American society is
rallying around black male teens.
On August 9, 18-year-old
Mike Brown was shot six times by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer. The young
man was unarmed, and an autopsy performed found that the fatal bullet struck
him in the top of his head.
The country has held
protests almost every day and night since Brown was slain. Rallying around the
teen and his family, protestors wore T-shirts like “Don’t Shoot Me” and sent
selfies of themselves with their hands up in the air as if surrendering. Their
cry for Brown’s justice, Trayvon Martin’s justice, Oscar Grant’s and many
others, has been the same “No justice, No Peace.”
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Mike Brown was 18-years-old when he was shot
and killed in Ferguson, Missouri
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The killing of black men
in America by police officers is an ill, cyclical atrocity. From slavery,
through reconstruction, to the Civil Rights movement, those killings, were
justified or excused in some way.
In 1955, when black teen
Emmett Till, 14, was murdered for whistling at a white woman, the defendants
were easily found not guilty by an all-white, all male jury. After the two men
were acquitted, they comfortably admitted to Till’s murder in Look magazine.
Brown has been trot out
in the media as ‘guilty until proven innocent’ when revelations that he
allegedly robbed a convenience store were brought to light by the Ferguson
police department. A rotten, irrelevant calamity that his loving parents could
not protect him from.
But tragically as
mothers and fathers fight more and more to keep their sons safe in what should
be a post-Emmett Till era, there is a bittersweet lag in that goal.
Their daughters.
On July 29, Kimberlé
Williams Crenshaw, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, pointing out that young women of color face
some of the same odds as black men, but they are often overlooked.
“In February, when Mr. Obama announced
the [My Brother’s Keeper] initiative — which is principally financed by
philanthropic foundations, and did not require federal appropriations — he
noted that boys who grew up without a father were more likely to be poor. More
likely than whom? Certainly not their sisters, who are growing up in the same
households, attending the same underfunded schools and living in the same
neighborhoods.
The question “compared with whom?” often focuses on racial
disparities among boys and men while overlooking similar disparities among
girls and women. Yet, like their male counterparts, black and Hispanic girls
are at or near the bottom level of reading and math scores.
Black girls have the highest levels of school suspension of any girls. They
also face gender-specific risks: They are more likely than other girls to be
victims of domestic
violence and sex
trafficking, more likely to be involved in the child
welfare and juvenile justice systems, and more likely to die
violently. The disparities among girls of different races
are sometimes even greater than among boys.”
Young black women might
not be facing cops’ fear factors – that police shoot black men first out of
fear – like black men, but tragic killings happen.
Many months after
Trayvon Martin’s death, but just 8 months before Brown’s, there was Renisha
McBride.
McBride, 19, was and
shot and killed in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, when she went to a stranger’s
home for help after she was seriously injured in a car accident and could not
use her cell phone to call for help. Although McBride was unarmed, her killer,
Theodore Wafer, claimed self-defense.
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| Renisha McBride |
In Salon, author Roxane Gray wrote that "Trayvon Martin was murdered while
walking home from a convenience store" while "Renisha McBride
thought, like any reasonable person, that she could ask a stranger for
help." Both of their deaths, she argued, are evidence that the "environment in the United States is
toxic for black people."
According to the Centers for Disease Control, the statistics that Williams Crenshaw pointed
to in her article, 673 black girls 10-24 were killed with a firearm between
2008-2010 is the highest among all other ethnicities. Black men ages 15-19 were
eight times as likely as White males of the same age and two-and-a-half times
as likely as their Hispanic peers to be killed in a gun homicide in 2009, ChildDefense.org says.
By implementing My
Brother’s Keeper, Williams Crenshaw suggests that the idea is let’s take care
of our young boys first and then the fixing will somehow trickle down or bubble
up.
“Proponents of My Brother’s Keeper — and similar programs, like
the Young
Men’s Initiative, begun by Michael R. Bloomberg in 2011 when he
was mayor of New York — point incessantly to mass incarceration to explain
their focus on men. Is their point that females of color must pull even with
males in a race to the bottom before they deserve interventions on their
behalf?”
And this Darwinist
idealism is not hallucinated by Williams Crenshaw.
Barbara Smith, an
African-American activist, who taught the first class on black women’s
literature at Emerson College in 1973, talked about the sexism that she experienced during the Black Power
Movement as it related to black nationalism in the late 1960s, winding up in
the late 1970s.
“A part of the black
nationalist perspective and analysis was that black men were kings and black
women were supposed to be queens, and our major role was to walk three or seven
steps behind our men and have babies for the nation.
“Black studies and black
literature was about black male experiences, and women’s studies, which was
just beginning, at the same time was very much about white women’s experiences,”
Smith said. We [black women] were just left out of the curriculum.”
In 1965, during the peak
of the Civil Rights Movement, black women were visible but unsung.
From Schmoop.com, listed
as a digital publishing company that provides credible academic resources
written by educators and experts from America's top universities, including
Stanford, Harvard, and UC Berkeley, said in an analysis called “Civil Rights Movement: ‘Black Power’ Era” that:
“Despite the fact that women spearheaded the Birmingham
Bus Boycott, galvanized the "freedom rides" and sit-in
demonstrations, and served as important political
representatives, men controlled the organizations, often disregarding the
weight of these contributions. For instance, in 1963, at the height of the
movement, tens of thousands of women, including activists and organizers such
as Jo
Ann Robinson, Ella
Baker, and Fannie
Lou Hamer, joined the March on Washington, yet the
all-male march committee neglected
to invite any woman to make a speech before the crowd.”
“There’s a Chinese
saying, ’Women hold up half the world,”’ said Julian Bond, a leader of the
Civil Rights Movement, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to NBC. “In the case of the civil rights movement it’s probably
three-quarters of the world.”
So what, per se, should
be the initiative for young women of color?
While in Ferguson, St.
Louis rapper Nelly indirectly pointed out that incarceration is a plague that
has disproportionately infected young black men.
“We've got to understand
that we have options and stop choosing the reaction option ‘cause at the end of
the day we gonna pay - our brothers are gonna be the ones in jail," he
told a crowd via the Independent during a Mike Brown rally.
It’s an issue that my
Brother’s Keeper has also pledged as an important call to action; one other
artists feel connected to.
Jay-z, attended a Trayvon Martin rally in New York, and during a performance with
Justin Timberlake, he dedicated his “Forever Young” performance to Martin.
And while several
artists like Nelly and Jay-z understand how crucial it is that young black boys
and men of color are not dehumanized, these are the exact men who young black
women need as ralliers in a different sense.
In Nelly’s music video “Tip Drill” he proceeds to slide a credit card down a
woman’s backside; Jay-z’s (and other artists’) comfort level with saying ‘bitches and/or hoes” isn’t challenged as destructive to women (by
male rap artists). Neither is the pervasiveness of pornifying black women as
commonly as buying a magazine on the street and registering it as appropriate “speech.” And
there are far to many more explicit examples.
The pornification,
dehumanization of black women in music videos, lyrics, books and elsewhere is so trite that it runs the risk of fostering
an indecisiveness in young women; wrongly pointing out their value to men, and
in turn, how society should value them.
Dorian
Miller Rosenberg, of Elite Daily
writes, “Self-aware misogyny is the best kind.
Every
day, a child is born to a woman who will someday grow up to think, talk and rap
just like this. Judgment is corny,
but examining the cultural forces which shape our perceptions and actions is
essential.”
The signs held up in
protest during the Civil Rights marches and demonstrations, “I Am a Man” sum up what was called for, perfectly. These
signs were also held by some of the protestors in
Ferguson, explaining that the
heart of the matter is that all people deserve to be respected and viewed as
human beings.
Admittedly, these
salacious, unredemptive images and lyrics about women are not murderous, but
they too call for signs that read “I Am a Woman.” The question is will
America’s conscious hold them up.
Emmett Till will not be
forgotten, neither will Mike Brown or Trayvon Martin, but lest we forget our
black girls.
