By
Sikivu Hutchinson
In Alice Walker’s short
story “The Flowers” a little girl happens upon the decomposing body of a
lynching victim while she is out picking flowers. Walker contrasts the light tranquility of the
girl’s walk with the savagery of her discovery; suggesting that to be a black
child is to never be shielded from the “adult” horrors of racist dehumanization.
As the girl lays down her wreath of flowers Walker’s narrator declares that “the
summer was over”. Summer’s metaphoric end
signifies the brutality of a segregated nation in which black children are
already othered, racialized, and criminalized in the pools, parks and recreational
spaces that define white childhood innocence.
The videotaped assault
and sexual harassment of 15 year-old Dajerria Becton by a rampaging white police
officer after a pool party in McKinney, Texas makes it clear that it continues
to be open season on black women and girls.
In the video officer Eric Casebolt grabs, straddles and violently restrains
the young woman while she is lying face down on the ground in a bikini. Ignoring her cries of pain and anxiety, he
sadistically sits on her back while handcuffing her. Casebolt then pulls a gun on a few young
people who attempt to intervene. Some of
the good white citizens of McKinney have reportedly praised
Casebolt’s thuggery.
The assault of Becton is an enraging reminder of the particular brand of sexual terrorism black women routinely experienced in the Jim Crow
South at the hands of white law enforcement and ordinary white citizens. In her important book,
At the Dark End of the Street,
Danielle McGuire chronicles how institutionalized sexual violence informed black
women’s civil and human rights resistance.
Even as they were eclipsed in the mainstream civil rights movement by charismatic
black male leaders, black women activists like Ida B. Wells, Recy Taylor,
Claudette Colvin and Endesha Mae Holland drew on their experiences with sexual
terrorism to galvanize black women organizers around the nexus of gender, race
and class apartheid.
The McKinney incident underscores how even within
the context of “recreation”, “normative” gender boundaries that automatically “feminize”
young white women do not exist for young black women. Little black girls can never occupy the space
of carefree, feminine innocence that little white girls expect as their birthright. They can never rely on the damsel in distress
image to “rescue” them from American-as-apple pie state violence. According
to the African American Policy Forum, black girls are suspended six times
more than white girls and routinely vilified as aggressive menaces in school
classrooms. It goes without saying that a black male police officer captured on
video brutalizing and sitting on a bikini-clad teenage white girl would have
been lynched before he returned to his precinct. It is tacitly understood that
the scantily clad bodies of teenage white girls are sacrosanct cultural
commodities; publicly off limits to
law enforcement, privately available for the consumption of white heterosexist
patriarchy. Within the public domain
these are the bodies that must be protected at all costs—from potential violation
by predator white men and from the imagined, ever present “threat” of violent
encroachment by men of color.
Socialized to see black women as chattel, thuggish police
officers play on misogynist white supremacist stereotypes to justify their
criminality under the color of law. After
months of community agitation, last summer’s heinous videotaped beating of Marlene
Pinnock, a middle age African American homeless woman, by a white California
Highway Patrol officer led to his firing.
Nonetheless L.A.’s black female district attorney has not seen fit to
file criminal charges against him. And the
recent conviction
of white female LAPD officer Mary O’Callaghan for assault—rather than
involuntary manslaughter—in the death of 35 year-old Alesia Thomas is an anemic
substitute for justice.
The McKinney police thug has been suspended from
duty but there should be a national push for prosecution. As with police beatings and murders of men of
color, there is no special dispensation for black women victims of state
violence, no “weaker sex” clause that mitigates the brutalization of black
women’s bodies as hypersexualized policed space. For black girls in the hallowed idyllic spaces
that enshrine the privileges of white youth, summer is always over.
