By Sikivu Hutchinson
From The Humanist
In her groundbreaking new book, Invisible No More:
Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, Black lesbian
activist attorney Andrea J. Ritchie builds on Angela Davis’ vision of feminist abolitionism to provide a commanding
analysis and indictment of the gendered regimes of power and authority that
shape the U.S.’ carceral state. Ritchie
documents the emergence of contemporary police departments in eighteenth
century slave patrols. She powerfully
unpacks the nexus of sexual violence and policing—a cornerstone of white
supremacist control over Black bodies during slavery. Beginning her book
with a short overview of the role race, gender, and sexuality played in
colonial occupation of Indigenous lands, she underscores the degree to which
heterosexist gender binaries informed the terrorist origins of American
nationhood. Throughout the book, she critiques commonly held views which
center Black masculinity in discourse about and policy reform on the U.S.’
policing regime. She also calls out mainstream civil rights organizations
for failing to address the intersection of police violence and sexual violence
with respect to Black women. Ritchie
faults the hetero-normative respectability politics that inform much traditional
civil rights discourse privileging straight Black male victimhood. In this regard, “controlling narratives”
about gender, sexuality, race, disability, and age have always shaped the way Black
women and girls and women of color are treated by law enforcement. These controlling narratives, coupled with a
multi-billion dollar militarized police apparatus that diverts social welfare
from communities and schools, makes law enforcement a grave public health
threat to communities of color in general and to trans, queer, gender
non-conforming and cis women of color in particular. Ultimately, “white supremacy demands such
complete control of Black women and women of color that it takes very little to
perceive us as out of control”. Given these realities, it doesn’t matter how
much “implicit bias training police receive or how many police reforms” are put
in place. As Ritchie argues, this regime
of “complete and total control” means the only feasible solution to the police
state is abolitionism.
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| Andrea Ritchie (By W.C. Moss) |
Question number five in the interview was
provided by activist and organizer Yuisa Gimeno, of
the Freedom Socialist
Party.
1. At the
beginning of the book you discuss personal experiences with police sexual
assault and harassment which made you conscious at a very early age that police
are not protectors. You also emphasize throughout the book that there is no
national data on sexual assault and rape committed by law enforcement.
Certainly, mistrust of the police, and fear of police targeting men of color,
have contributed to low rates of sexual assault reporting among Black women.
How does this “Catch-22” strengthen the police state and undermine attention to
Black sexual violence victims? Sexual
violence against Black women has been part of the global historical fabric
since 1492. Historians have placed this
within the context of the diaspora, Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Police officers’ response to violence in the
community is part of this seamless web.
This plays out in how police sexual violence remains unseen in the
broader movement. The International
Association of Chiefs of Police has said that law enforcement doesn’t see
communities really clamoring for action around these issues. How are we as movements that challenge police
and state violence—particularly in this reinvigorated moment of struggle around
state violence—continuing to abandon Black women who experience violence at the
hands of the state in the same way we continue to abandon individual Black
women who experience violence in the community? The question of individual Black
women coming forward and telling their stories is important but the answer is
obvious. If the people you’re told to
report to are the police and they are the ones raping you then obviously the
incentive to do that is quite low. In
the book, I talk about women who do come forward and are re-victimized and are
put on trial for the violence that has been perpetrated against them, while the
officer who assaulted them is not held accountable. I think we need to shift away from the
question of why aren’t women coming forward; or why aren’t we collecting the
data, to what are we doing about it?
There is research showing that police get caught in an act of sexual
violence every five days! And, of course, that is just those that get caught. People in law enforcement acknowledge it and
call it law enforcement’s “dirty little secret”. So now it’s really on us to put the lie to
statement by The International Association of Chiefs of Police and start
demanding action on it.
2. You reference
numerous cross-generational, regional examples of Black women who have been
murdered by law enforcement. What role do toxic cultural
constructions/notions about Black femininity and respectability play in state
violence against Black women? These controlling narratives inform every
police interaction and shape how Black women and girls are seen in any given
situation. I drew on Black feminist theories and applied them to police
interactions. For example, there was a
case where a twelve year-old Black girl stepped out of her house and police
officers who were responding to a complaint about three white women engaged in prostitution
proceeded to arrested her. The arrest of
this young twelve year-old reinforced controlling narratives associating Black
girls with prostitution; narratives that are as old as this nation. The police
charged her with resisting arrest and assaulting an officer. Georgetown University recently came out with
a study
about how these narratives age Black girls and make them seem older than they
really are. A twelve year-old child was construed as a physical threat. That was an example to me of how deep these
narratives run and how they control every police encounter with Black women and
girls.
3. On page 40 you note that, “Actual or perceived deviation from gender and
sexual norms has served as a basis of criminalization since the colonial
period…constructing a gender-normative nation.” Your book puts a
much needed spotlight on the specific ways queer folk of color are dehumanized
by draconian policing policies. How do homophobia, transphobia and
misogynoir inform the way trans, queer and gender non-conforming folk
of color are treated in the criminal justice system? It ends up being an amalgamation of
these controlling narratives. For
instance, when police are interacting with Black trans women they are acting on
these controlling narratives that frame Black women as engaging in prostitution
and being sexual deviants. They are also
reading gender non-conformativity as deviant and engaging in criminalized
sexual conduct; as well as being mentally unstable, fraudulent, deranged, and
threatening. For example, this
consequence is manifest in the case of Tawana Johnson where police arrested her
for walking around because they perceived her as “being a potential prostitute”. They called her the wrong pronoun, labeled
her a “faggot”, and assaulted her. That’s how that controlling narrative merged
into a single incident. The trans
community came out to support Tawana but the local civil rights community did
not. While mainstream civil rights organizations conceded that they did not
agree with law enforcement’s response they also said “we do not agree with who
she is”. Trans youth are often kicked
out of school for defending themselves. They are pushed out by criminalization
and gender non-conformativity. Trans youth are under constant surveillance by
police on the streets. When I was researching
the Amnesty International report in L.A. in the early 2000s, many trans folk
expressed the fear that they can’t exist on public streets and that there is
nowhere to go without cops surveilling and harassing them. Police officers routinely
target women who they think the Black community won’t stand up for—i.e., those
who are poor, mentally ill, in the sex trade—both queer and cis, who don’t
conform with Black bourgeois respectability politics. That is how Daniel
Holtzclaw gets away with assaulting at least thirteen Black women and
girls. Holtzclaw was not challenged by
any major civil rights organization. With respect to mainstream civil rights
organizations, it’s one thing to make that central to your agenda rather than
just sending out a press release. They
are not taking up the issue of police sexual violence as central to their
platform because it requires standing with women, trans and not trans, that are
not conforming to their notions of respectability politics. Even though there is more conversation about
police sexual violence now than there was twenty years ago people are still
writing books that exclusively explore policing through the lens of Black men’s
experiences, period. We need to be
serious about examining police sexual violence through the lens of Black queer
experiences, Black trans experiences, and Black cis women’s experiences.
4. You discuss
the connection between military violence and police violence, occupation,
colonialism, and racialized gender violence toward Indigenous women.
Native and Indigenous women have some of the highest rates of sexual
violence in the nation yet are routinely “invisibilized” when it comes to
mainstream discussions about “proper victims” of sexual assault. What are
the dynamics of state violence toward Indigenous women with respect to federal
imposition and jurisdiction on Native lands? There is still the notion that
it’s about an infringement on sovereignty.
Indian nations don’t have the power or jurisdiction to hold folks who come
on Indigenous land accountable for sexually assaulting Indigenous women. Once it gets to the federal level it’s not
their “priority”. Their “priority”
apparently is prosecuting someone who has an ounce of weed in D.C.! This is a legal problem of jurisdiction that
was set by the Supreme Court and needs to be overturned. People have been trying to figure out how to
overturn it by legislative means for some time but I think ultimately it
requires more than a legislative shift, it requires us to confront the epidemic
of sexual violence and state violence against Indigenous women. This is not a relic of a distant past that
can be “addressed” by commemorating Wounded Knee and historical instances of
assault and rape and genocide.
5. What
would you recommend government agencies and community groups do to grapple with
these issues? What do you think are some initial concrete steps? I just released a report
that outlines policy changes municipalities can make to reduce criminalization
and deportation and increase safety for Black women, girls, gender
nonconforming folks and fem(me)s: https://forwomen.org/resources/sanctuary-city-report/ .
Ultimately, the first step for both policy makers and community groups is
simply to expand their understanding of profiling, policing, police violence,
and criminalization to incorporate an analysis of the experiences of Black
women, girls, gender nonconforming people; when developing agendas for reform,
simply ask yourself how this will play out for women/in the contexts where
women tend to come into contact most with the police. If you don't know, ask
women of color who are directly targeted by police, seek out the input of
organizations who work with them.
