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Angela Ritchie: Invisible No More
Jun. 18th, 2018 12:10 amIn her Introduction to Angela Ritchie’s Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, Angela Y. Davis writes:
“Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color is a very important twenty-first-century document. It reminds us how little in the way of material progress has been made during the last century in purging our societies of officially condoned racist violence. At the same time, Andrea Ritchie’s multifaceted and unrelenting antiviolence practice over the last decade, to which her book bears witness, reveals extraordinary progress in the way we conceptualize state violence and antiviolence strategies. She does not urge us simply to add women of color to the list of targets of police violence—a list that is already longer than anyone would wish. She asks us to consider what the vast problem of state violence looks like if we acknowledge how gender and sexuality, disability, and nation are intermeshed with race and class. In other words, Ritchie’s feminist approach reminds us that the job of purging our worlds of racist violence is far more complicated than advocates of simple police reform would have us believe. It is not only Black women and women of color who are “invisible no more” but also the immensity and complexity of the problem of rooting out the nexus of racist violence.”
It is this intersectional approach to the documenting of state violence against women of colour that makes this book so important. The issue is far more deeply embedded in white society than any approach that focuses primarily on police and prison reform can affect. It is part and parcel of whiteness itself, and must be addressed by radical change, not liberal reform. As Mariame Kaba notes in her Introduction, “Today, my organizing work is focused on abolishing police, prisons, and surveillance. It took a long time for me to embrace abolition as praxis. I bought into the idea that more training, more transparency, better community oversight, and prosecuting killer cops would lead to a more just system of policing. I was wrong. The origin story of modern American policing is slave patrols and union busting. A system created to contain and control me as a Black woman cannot be reformed.”
In this book, Ritchie exposes state violence against black, Indigenous, and other women of colour, starting with the early history of policing as a means of controlling the lives of Indigenous people and African-descended slaves. She gives voice to the many black and Indigenous women who experienced sexual violence at the hands of American soldiers, slave patrollers, and later, police officers. She also examines the gender-specific forms of border policing waged against immigrant women throughout American history, many of which are based on, and reinforce, racist stereotypes of hypersexuality, promiscuity, indiscriminate child-bearing, criminality, and sexual and gender non-conformity among women of colour.
She painstakingly traces the links between race, disability and sexual and gender non-conformity, demonstrating how all are factors placing women, trans men, and queer and non-binary people of colour at high risk from violence, and frequently sexualised violence from police and other state agents. She looks at laws and policing strategies, from anti-loitering and anti-prostitution laws to “broken windows” and “quality of life” policing to child welfare and domestic violence interventions as sites of racial profiling, invasion of privacy, gender role policing and violence.
Yet in this painful litany of injustice upon injustice, there is also a record of resistance. “There is no question that the shroud of invisibility around Black women’s and women of color’s experiences of police violence has been irrevocably lifted in the post-Ferguson moment and movement. It has been forcefully pushed aside by young women on the front lines in Ferguson and by bloggers and organizers across the country who were speaking out in the days and months following Mike Brown’s killing, who were outraged at Dajerria Becton’s assault in McKinney, who rose up in widespread protest following Sandra Bland’s death in police custody, and who unapologetically demanded attention and action around #AssaultatSpringValleyHigh and the rape of thirteen Black women by Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, and who demanded justice for Rekia Boyd.”
But as each new day’s newspapers and twitter feeds inform us, the state’s assault on black, Indigenous and other racially marginalised women, trans men and non-gender conforming people continues, and so must the resistance.
“Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color is a very important twenty-first-century document. It reminds us how little in the way of material progress has been made during the last century in purging our societies of officially condoned racist violence. At the same time, Andrea Ritchie’s multifaceted and unrelenting antiviolence practice over the last decade, to which her book bears witness, reveals extraordinary progress in the way we conceptualize state violence and antiviolence strategies. She does not urge us simply to add women of color to the list of targets of police violence—a list that is already longer than anyone would wish. She asks us to consider what the vast problem of state violence looks like if we acknowledge how gender and sexuality, disability, and nation are intermeshed with race and class. In other words, Ritchie’s feminist approach reminds us that the job of purging our worlds of racist violence is far more complicated than advocates of simple police reform would have us believe. It is not only Black women and women of color who are “invisible no more” but also the immensity and complexity of the problem of rooting out the nexus of racist violence.”
It is this intersectional approach to the documenting of state violence against women of colour that makes this book so important. The issue is far more deeply embedded in white society than any approach that focuses primarily on police and prison reform can affect. It is part and parcel of whiteness itself, and must be addressed by radical change, not liberal reform. As Mariame Kaba notes in her Introduction, “Today, my organizing work is focused on abolishing police, prisons, and surveillance. It took a long time for me to embrace abolition as praxis. I bought into the idea that more training, more transparency, better community oversight, and prosecuting killer cops would lead to a more just system of policing. I was wrong. The origin story of modern American policing is slave patrols and union busting. A system created to contain and control me as a Black woman cannot be reformed.”
In this book, Ritchie exposes state violence against black, Indigenous, and other women of colour, starting with the early history of policing as a means of controlling the lives of Indigenous people and African-descended slaves. She gives voice to the many black and Indigenous women who experienced sexual violence at the hands of American soldiers, slave patrollers, and later, police officers. She also examines the gender-specific forms of border policing waged against immigrant women throughout American history, many of which are based on, and reinforce, racist stereotypes of hypersexuality, promiscuity, indiscriminate child-bearing, criminality, and sexual and gender non-conformity among women of colour.
She painstakingly traces the links between race, disability and sexual and gender non-conformity, demonstrating how all are factors placing women, trans men, and queer and non-binary people of colour at high risk from violence, and frequently sexualised violence from police and other state agents. She looks at laws and policing strategies, from anti-loitering and anti-prostitution laws to “broken windows” and “quality of life” policing to child welfare and domestic violence interventions as sites of racial profiling, invasion of privacy, gender role policing and violence.
Yet in this painful litany of injustice upon injustice, there is also a record of resistance. “There is no question that the shroud of invisibility around Black women’s and women of color’s experiences of police violence has been irrevocably lifted in the post-Ferguson moment and movement. It has been forcefully pushed aside by young women on the front lines in Ferguson and by bloggers and organizers across the country who were speaking out in the days and months following Mike Brown’s killing, who were outraged at Dajerria Becton’s assault in McKinney, who rose up in widespread protest following Sandra Bland’s death in police custody, and who unapologetically demanded attention and action around #AssaultatSpringValleyHigh and the rape of thirteen Black women by Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, and who demanded justice for Rekia Boyd.”
But as each new day’s newspapers and twitter feeds inform us, the state’s assault on black, Indigenous and other racially marginalised women, trans men and non-gender conforming people continues, and so must the resistance.