July 26th 2023.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, a highly respected scholar, has recently published her book #Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories Of Police Violence And Public Silence in an effort to ensure that the stories of Black women killed by the police are not forgotten. During an interview with NBC News, she spoke about the importance of her work and the consequences of erasure in this current revival of historical revisionism.
“First, the families lose these women, and then the fact that they’ve lost them becomes lost to their communities, becomes lost to history, becomes lost to the movement,” Crenshaw said.
The book, co-authored by Crenshaw and the African-American Policy Forum, centers on the stories of Black women who have been victims of police violence. According to the Haymarket Books website, there have been Black women, girls, and femmes as young as seven and as old as ninety-three who have been killed by the police, but their names and stories are rarely heard.
Janelle Monae wrote the foreword for the book, and her 2021 song shares the book’s subtitle and has helped keep some of those stories alive. The African-American Policy Forum and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies created the #SayHerName campaign in December 2014, and it has since grown to draw attention to the extrajudicial murders of Black women by police.
In May 2015, the AAPF and the CISPS released a report titled Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women. This report outlines the goals and objectives of the movement, and the book draws on this research. The closing paragraph on the AAPF site reads: “Including Black women and girls in police violence and gender violence discourses sends the powerful message that indeed all Black lives matter. If our collective outrage around cases of police violence is meant to serve as a warning to the state that its agents cannot kill without consequence, our silence around the cases of Black women and girls sends the message that certain deaths do not merit repercussions.”
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