were routinely characterized as having no virtue to protect and reduced to assumptions of sexual deviance, they were at a significant disadvantage from a legal standpoint.[2]
Throughout early American history, Black women have routinely been labeled sexually available as our bodies were often considered as part of the market and an extension of our expected labor contributions. In the Antebellum (and post-Emancipation), Black women were treated as economic investments that were “equally bound up in their reproductive bodies, and the products of their sexual labor.”[3] In other words, Black women’s bodies were perceived as commodities from which Southern white capitalists could reap economic benefits (e.g. wet-nursing and ‘breeding’). As it relates to our interactions with the state, the policing institution in America, since its inception, has been charged with the duty of protecting capitalist’s interests (i.e., returning enslaved people to their masters[4]) and survives through maintaining a socio-economic underclass of people. Therefore, even targeted sexual violence towards Black women advances the interests of the state, not only by bolstering white supremacy, but also by reasserting white patriarchal ideas of social dominance.
In the contemporary, police officers contribute to existing notions of consent and rape through their exertions of power. Simply put, as the law is enforced by police officers, they are also agents that contribute to a social rule of law inclusive of sexual assault. Moreover, with no other means to address the sexual brutality that they have experienced, Black women are forced to be silent for the sake of their own survival and out of fear of retaliation. However, notwithstanding the ever-looming threat of racial violence that could force them into sexually vulnerable positions, Black women continuously fight to achieve sovereignty over their bodies.
In San Antonio, Texas, a young Black woman named Natalie Simms was stopped and frisked by officers who assumed she had contraband. As the officer proceeded to pat down the woman, she was directed to spread her legs on the side of the street. After Simms complied with the officer’s demand, Officer Mara Wilson then shined a flashlight into Simms’s underwear, reached in, and pulled out her tampon.[5] When no drugs were found on her person, the officers then sent Simms on her way as if nothing had occurred.
Although the officer was Black and a woman, she still became a perpetrator of a sexual state-sponsored violence that violated a Black woman’s body on a whim. Only months later, after a lawsuit, did Simms receive some financial retribution for her trauma and even still, Officer Wilson has not experienced any more disciplinary action beyond retiring with glowing reviews from her superiors.
While my experience may not have been traumatic nor notable on its own, it alludes to a greater system of injustice built into the policing and prison institution. In the context of the 2020 reinvigoration of the Black Lives Matter movement, and despite the visibility of Black pain being at an all-time high, Black women’s, girls’, trans, and gender non-conforming individuals’, suffering and inter-generational traumas are often relegated to the sidelines of the movement. Despite the fact that Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo Movement were both originally founded by Black women, both movements have been co-opted to the extent that Black women maintain low visibility in both. Thus, designating us as the unheard laborers of progress; existing in a liminal space of hyper-visibility and invisibility.[6]
Sources:
Maschke, Karen. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” In Feminist Legal Theories, 35–64. Routledge, 1997. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315051536-7.
“Arrest data from Savannah, Georgia, reveal that for years the police pursued only black, and not white, men accused of rape or seduction, reinforcing the myth of the black male rapist and enabling white men to escape punishment for interracial or intraracial rape. A black man on trial for rape had once benefited if his accuser had a questionable reputation for chastity” (Freedman, 92). Under these circumstances, Black women’s chastity was always called into question. “The Racialization of Rape and Lynching.” Harvard University Press, 2013, pp. 89–103. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wpm5m.9. Accessed 20 Oct. 2020.
Berry, Daina Ramey, and Leslie M. Harris, eds. Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas. ATHENS: University of Georgia Press, 2018. Accessed November 2, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt22nmc8r. (117).
Spruill, Larry H. "Slave Patrols, “Packs of Negro Dogs” and Policing Black Communities." Phylon (1960-) 53, no. 1 (2016): 42-66. Accessed November 2, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/phylon1960.53.1.42.
Isabella Kwai, “Woman Who Said Officer Removed Her Tampon Will Receive $205,000,” October 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/us/tampon-san-antonio.html?searchResultPosition=1.
In compliance with the Honor Code, I acknowledge that I visited the Writing Workshop for help in writing this paper." In compliance with the Honor Code, I acknowledge that I visited the Writing Workshop for help in writing this paper."