Violence Against Women of Color
Tags: Sandra Bland, Violence, Police Brutality, Crenshaw, BlackLivesMatter

Breaking The Silence about Police Brutality Against Women of Color

Mapping the Margins by Kimberle Crenshaw introduces the idea of Intersectionality. Intersectionality has quite a complex meaning so I am going to take some time to take it apart and explain it. Intersectionality refers to the idea that every person is made up of various different components such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Each of these different parts create an overlapping system that makes up a person and neither one of the components can exist without the other. For example, a white woman in the United States may experience some type of inequality or unfairness due to her gender, but she wouldn’t experience any racial injustice because she is white. At the same time, a woman of color in the United States not only deals with injustices because of her gender, but she also deals with discrimination because she is of color. For the woman of color, her race and gender overlap to create her identify. She can’t be seen as just a woman or just a person of color because she experiences the world in terms of both of those components. Crenshaw seeks to look at how different dimensions of identity intersect. She points out that institutions at all levels fail to serve people in regard to intersectionality because they only focus of one of the components mentioned at a time. To illustrate her argument, she gives many examples in her article, but I will focus on one example. Crenshaw points to the flaws in the Immigration and Nationality Act passed by Congress which was meant to help immigrants who were married to American citizens and were being abused by their spouse. Because many of these individuals were only able to get to the United States by marrying an American citizen, they feared being deported if they reported the abuse, so they stayed silent. In an attempt to fix this issue, the Immigration and Nationality Act allowed the immigrants to stay in the country without their spouse. The catch was that they had to provide some sort of evidence to prove that their spouse was abusing them. Crenshaw states that this solution was not enough because most of the immigrants did not have enough recourses to support themselves and stay in the U.S independently and many of the immigrants are unable to speak English so they may not even know about this Act. So, in order to benefit from this Act, the immigrant would have to be English speaking and somewhat wealthy to be able to provide proof of abuse and support themselves without the help of their spouse. This leaves out the abused immigrants who are unable to speak English and have no money other than what is being provided by their spouse. Therefore, intersectionality is ignored in this situation and fails to serve everyone.

Now, I am going to shift my focus to look at police brutality thorough an intersectional lens. In 2017, people of color had three times higher chance of being killed by the police than white people. Although black men are killed by the police at a higher rate than women, much of police violence against women of color stays hidden. Andrea Ritchie, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color points out that we can’t only focus on fatal shooting and excessive force. We must also address things like police sexual violence. She says that we don’t know exactly how many women are killed and brutalized by the police each year because no one collects or reports that kind of information, and police departments are not required to report this. We can only get glimpses of these types of brutally when cases such as Sandra Bland’s surface the web. She says, “just because the number of black women incarcerated were smaller than the number of black men, that didn’t mean their experiences didn’t have something to teach us about larger patterns of racial injustice and white supremacy in America.”

Just to give you an idea of police brutality towards black women, I am going to briefly focus on Sandra Bland’s story. In 2015, her story surfaced the web and caused quite an uproar. Bland was a black woman who was pulled over by a white police office for not using her turn signal. After being pulled over, her discussion with the police officer got heated because the officer asked her to put out her cigarette and she refused. The officer, Brian Encinia, had his dashcam on. In the dashcam, Encinia draws his taser and yells, “I will light you up! Get out! Now!” Bland then exited her vehicle. The two moved out of the video frame, but a bystander continued to video tape the rest of the incident. Encinia slammed her head into the ground, at this point Bland screamed out that the she could no longer hear anything because of the impact, then he continued to pin her to the ground by holding her arms behind her back and using his knees to keep her on the ground. Bland was heard yelling and crying. Bland was charged for assaulting a public servant and was placed in Waller County Jail. Three days after Bland’s arrest, she was found hanging in her cell. It was said that Bland had committed suicide with a trash bag, but many people thought differently. A few months before her death, Bland had created a video series called “Sandy Speaks” in which she spoke about different matters such as the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality. None of her family and friends believe that she could have committed suicide because she was a bright young woman who was excited to start a new job soon and had so much to live for. In one of her videos, Bland says, “there has been something really heavy on my mind, a seed that I feel like God has truly planted in my life, work that He has set for me to do, a message that He has for me to get out…” and then she goes on to speak about unfair treatment by the police towards black people. She finishes with, “if we want a change, if we really want a change, we can truly make it happen!” it was, still is, difficult for people to believe that someone with this much purpose would end her own life. After her story came out, the conversations about police brutality towards black women began to surface once again. I focused on her story because I believe that her mistreatment was solely based on the fact that she was a black woman. Can you imagine this same situation if Sandra Bland was white?

Sandra Bland is just one example of why intersectionality is important. We cannot say that all women have similar experiences when dealing with the police because a woman of color will have a much different experience with the police than a white woman. It is important to look at different dimensions of each person’s identity and understand that each component goes hand in hand and effects an individual’s way of experiencing the world.