University of Arkansas Press

Making Black Femicide Visible

Author(s): Shatema Threadcraft
Source: Philosophical Topics , SPRING 2021, Vol. 49, No. 1, Social Visibility (SPRING 2021),
pp. 35-44
Published by: University of Arkansas Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/48652159

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philosophical topics
vol. 49, no. 1, Spring 2021

Making Black Femicide Visible:

Intersectional, Abolitionist People-­Building
against Epistemic Oppression

Shatema Threadcraft
Vanderbilt University

ABSTRACT. Black women struggle to make the violence they experience

visible for at least four reasons: the violence occurs in private, not in pub-
lic; it is associated with sex, sexuality and intimacy; the violence is not
amplified within the public and counterpublic spheres; and, finally and
importantly, activists have not been as successful in constructing resonate
narratives regarding the violence. Contemporary violence against black
men, for example, is often understood through the lens of lynching, a
phenomenon that earlier activists were able to link to the biblical cruci-
fixion. The activists’ work ensured that lynching holds an important place
in the story of black peoplehood; it helped to make blacks as a political
people and has been crucial to black understandings of who we are and
why we are here. Social visibility requires that black women tell stories
that not only build social movements; they must also tell stories that help
to build people.

In this period of sustained protests against antiblack violence, black women

struggle to make the violence that they experience socially visible. They struggle to
do so for at least four reasons. The violence black women experience often occurs

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in the private sphere, in the home. The private violence to which black women are
subject is not only hidden from public view but occurs in a realm we have long
afforded less value, a realm thought to be unworthy of public concern. One reason
this realm is given lower regard is because it is associated with sex, sexuality, and
intimacy and those things are associated with the lesser feminine as opposed to a
more important masculine public realm of commerce and politics. The violence
black women experience occurs in connection to or is a product of their sexual
and intimate relations. Moreover, people often believe that women are untruthful
when it comes to said relations. Black women suffer from a lack of publicity, of
amplification, as far fewer people discuss the violence they experience relative to
the violence experienced by black men within either the broader public or within
the black counterpublic sphere. Finally, black women have had less control over the
means of symbolic production relative to white women and black men and they are
therefore disadvantaged by violence’s symbolic order. Storytelling has the potential
to overcome privacy and its tendency to encourage secrecy, disbelief, disregard, and
anonymity; it has the potential to counteract black women’s epistemic oppression
and therefore help to make the violence visible.
Globally men are more likely than women to experience lethal violence, and
yet, in the United States, black women are killed at higher rates than white men
and have been killed at higher rates for decades.1 In the US, as elsewhere, when
men are killed they are often killed in public. This matters in and of itself. On a
recent podcast, Wesley Morris speaks eloquently of how a community is called
into being as Floyd is murdered. He says the witnesses functioned as the Greek
chorus; they try to intervene morally, to get Chauvin to do a different thing.2 We
have evidence of their testimony on the tape and in the courtroom. This death
spectacle, and others like it, have played an important role not only in building
communities, spontaneous counterpublics, but also more profoundly in sustain-
ing blacks as a political people. When women are killed, they are killed in private
and their deaths, then, cannot occasion these spontaneous publics.
As well, women are killed by intimates or because of intimacy. They are, for
example, the majority of those killed in sex-­related murders in the United States.
In fact, when women in the US are killed, it looks a lot like what activists have
named femicide, that they are killed because they are women. Within this group,
black women are three to four times more likely to die at the hands of a current
or ex-­partner than women of other groups, with the exception of Native women,
who experience extraordinarily high rates of lethal violence as a result of ongoing

1. Shatema Threadcraft and Lisa L. Miller, “Black Women, Victimization, and the Limitations of the
Liberal State,” Theoretical Criminology 21, no. 4 (2017): 478–93.
2. Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, narrators, “The People in the Neighborhood: A powerful—­and
revealing—­aspect of the Derek Chauvin Trial Was the Community It Created Out of Strangers,”
Still Processing, Episode 135, New York Times, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13
/podcasts/still-­processing-­derek-­chauvin-­trial-­witnesses.html.

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settler colonial violence.3 In fact, while it is true that a black man is killed by police,
security guards, or similar agents every 28 hours, it is also true that every 21 hours
a black woman is killed by an intimate partner.4
The intimate nature of the murders, that they are associated with sex, sexuality,
and intimacy, that they occur within the realm of intimate relations, is the sec-
ond problem in making this violence socially legible. The stories of the killings do
not fit the standard frames of antiblack violence, where, for example, racist cop A
murders black man B, even if, tragically antiblack racism and disproportionate
state violence are key factors in black women’s disproportionate deaths. The bias
blacks experience in their interactions with police is well established, as is the phe-
nomenon of overpolicing, where blacks are much more likely to encounter police.
Abolitionist feminists, including Beth Richie, argue that police involvement in
intimate partner conflict does not function to lessen but in fact escalates black
male violence against black women. Evidence suggests that this is a racialized phe-
nomenon, as the laws and policies that supposedly protect women from male vio-
lence in practice only protect white women and do that at the expense of increased
state violence against black women and the loss of black female life.5 As well, this
violence takes place within a culture that presumes that women lie, have reason
to lie, or can never be wholly truthful when it comes to sex and its surround-
ing relationships. This, of course, is a problem of female stereotypes and feminine
misrecognition.6
Police not only escalate and contribute to the greater lethality of intimate part-
ner violence against black women, they also perpetuate it themselves. The prob-
lems of privacy and intimacy are also factors in the legibility of black women’s
experience of state violence. Andrea Ritchie states succinctly that police brutality
against black women “takes place inside the home, it takes place in the context
of calls for help and is often unseen as a result.”7 Breanna Taylor’s death echoes

3. Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York:
New York University Press, 2012).
4. Shatema Threadcraft, “North American Necropolitics and Gender: On #BlackLivesMatter and
Black Femicide,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 3 (2017): 553–79.
5. Mandatory arrest policies are of particular concern for black feminists and organizations devoted
to ending violence against women of color, such as INCITE! Crenshaw draws attention to studies
that show these policies have heightened the risk of serious injury and death for women of color
and black women in particular. She cites a Milwaukee study that concluded that the safety that
mandatory arrest policies bring to white women comes at the direct expense of black women,
that “mandatory arrests prevents 2504 acts of violence against primarily white women at the
price of 5409 acts of violence against primarily black women.” She also cites a Harvard study that
concluded that “intimate partner homicides increased by about 60% in states with mandatory
arrest laws.” Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, “From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking
Intersectionally about Women, Race, and Social Control,” 59 UCLA Law Review 1418 (2012).
6. Glen Coulthard, Red Skin/White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Catherine MacKinnon, “Not a Moral Issue,” Feminism
Unmodified: Discourse on Life and Law, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
7. Brianna Scott, “Author: Black Women’s Experiences with Police Brutality Must Be ‘Invisible No
More,’” National Public Radio, July 16, 2020. “If police violence against black women and women

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the deaths of many other black women whose names we are now called upon to
say, including Eleanor Bumpurs, Aiayana Stanley-­Jones, Rekia Boyd, Atatiana
Jefferson, Katheryn Johnston, Charlena Lyles, Pearlie Golden. Ritchie elaborated
on the contexts surrounding black women’s deaths at the hands of police in a con-
versation with PBS News Hour:
But I do think that much of the police violence that black women expe-
rience also happens in private, as it did for Breanna Taylor. It often
happens in the context of the war on drugs, and sort of by association,
in the way that the officers somehow thought that she was associated
with something that she was not at all associated with.
And, also it happens in the contexts of calls for help, calls for help
in a mental health crisis, calls for help for domestic violence, calls for
help around sexual assault, calls for help, as in Atatiana Jefferson’s case.
A wellness check can wind up being a deadly intervention with police.8

The above makes clear that black women’s experience of state violence, too, is
obscured by virtue of its connection to the realm of sex, sexuality, and intimacy.
Black women experience this violence because they are intimately involved with
black men, because police are looking for black men with whom the women are in
close proximity, black women are hurt and black women are killed because they
ask for help in their relationships with black men. Again, the public views ­women’s
accounts of events within these relationships, their testimony, with suspicion.
The problem is a profound one. Kimberlé Crenshaw laments this regarding lethal
police violence against black women and points out that “As long as black women
lose their lives in circumstances like these, their lost life won’t be dramatized in
a way that mobilizes the kind of reforms that have to happen in order to protect
more life and make police more accountable.”9
Third, black women confront a problem regarding amplification, a problem of
publicity. Alexandra Samuels, Dhrumil Mehta, and Anna Wiederkehr report that

of color is happening in the back seats of patrol cars, on the way to the precinct, in the precinct
in the context of domestic violence, in the context of responses to mental health crises—­all
those things are happening in private spaces away from cell phones and cop-­watching cameras.
Also when officers are responding to domestic violence, they’re supposed to turn off their body
cameras for the privacy of the survivors and I would support that except that then there’s no
documentation of the kinds of abuse that happens in those contexts. That is definitely one
significant reason for invisibility of police violence against black women and women of color
because it’s happening in private spaces—­in clinics, in homes, in welfare offices, in the back
seats of patrol cars, in vacant lots, in precincts—­and we are not seeing it in the same ways
of the kind of public stop and frisk or the public excessive force or the public shootings that
we see more often for black and brown men.” Cheryl Corley, “‘Invisible No More’ Examines
Police Violence against Minority Women,” National Public Radio, November 5, 2017. Andrea J.
Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2017).
8. John Yang, “What Breanna Taylor’s Killing Says about Police Treatment of Black Women,” PBS
News Hour, June 16, 2020.
9. Marisa Lati, Jennifer Jenkins, and Sommer Brugal, “Nearly 250 Women Have Been Fatally Shot
by Police since 2015,” Washington Post, September 4, 2020.

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black women fatally shot by the police receive little to no media attention.10 When
they do, it is as it was for Ma’Khia Bryant or Breanna Taylor, that is, their deaths
occur within a news cycle that focused on police violence—­the Derek Chauvin trial
in Bryant’s case—­or a man was murdered around the same time and the ­woman’s
death becomes a further illustration of a point about male death, as was the case
for Taylor.11 They point out that mainstream media narratives have a profound
impact on social media narratives, and cite research from the Brookings Institute
and the University of Maryland that analyzed “nearly 300 phrases used as Twitter
hashtags between August 2014 and August 2015, a year after the killing of 18 year
old Michael Brown. Though these hashtags are often used to name black victims of
police brutality, not one specifically mentioned a Black woman or a girl.”12
The above Crenshaw quote makes reference to the fourth issue affecting the
social visibility of violence against black women: dramatization. Fittingly, given
Crenshaw’s contributions, it is indeed an intersectional problem of dramatization.
Visibility, legibility, requires storytelling, narrativization. Hegemonic accounts
of gender-­based violence and accounts of racist violence work against activists’
ability to tell the story of violence against black women and to have that story
recognized and accepted as antiblack and patriarchal violence. The violence black
women experience is less visible because it does not always look like the violence
white women experience and white women have had greater power in narrating
the story of gender-­based violence. Here the work of Richie is, again, instruc-
tive. “Public symphathy,” she says, “has been organized around a fairly narrow
set of images of female victims and a small range of situations women face in
dangerous relationships.”13 Richie faults the influential conservative wing of the
antiviolence movement, which helped “to circulate a simplistic, narrow under-
standing of the problem of violence against women, so that many black women
and their experiences aren’t included in the definitions.”14 White women control
“the means of symbolic production” regarding gender-­based violence.15 Richie
says that feminists must attend not only to the more frequent, more brutal, and
more consequential physical and sexual assaults—­more consequential in that they
have a greater impact on black women’s housing, livelihoods, and ability status—­
that black women experience at the hands of intimate partners, but also to the
violence they experience from members of their households with whom they are
not intimately involved, community members and state agents, which includes

10. Alexandra Samuels, Dhrumil Mehta, and Anna Wiederkehr, “Why Black Women Are Often Missing
from Conversations about Police Violence,” 538, May 6, 2021.
11. Alexandra Samuels. Twitter Post. May 6, 2021. https://twitter.com/AlexSamuelsx5/status
/1390296318208266240.
12. Samuels et al., “Why Black Women Are Often Missing from Conversations about Police Violence.”
13. Richie, Arrested Justice.
14. Richie, Arrested Justice.
15. Jeffrey Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

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physical assaults and sexual exploitation by police officers and the assaults they are
subject to in state custody. Indeed, Angela Davis argues that prisons represent the
institutionalization of sexual assault.16 Richie’s understanding pushes back against
a key liberal feminist claim, that the state is not the biggest source of violence in a
woman’s life.
Conservative antiviolence activists and the mainstream media came together
to construct a story regarding gender-­based violence that disadvantages black
women, that makes much of the violence they experience invisible as violence
against women. That is not the only story, however, that works against the visibility
of violence against black women. Because much of this violence does not fit the
pattern of racist person X harms black person Y and because the violence does
not take place in public and go on to become a spectacle, the violence cannot be
connected as clearly and as cleanly to the concept of lynching, which has been a
powerful mobilizing and collectivizing story in black communities.17
Lynching is the most iconic symbol of black racial oppression in the United
States, indeed perhaps throughout the world. Lynching helped to create blacks as a
political people; it is central to the story US blacks have told themselves about who
they are and why they are here. Violence that can be connected in any way to lynch-
ing will be more visible, more legible because lynching has been so central in giving
black life in the US meaning.18 Public lethal police violence that is filmed and cir-
culated is quite easily connected to the lynching narrative. The concept of lynching
and the lynching story has been central to how activists, academics, and even inter-
national organizations understand contemporary lethal police violence. Keeanga-­
Yahmatta Taylor says that Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were lynched; Cornel
West tells us that George Floyd was lynched for the whole world to see.
Rogers Smith states that “No political peoples are natural or primordial.”19
Peoples are the products of history and politics. Smith holds that the politics of
people making involves both force and stories. Stories must “inspire senses of
trust and worth among members of a people by weaving together economic, politi­
cal power and ethically constitutive stories tailored to persuade a critical mass
of constituents while also advancing partisan elite interests.”20 Activists ensured
that lynching stories became ethically constitutive stories for blacks. Elizabeth
Alexander says that violence—­the experience of violence, the threat of violence,

16. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003)]
17. See Gooding-­Williams, Philosophical Topics, this volume.
18. Edward J. Blum, “Lynching as Crucifixion: Violence and the Sacred Imagination of W. E. B. Du
Bois,” in The Souls of W. E. B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections, ed. Edward J. Blum and Jason R.
Young (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2009), 198. Michelle Kuhl, “Resurrecting Black
Manhood in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Martyr Tales,” in The Souls of W. E. B. Du Bois: New Essays and
Reflections, ed. Edward J. Blum and Jason R. Young (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2009),
160–61.
19. Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 32.
20. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood, 58, 69–70.

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and, crucially important in shaping how they experience the threat of violence, the
stories blacks shared regarding antiblack violence—­created blacks as a people.21
Lynching stories became the most significant among the violent stories shared,
and, again, this was no accident.
The preeminent African American theologian James Cone writes that “The
lynching tree is the most potent symbol of the trouble nobody knows that blacks
have seen.”22 He continues:
In [the lynching era, 1880–1940], the lynching tree joined the cross
as the most emotionally charged symbols in the African American
community—­symbols that represented both death and the promise
of redemption, judgment and the offer of mercy, suffering and the
power of hope. Both the cross and the lynching tree represent the
worst in human beings and at the same time “an unquenchable onto-
logical thirst” for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final
meaning.23

Du Bois was one among a group of writers and artists whose efforts helped to tie
these symbols—­the lynching tree and the cross—­together. In the process he and
others helped to sanctify the practice of lynching, making it the most significant
part of the African American theodicy.24 Cone writes:
From Henry Smith’s lynching in Paris, Texas (1893) to Emmitt Tills’ in
Money, Mississippi (1955) and beyond, black artists and writers have
made the lynching theme a dominant part of their work and most have
linked black victims with the crucified Christ as a way of finding mean-
ing in the repeated atrocities in African American communities . . .
No one focused on this theme with more literary passion and creative
theological insight than Du Bois of the NAACP.25

Du Bois was the best, but he was joined in this work by many other writers and
activists.26 Du Bois and others were able to depict lynching victims (and by ­extension

21. Elizabeth Alexander, “Can You Be Black and Look at This?: Reading the Rodney King Video(s),”
Public Culture 7 (Winter 1994): 77–94.
22. James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 3.
23. Cone, Cross, 3.
24. See Gooding-­Williams, Philosophical Topics, this volume.
25. Cone, Cross, 97, 101.
26. In response to mass violence and to whites’ persecution texts that sought to sanctify racist brutal-
ity, African American authors endeavored to redeem the lynch victim and, in so doing, redeem
the entire race. The primary method in this literary task was to associate the black victim with
the biblical Christ. Such a link would divest white violence of its sacred status. A wide array
of African Americans engaged in the work, including writer Langston Hughes, poet Countee
Cullen, playwright Georgia Douglas Johnson, and painter Aaron Douglas. In one way or another,
all sought to convert the lynched African American from an object of disdain to a paragon of
virtue. Yet in this literary and theological tradition the alleged black sinner became more than
a saint. He became a potential savior—­not only for the oppressed community, but also for the
white persecutors. In the conflation of violated blackness and the divine—­generally through the
creation of a black Christ—­these African American authors did not seek to answer the problem

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all potentially lynched blacks) as morally meritorious, their deaths as advancing
the political purposes of both God and the American nation. He and other black
artists and activists made lynched blacks martyrs to the American democratic
experiment and to an aborted multiracial democracy. This gave their lives and
suffering meaning, all black life and suffering meaning and worth, purpose and
pride. Du Bois, in particular, understood the special place of traumatic experi-
ences in forging collective memory, of traumatic events as unifying events. What’s
more as this people-­building story was being constructed black women down-
played the private violence they experienced.27 The Movement for Black Lives
participates in this tradition and this functions to make violence against black
women less visible.
Finally, it is important to consider the four problems of visibility as instances
of epistemic oppression.28 Kristie Dotson defines epistemic oppression as “per-
sistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s contribution to knowledge produc-
tion.”29 Those who experience epistemic oppression have their epistemic agency
infringed upon where that agency is understood as “the ability to utilize persua-
sively shared epistemic resources within a given community of knowers in order
to participate in knowledge production and, if required, the revision of those same
resources.” Dotson distinguishes between “reducible” and “irreducible” epistemic
oppression, where reducible epistemic oppression follows from social and political
oppression and irreducible oppression is more closely tied to features of epistemo-
logical systems:
Reducible epistemic oppression, for example, can most often be addressed
utilizing epistemic resources within the same epistemologi­cal system.
Irreducible epistemic oppression, by contrast, which follows from fea-
tures of epistemological systems, can only begin to be addressed through
recognition of the limits of one’s overall epistemological framework. This
generally means that one’s epistemic resources and the epistemological
system within which those resources prevail may be wholly inadequate
to the task of addressing the persisting epistemic exclusions that are
causing epistemic oppression.30

of evil as it related to people of color. They accepted the reality of their historical situation, but
with theological and literary skill they endeavored to recast it as a cosmic tale.
Edward J. Blum, “Lynching as Crucifixion: Violence and the Sacred Imagination of W. E. B.
Du Bois,” in The Souls of W. E. B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections, ed. Edward J. Blum and
Jason R. Young (Macon, GA: Mercer University, 2009), 198.
27. Darlene Clark Hine wrote of the culture of dissemblance, wherein black women were encouraged
to downplay private violence against them, while playing up public violence against themselves
and others. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West:
Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 14, no. 4: (1989): 912–20.
28. I thank Matthew Congdon for this point.
29. Kristie Dotson, “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression,” Social Epistemology 28, no. 2 (2014):
115–38; 115.
30. Dotson, “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression,” 116.

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Black women suffer from both reducible and irreducible forms of epistemic oppres-
sion and the hegemonic lynching story has increased this oppression. For example,
storytelling is a part of how we come to know things; our storytelling traditions
have epistemic consequences. Black women have been excluded in this form of
knowledge production and therefore from becoming equal authors of the values
by which we live.
As well, if we think of oppression as Iris Marion Young encourages us to, and
therefore think of people as “doers and actors,” instead of as “possessors of goods,”
then we can perceive the true dimensions of epistemic oppression’s impact on sub-
jectivity and politics.31 Oppression prevents people from having what is due to
them because they are not able to participate in knowledge production and make
persuasive use of shared epistemic resources, but they are also unable to become
who they might become without this oppression, as oppression limits people’s ability
to expand their capacities through exploration, education, and experience.
Not only are black women prevented from becoming all who they might
become, they are prevented from disclosing who they are and who they could be
to others; epistemic oppression hinders their capacity to engage in political action.
Speech, as we know, is critically important in politics; for Arendt, speech and poli­
tics are almost synonymous.32 Only speech allows us to encounter and consider
the perspectives of others. But all are not granted equal speech, all are not granted
an equal appearance in Arendt’s all-­important public realm. Equal speech takes
work, or better, in Arendtian terms, there must be action before there is Action.
Deva Woodly, in her forthcoming book, Reckoning: The Movement for Black Lives
and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements, argues that social movements
are necessary for democracies, particularly multiracial democracies characterized
by persistent racial hierarchies. Social movements are the phenomenon most likely
to change public associations of oppressed groups among members of the broader
public. One way in which they do this is through allowing oppressed people to
engage in storytelling, in self-­authorship, and be heard as they do so, in the public
sphere. Woodly insists that the Movement for Black Lives has had the impact it
has because journalists have included the stories and perspectives of activists more
than they have included the perspectives of police officers and state officials. This
is empirically verifiable regarding the Ferguson protests. They allow oppressed
peoples to participate in authoring the values by which we collectively live. If black
women cannot engage in this in the same way, if they cannot be equal authors of
the narratives that drive social movements and can help to bring about genuine
recognition, then they are missing out on an important process in becoming demo-
cratic citizens through the expansive exercise of their capacities for speech and
storytelling.

31. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2011).
32. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

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 The problems are complex. Black women must tell stories that not only build
social movements, something that they have very rarely been able to do, but in
truth they must tell stories that build people. People-­building will help to change
the balance of the symbolic order, but it is difficult to see how the symbolic order
isn’t critically important to people-­building. Changes to the symbolic order will
surely address the problem of amplification and end our tendency to discredit
what black women, both those who survive and those who do not, say. It will
increase our ability to “see,” truly, things we do not, and perhaps cannot, witness.
We must, therefore, not only do all we can to help black women tell their stories
(while recognizing that this often puts significant and undue burdens on survivors
that are rarely reciprocated in political action) but we must also do all we can to
change the symbolic order in which those stories are told, which means we must
take on our own significant burdens in this process. That might include petition-
ing newsrooms, action to change television programming and the scripts it circu-
lates in society, political action aimed at reforming sex education curricula.
It must be noted that people-­building storytelling is arduous and pain-­staking,
if necessary, cultural work. The work begins in a cultural context in which black
men have adopted the most important story in the Bible for their project. What’s
more, Smith says that women, in particular, have not fared well in processes of
people-­building. The project may very well fail. This is why it cannot be our only
project. We must also facilitate one of the best products of #metoo storytelling. At
their best #metoo stories held the potential to bring into being affirming communi-
ties created wholly through storytelling, in which survivors could seek and receive
recognition among themselves, communities in which they, and not the larger
public, chose what was valuable and demanded recognition about themselves and
their experiences. Together they could collectively elaborate the values by which
they live. Here I am profoundly influenced by the work of Indigenous scholars
and critics of colonial recognition Glen Coulthard and Gina Starblanket.33 Eve
Crawford Payton eloquently lays out the affirming actions of one such community
of Blake Bailey’s survivors in a recent podcast and many more such communities
have been brought into being through the speech movement.34
Succinctly, there is endless work to do. The problems are complex, but they
are problems we must confront, as black female subjectivity, political equality, and
their very lives are at stake.

33. Glen Coulthard and Gina Starblanket, “Being Indigenous Feminists: Resurgences against Con­
temporary Patriarchy,” in Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, 2nd ed., ed. Joyce Green
(Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017).
34. The Waves, “A Conversation with One of Blake Lively’s Accusers,” Slate, April 20, 2021.

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