Police Brutality In The Black Lives Matter Movement

In African American communities where the anti-racist movement is rooted and African American men are the leaders of the movement, men are the ones who become the face of what racial discrimination looks like; they are the ones who become and establish the prototypes of what subordination looks like. From this, most fail to see the specific contours of African American women’s context because they don’t fit the prototypical vision. In the Black Lives Matter Movement, issues surrounding police brutality became a focal point for the campaign. However, a majority of the cases covered and publicized by the media focuses on African American men who were beaten and killed by officers, while women were left out of the discussion almost every time.

Today there are two leading social activist groups that represent hardships for African Americans and Women, fighting for those affected by racial and gender injustice, and dismantling the ways in which societal norms have been used to oppress marginalized groups in America. With these two groups, one could presume that women of color would definitely be represented, perhaps even twice the normal amount. However, this is clearly not the case. From further reading, I realized that the issue lies in the fact that neither groups recognize issues of oppression and inequity within their own groups. Feminism advocators never discuss racism in situations involving gender inequality and Black Lives Matter groups never discuss how sexism can influence racial injustice. Then when it comes time to name allies, someone to say they’re life matters, intersectional failures often means that nobody will show up. For this problem, “Say her name” is a campaign that is trying to fix exactly this and draw attention to the various ways in which African American women are killed in many of the same circumstances as black men. A failure to interrogate the patriarchy in anti-racism and racism in feminism shapes modern politics and undermines our capacity to create a more robust and inclusive set of coalitions around social

She highlights that many men in African American communities deny gender violence in efforts to protect the image of African American men in anti-racist protests—this will discredit the claim that African American men are more prone to violence than white men. She brings up a book by Shahrazad Ali, where she claims, “Patriarchy is beneficial for the African American community” and that “Black men must sometimes resort to physical force to reestablish the authority over black women that racism has disrupted”. In response, Crenshaw says that the problem is not the violence these kinds of things portray, but more so the absence of other narratives and images that portray a fuller range of Black experience. Suppression of some of these issues in the name of antiracism imposes real costs and the priority tends to be “obliging women not to scream rather than obliging men not to hit” (Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins). Crenshaw also addresses the lack of racial equality in feminism, stating they are more than differences and closer to critical issues of power. The problem is not that white women who tend to run the anti-violence movements are different from women of color, but that they have the power to determine whether the intersectional differences of women of color will be incorporated at all into the basic formulation of policy. Thus, the struggle over