Feminist Media Studies

ISSN: 1468-0777 (Print) 1471-5902 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rfms20

#SayHerName: using digital activism to document

violence against black women

Sherri Williams

To cite this article: Sherri Williams (2016) #SayHerName: using digital activism to
document violence against black women, Feminist Media Studies, 16:5, 922-925, DOI:
10.1080/14680777.2016.1213574

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1213574

Published online: 10 Aug 2016.

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922 COMMENTARY AND CRITICISM

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2. Accessed February 29, 2016. http://blog.nfb.ca/blog/2015/10/02/redemption-red-river-woman/
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#SayHerName: using digital activism to document violence

against black women
Sherri Williams
Wake Forest University

The year 2015 was a particularly violent one for black women in the United States. Almost
two dozen transgender women of color were killed, and a former police officer stood trial
for raping thirteen black women while on duty, including a seventeen-year-old who was
raped on her mother’s porch. The deaths of the transgender women of color didn’t lead
newscasts on national network or cable news. Top national newspapers and online news
media outlets didn’t publish many stories about the thirteen women in Oklahoma City.
These stories of brutality had the perfect elements to become national stories that topped
the news agenda at media outlets. The violence was extreme. There were patterns of abuse.
 Feminist Media Studies  923

The victimization of vulnerable groups was apparent. There were multiple victims. But the
women who suffered violence in these instances were not perceived as legitimate victims.
The women are black and they possess womanhood and exercise gender expression that
is outside of the dominant heteropatriarchal standard, so their stories remained mostly
invisible in mainstream media.
Mainstream news media has a complicated history when it comes to covering black
women, from overlooking them completely to circulating stereotypical images of them in
abundance (Patricia Hill Collins 2005). But social media is a space where black women tell
stories of violence and survival when mainstream media ignores them (Sherri Williams 2015).
The social media hashtag #SayHerName made visible the deaths of black transgender
women along with the sexual assaults committed by Holtzclaw. Launched by Kimberlé
Crenshaw’s African American Policy Forum in 2015, #SayHerName urged the press and the
public to pay attention to the violence black women experience at the hands of police and
others (Kimberlé Crenshaw and Andrea J. Ritchie 2015). With #SayHerName, black women
aimed not only to bring attention to the women’s deaths but also to gain justice for them.
The dismissal of cisgender and transgender black women as crime victims, whose bru-
talization deserves the resources of law enforcement and the attention of media outlets, is
connected to social constructions of black womanhood. Since they arrived in the United
States, black women’s femininity has been constructed in direct opposition to white women’s.
Particularly during America’s slave trade, white women were constructed as the epitome of
femininity and black women were constructed as genderless; white women were wives,
black women were property (Angela Y. Davis 1981). Those same social constructions about
black women no doubt circulate in mainstream American newsrooms and affect the news
we do and don’t see about black women. American newspapers in particular have been
found to have a pervasive “macho culture,” where the issues of women and people of color
are othered and minimized in newsroom conversations and in news coverage (Stuart Allan
2010). So there is no surprise that the stories of police brutality and violence against black
women in particular are underreported.
All of the women Holtzclaw targeted and terrorized were black and some of them had a
history of substance abuse, sex work, or interactions with law enforcement. Holtzclaw
engaged in a dangerous pattern of predatory policing of these black women. For Holtzclaw
their race, class, gender, and past experiences intersected to create womanhood that was
easy to violate because this type of womanhood has historically been abused in the United
States by both people with authority and everyday citizens without facing consequences.
Holtzclaw targeted the women because he assumed they wouldn’t report his crimes against
him and if they did they wouldn’t be believed (Sarah Larimer 2015). Even though Holtzclaw
was sentenced to serve 263 years, his ability to terrorize black women living in a working-class
mostly black neighborhood for several months clearly illustrates that ideas about black
women’s worthiness as victims remain. Moreover, the fact that his arrest, trial, or sentencing
did not garner any significant national media coverage in the age of consistent news reports
of police brutality reveals the profound ways in which not only black womanhood but
­working-class black women are still disregarded in the United States.
Throughout the trial black feminists used the #SayHerName hashtag to bring attention
to the case by reporting updates from inside the courtroom and leading up to Holtzclaw’s
924 COMMENTARY AND CRITICISM

sentencing. Their offline activism included a caravan of activists who traveled across the
country in January 2016 to Oklahoma City to stand in solidarity with the survivors for
Holtzclaw’s sentencing and to gain media attention. Barbara Arnwine, a lawyer who attended
the trial and the sentencing, said national media disregarded the story and that sent a sober-
ing message, “It says that black women’s lives don’t matter” (Sherri Williams 2016).
Attention to violence faced by transgender women of color further highlights the role of
gender expression in affecting who is deemed worthy of justice. More than twenty trans-
gender people were killed in 2015—almost double the number killed in the previous year—
and most of them were transgender women of color. Their deaths did not create mainstream
national outcry and concern. There was no abundance of headlines to inform the public
about this violent crime wave or to warn transgender women of color of the potential danger
they faced. This disturbing trend deserved to be a national crime story and a national LGBT
issues story. It was neither. In a year when LGBT issues, including same-sex marriage and
Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition, gained ample media attention, the murders of transgender
women of color were only sporadically reported in mainstream media. Black and gay media
outlets provided some coverage of these homicides but on social networks, the #SayHerName
hashtag kept the stories of the murders of transgender women of color circulating
consistently.
#SayHerName reminds us that black, gender nonconforming women experience a com-
plex and layered policing from authorities that affects the way they are perceived by both
journalists and authorities as legitimate victims. Racialized heteropatriarchal ideologies
about gender affect the ways in which state violence enters the lives of black transgender
women. They are often perceived by authorities to be suspicious, they garner more surveil-
lance and experience more harassment because law enforcement reinforces heteronorma-
tive ideas about gender (Andrea J. Ritchie 2006). Moreover, when authorities interact with
women of color they act to sanction sexual expression and regulate gendered social expec-
tations for women of color (Ritchie 2006). Transgender women are also frequently profiled
by authorities and perceived to be involved in sex work (Ritchie 2006). Overall, gender non-
conforming women who are perceived to be operating outside of traditional gender and
racial norms are more likely to be abused by police, experience violence while in custody,
and not be protected when they are crime victims (Ritchie 2006).
The #SayHerName hashtag recalls the names of past transgender women who were mur-
dered by civilians and those who were killed by police or died in police custody. The hashtag
highlighted the 2013 Berkeley, California case of Kayla Moore, a black transgender woman
whose roommate called authorities to seek help for her because she was in mental distress.
Instead of helping Moore, officers tried to arrest her on a warrant for a man, twenty years
older than her, who happened to share her birth name. Officers used transgender slurs while
referring to Moore and neglected to provide medical treatment (Crenshaw and Ritchie 2015).
Moore died at their hands.
State violence also enters the lives of transgender women through laws that criminalize
them and increase their potential to interact with police. Local and state ordinances, such
as those in large cities that restrict the number of condoms women can carry and North
Carolina’s HB2, which requires transgender people to only use restrooms of the gender they
were assigned at birth, renders the mere existence of transgender women unlawful in certain
spaces. The laws themselves are a form of structural violence that police and penalize
 Feminist Media Studies  925

transgender women and gender nonconforming women for having a gender expression
that does not reinforce the heteropatriarchal gender binary.
The #SayHerName hashtag and report both advocate for the full protection of transgender
women under the law and the abolition of polices that criminalize them (Crenshaw and
Ritchie 2015). Because the activism is digital, these ideas about the injustices that black
transgender women face can be communicated to a wide audience who can spread this
information on social networks. #SayHerName is a tool to tell the story of violence against
black women while circumventing traditional media barriers.
Black Lives Matter and other activists’ use of social networks have already changed the
nation’s conversation about state-sanctioned anti-black violence, yet the corresponding
national news coverage almost exclusively focused on cisgender black men. #SayHerName
forces people to recognize the humanity of black women victims of violence. #SayHerName
does what mainstream media should do for black transgender and cisgender women victims
of state violence: document the brutality they experience and show that their lives matter.

References
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Davis, Angela Y. 1981. Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House.
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Transnational mediation of state gendered violence: the case

of Iran
Gilda Seddighia and Sara Tafakorib
a
University of Bergen; bUniversity of Manchester

The Facebook page “My Stealthy Freedom” was launched in May 2014 by Masih Alinejad, an
exiled Iranian journalist based in the United Kingdom. Through making calls for Iranian
women to send and share unveiled pictures of themselves taken in public settings (Golam