Ain't I a Woman, too?
Commentary by Black Kos Editor JoanMar
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere...And ain't I a woman?
(Sojouner Truth, 1851)
Quick, name me ten modern day victims of racism...whether at the hands of the police or civilians.
Trayvon, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Rodney King, Anthony Baez, Sean Bell, Tamir Rice, Amadou Diallo, John Crawford, Abner Louima.
There's not a woman on that list, and I could name the next ten and still not mention a woman's name.
Given that, you'd be forgiven if you were to conclude that the black woman is being protected; that she is being treated as a member of the "fairer sex" and thus shielded from the wanton brutality being visited upon her son, her father, and her lover. Not so. The fact is, the black woman is not now, nor was she ever spared from the physical manifestation of racism. In addition to being raped at will, she's also been adorned with the
"chokecherry Tree" design on her back, and at the whim of the ruling class killed right along with her menfolk. The number of black women and girls killed during the glory days of lynching has been conservatively estimated to be around 200; a figure some see as being ridiculously low. However many there were, the fact is, the black woman was accorded no special consideration for being female. She was black and that was what mattered.
Things have not changed much since the good ol' days. Interacting with the law is a far scarier prospect for black women than it is for their white counterparts. If you are the loved one of a black woman who is suffering from mental illness, for example, you may want to think twice before you call 911 for help.
Eleanor Bumpurs was a 66-year-old "psychotic" grandmother who suffered from a whole host of health issues. In attempting to evict her from her apartment, police officer Stephen Sullivan used his 12-gauge single-barreled shotgun to shoot her twice. Sullivan was with the
"NYPD Emergency Services Unit squad which was specially trained in subduing emotionally disturbed people."
Renisha McBride, 19, went looking for help and got a bullet to the head instead.
Caught in the "storm of all storms," Glenda Moore grabbed her two sons ages two and four and went looking for help on Staten Island (yes, that Staten Island). No one answered her cries. Her two sons were swept from her arms and she spent the night huddled on the back porch of a man who said that he thought she was there to rob him.
Aiyana Mo'Nay Stanley Jones, 7, was asleep at her grandmother's house when police threw a grenade through a window, kicked in the door and this is what happened:
"The gun was just pointed right there at Aiyana. He pulled the trigger.... I knew she was dead," she testified as she sobbed.
They start coming into the house, and I'm steady screaming that they done killed Aiyana, and it seemed like was nobody paying me no attention."
Marlene Pinnock, 51 years of age, homeless, and having mental challenges was a danger to herself, CHP Officer Daniel Andrew said, so he tried to protect her by pinning her to ground and then proceeded to punch her senseless. I watched that beating and marveled that she's still alive.
The case of
Aura Rosser was brought to my attention by our own
peregrine kate in her diary
detailing the killing of the woman who was cooking her pains away just before they came for her.
On Sunday, November 9, Ann Arbor police responded to a 911 call from a man regarding a domestic disturbance. A few short moments after the police arrived at a single-family home on the west side of town, a 40-year-old black woman, Aura Rosser, was dead. She had been shot by police who claimed that she was a threat, due to the fish knife she had in her hands when police arrived.
In Arizona, days after Michael Brown was murdered, mentally ill 50-year-old Michelle Cusseaux who suffered from bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and depression was killed by police.
Police arrived at her door to serve a court order to transport her to an inpatient mental-health facility. She met them with a hammer — and was shot dead.
The most hated of them all
If there is one group of bodies that is hated more than any other, it is the black woman who was assigned male at birth. The black transgender woman faces a special hell every time she dares to walk out her door as her true self. In this year alone, four trans women of color - three Black and one Latina - have been killed in California: 40-year-old Kandy Hall, 31-year-old Yaz’min Shancez, 28-year-old Zoraida ‘Ale’ Reyes, and 28-year-old Tiffany Edwards.
Black and African-American transgender women have a 50 percent greater homicide rate than their white, Latina, and Native American counterparts and were more than three times as likely to experience police violence more than any other group, according to a 2012 report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs on LGBTQ and HIV Affected Hate Violence
Black women being killed, brutalized, and traumatized by this racist system. Did we talk about Lesley McSpadden having to stand on the sidelines and watch her beloved son lying in the streets while his blood - her blood - soaked the ground beneath him? Or Samaria Rice having to choose between riding with her dead 12-year-old son or her handcuffed, terrified 14-year-old daughter who the cops had tackled to the ground when she sought to go to her dying baby brother?
This is by no means an exhaustive list of all those who have died or suffered at the hands of the police or the racist around the way. Indeed, in preparing for this diary I learned about cases that I had not heard of before; enough to fill a dozen or more diaries. We are just not that cherished.
It is my hope that we remember all the victims of racial violence when we talk about those who have been murdered. That the names of Michelle and Aura be given some prominence on the list of those killed by police this year. That we spare a sign or two for them. Their lives mattered, too. I am deeply ashamed that I heard their names and then promptly forgot them like most everyone else did. Thank you for the wake up call, peregrine kate.
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Special tribute by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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This week we lost Robinswing, one of Black Kos' original editors to cancer. Without her writing, Black Kos would never be what it is today. So today, instead of the normal news round up, I thought I would republish the first commentary Robinswing wrote for Black Kos. Rest in peace Robinswing, Earth lost a true champion of social justice, but heaven gained an angel.
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Commentary
Robinswing, Black Kos Editor
It’s been a tough week for a blackwoman. If my sons had not already done so years ago, the media and its relentless harping on Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama would have tap-danced on my very last nerve.
Then I look up today and see this.
Talk about open season on black males, this is the week that was. I love my brothers and this has been a pretty big dose of black as boogie man manic trying to be depressive. It’s been a week of you can do anything you want to my brothers. I’m not having it. Not any of it.
(SistahSpeak con't.)
I’m working real hard not to get mad. And no, I don’t mean angry, I mean mad. A little anger can be the impetus to change. Mad just makes you lose focus. If there is anything that I need right this minute now, it’s focus. My whole life has lead me to the fierce urgency of this moment in time and I intend to be razor sharp moving into tomorrow. Make no mistake, we are moving into tomorrow but not it seems before we have a chance to stroll down memory lane and the glories of yesteryear when we didn’t have the real possibility of having an African American man as the POTUS.
I just need to take a moment and cry foul. Very foul. Foul most.
So I guess Jeremiah is scary because he is not bound to the narrative of the good white man. Looking at the so-called news coverage, I’m having these Roots flashbacks where the language has been updated but the meaning is essentially “Yazza Bahss.” “I’se musta loss my mine whad wid thinkin’ fo mysef.”
You see any other story puts you in the Kunte get your foot cut-off club. Movement must be restrained. At any cost. This week the forces of darkness tried to claim a two-fer. Wright and Obama. Or more accurately, Obama through Wright. The framing has been a subtle house vs. field. The good vs. the angry. Except that the good might as well be the angry since they know each other. Everybody’s getting’ a whipping. I’ve not allowed myself to forget that this original framing of black men and women during slavery was an attempt to offer those offspring of rape a greater legitimacy. It was an effort to separate into even smaller divisions, the divisions of race. A sub race within the black community. All sorts of black folks were trotted out to confirm the suspicions and affirm the fears of white America this week.
How could this man be a friend to such as Wright? Wright they say is angry. Bad black man.
They kept telling us that it was just wrong for Obama to even know him. Obama shoulda this, he shoulda that. For days on end folks been shoulding on Obama like they win points for who can should upon him most often and with the most creativity.
How dare Rev. Wright suggest that America is anything but the most wonderful place on earth? Everything done by this country has been wonderful and the few, very few mistakes (I’m being sarcastic jus’ so you know) ought not be discussed.
Certainly the folks with 1st Amendment rights don’t look like Jeremiah Wright. Pat Robertson can say anything he likes. Ditto Jerry Falwell and Rod Parsley. Jeremiah Wright...not so much. Hell, not at all.
To hear some of the punditz you would think it outrageous for anyone to suggest that the good folks of the U. S. of A. would ever intentionally harm black folks. Not one of the so called intelligentsia while they were savaging Jeremiah Wright, bothered to mention a forty year history of doing just that.
For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama , were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,”1 their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”
It was called the Tuskegee Experiment. It happened.
Too bad no one remembered to bring it up.
I ‘m feeing some Amistad right about now. See myself standing on the shoulders of all my relatives since the beginning of time and together we are all shouting... Give us free! Give us free! This is a moment of fierce energy.
I don’t know how to work roots or cast a spell. Wish I did. I’d love to have a magic wand that I could wave across the faces of those who hate without reason in this season of silly. I would like to think that my fundamental human decency would use my powers for good and I would turn those cowardly, hate-filled mongrel carbon units into sentient, compassionate beings. I would too. Second wave. First time I don’t trust myself not to turn them into the texture of their humanity... Rocks. Not grand glorious mountain rocks, but the kind of pebbles that get in your shoes and annoy you. Small, mean, hard rocks
‘Bout the only thing I know how to invoke is the law of Backatcha. It always works. Whatever you have sent out comes Backatcha.
This law guarantees that planting orange trees does not grow cherry trees. What is sown is reaped.
Backatcha!!! All y’all that mean harm. Your day is done. Leave my brothers alone or prepare to meet thyself a little further down the road. Backatcha! Backatcha! Backatcha!
Ah! A blackwoman feels better. Much better.
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Welcome to the Black Kos Community Front Porch, this one is dedicated to Robinswing.