When Deaths Are Silenced — The Systematic Omission and Misrepresentation of Black women as Victims of Police Brutality in the US
Black women killed by police in the United States are suspiciously absent in media reporting on the topic of police brutality. The representations of Black women as victims of police violence that do make it into mainstream media, describe the women in stereotypical and problematic tropes. These tropes in effect work to ‘other’ the women in question, and uphold a racial hierarchy.
Lærke Cecilie Anbert
Police killings of Black[1] men have recently been the focus of much media attention and public debate. Names such as Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, and more recently, Philandro Castro and Alton Sterling, have been repeated in mainstream media and shouted at demonstrations calling for an end to police brutality. Although Black men suffer disproportionately from police violence in the US, other minorities, including Black women, are absent from most media coverage of the topic[2].
Kendra James, Gabriella Nevarez, Natasha McKenna, Miriam Carey, Shelly Frey, Tanisha Anderson, Michelle Cusseaux, Alexia Christian, Rekyia Boyd, Tarika Wilson and Korryn Gaines — The names of just some of the Black women killed in police encounters in the United States in the last couple of years. Though they have been killed under similar circumstances as the men mentioned above, representations of them and their deaths have been absent — both in mainstream media and civil rights campaigns such as Black Lives Matter. The few accounts of Black women as victims of police violence that are reported in mainstream media, are represented in stereotypical and harmful ways.
Hypersexualised visibility
The US government does not provide a public record of violent police encounters, and the precise number of deaths or violence by the police is not known. According to the Guardian, police has killed 306 Black people in 2015. However, few of these deaths have made national news or sparked major protests, and those that have mostly involve Black men. For example, while the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in Baltimore on April 12th, 2015, drew major media interest and protests throughout the country, the shooting of Mya Hall by law enforcement only weeks prior in the same city yielded little to no comparable response.
Mya Hall, a transgender woman, was shot and killed when she took a wrong exit, entering a road leading to the Baltimore headquarters of NSA (National Security Agency). Her failure to stop when commanded to do so by NSA agents caused them to shoot and kill her. Hall’s death did not lead to major national protests among Black Lives Matter campaigners or others, and her name did not trend on social media in ways similar to Black men like Eric Garner’s or Mike Brown’s.
The reporting on the death of Hall cannot be understood without acknowledging the intersecting experiences of oppression directed towards her[3]. Hall represents a marginalised group, not only as a Black woman, but also as a transgendered person. Although some media outlets did report the incident, most news coverage describing the death of Hall failed to mention that wrong turns at this exit are a frequent event, rarely leading to shootings; while several articles included transphobic comments and misgendered Hall. For example, the Washington Post described Hall and her friend who was in the car with her, as men “dressed in women’s clothing” in what was a “strange twist” to the story. The article further emphasised that Hall was a sex worker living on the streets. Considering that Hall was killed while driving, not while on the streets, and that she had had no prior contact with the officers that could have indicated to them that she was a sex worker or transgender, it is significant that this part of the story is emphasised.
From an intersectional perspective it is not possible to separate the oppressive structures leading to the shooting of Hall, but it is important to note that several articles have failed to connect this case to issues of race, while Hall’s profession as a sex worker have been overemphasised. The representation of Hall in this way invokes historical connotations of representations of Black women as hypersexual and one-dimensional. This further dissociates her death from the larger debate about police brutality thereby contributing to an invisibilisation of Black women in representations of police brutality.
When Hall’s death is connected to her transgender identity and her sex work, the cause of death is represented as an individual, rather than systemic problem, indeed as something that she could have avoided. This simultaneously leaves oppressive intersecting structures of racism and sexism unexamined.
Exoticisation and eroticisation of those deemed ‘Other’ are not new phenomena. Throughout recorded history the fascination in ‘the Other’ has been documented in art, advertising and literature. Black women have historically been represented as hypersexual, while their personalities have been rendered largely invisible through a spectacular focus on dissected body parts.
This was for example apparent in the popular human exhibitions, especially between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. People from colonies and distant countries were brought to Europe and North America to be installed at fairgrounds and amusement parks for the pleasure of the locals. Black women, for example the now iconic Sara Baartman[4] were represented as having large genitalia, buttocks and breasts and this was in turn interpreted as representative of an uncontrollable and untamed female sexuality.
The hypersexualisation of Black women can be linked to colonial discourses and orientalism — the projection of their sexuality as uncontrollable, show them as in need of guidance by imperial projects. The control over representations of sexuality thus confirms white privilege by marking the body as a primary site for interpreting race, gender, sex, age and class, and linking these markers to intellectual and sexual properties. Black women are often rendered within stereotypical tropes, in effect reducing them to one-dimensional characters, in a language that is uncomfortably close to that used to justify colonial expansion and racism. Representations of Black women encountering police brutality are structured around similar lines, as apparent in the oversexed representation of Mya Hall.
Absent or stereotypically visible
Although marginalised and misrepresented, Hall’s death was covered by a few media sources. Comparatively, most Black women killed in encounters with police receive very limited media coverage and are never represented as being the spark that sets off national protests.
Melissa Harris-Perry argues that Black women become visible in news coverage only when they fit into a well-known stereotype. This is exemplified through a description of a male news anchor asking Michelle Obama in an interview why there are so many angry Black women, he says: “Look at the image of angry black women on television… And who are the black women you see on local news at night in cities all over the country. They’re usually angry about something… so you don’t really have a profile of non-angry black women.”. Harris-Perry emphasises that the male anchor is incapable of recognising Black women outside of the stereotype of the angry Black woman. He further ignores the fact that Black women are often encountered in the news as local anchors and reporters at networks across the country, or indeed as the first lady sitting across from him.
Following Harris-Perry it might be possible to explain why news coverage conceptualised the death of Mya Hall within a highly sexualised framework. The countless other women whose stories have not surfaced, might be ignored or invisible because they cannot be recognised as long as they do not fit within particular well-known stereotypes.
This is for example the case with the police shooting of Shantel Davis in 2012 following a car chase caused by erratic driving. Though the case did not receive much coverage, the few articles that do exist, portray Davis as an angry woman with “an extensive criminal record”. The New York Daily News describes Davis as part of a violent crew of “brutes” that had held a man hostage and threatened to “torture him” as they robbed his apartment. Davis is thus represented as aggressive and a known criminal while the fact that her death occurred unrelated to the criminal charges is omitted until the end of the article.
The fact that she was unarmed is accompanied with a sentence stating that she is “no stranger to run-ins with the law” thus again portraying Davis as violent and aggressive. Davis is thereby represented in the stereotypical image of the angry Black woman. Similar to the representation of Mya Hall, Davis’s death is represented as an individual case, rather than within the on-going debate about police brutality thereby dissociating it from oppressive structures.
The cases presented here thus suggest that Black women encountering police violence appear in stereotypical tropes, or not at all.
Reproducing a racial and gendered hierarchy
The ‘Othering’ of Black women in representations of police brutality is not only symbolically significant but also has consequences for future police encounters as representations shape perceptions of reality. Even if mainstream media does not tell us what to think, media representations do tell us what to think about.
Thus, the missing representations of Black women as victims of police brutality contribute to the understanding that Black women are not actual victims of police brutality because this is not represented as something to think about. Black people in general and Black women in particular, occupy a narrow repertoire of roles, and are more often than not represented within stereotypical imagery. Thus, when Black women are represented in stereotypical tropes, a mainstream belief in the existence of these tropes is reinforced, in effect upholding a racial/racist hierarchy.
According to Nancy Scheper-Hughes, all violence is sustained: “by the passively averted gaze”. The missing representations of Black women as victims of police brutality can thus be understood as sustaining this violence. Further, the underrepresentation of Black women in encounters with law enforcement leaves them under-protected in future encounters as neither law enforcement nor the general public will recognise this group as vulnerable. In particular, representations of deaths of Black women as individual cases rather than as connected to the debate of racism within law enforcement can prove to be an obstacle in recognising the systematic and particular oppression directed towards Black women.
Police brutality and racism in the US
Often, cases of police brutality against people of colour have been tied to racism. This is not surprising, since the first state-sponsored police units in the South were slave patrols, consisting of white men deployed to control slaves. The connection between racist ideology and the US police was furthered by Ku Klux Klan’s strategy to infiltrate police forces in the post-slavery South and the common practice of law enforcement turning a blind eye to lynching, or even aiding in the acts. Although steps have been taken towards improving public relations and minimise racial profiling, the police, to this day, remains associated with racist ideologies.
Documentation of police brutality, from the beating of Rodney King in 1991, to the recent video of the shooting of Philandro Castro has sparked debate and questioned the inherent racism in the police force. Currently, interest in covering and accessing information about police brutality is growing. This is illustrated by a growing discussion of police brutality on social media, the 2013 release of a documentary about Oscar Grant who was killed by police in 2009, and the fact that two major newspapers, the Guardian and the Washington Post since 2015 have monitored deaths by the hand of law enforcement.
After the indictment of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Black boy, in 2012, national protests erupted and a social movement under the name of Black Lives Matter started. The movement aims to draw attention to racist and structural oppression met by Black people who are overrepresented in violent encounters with police, in prisons across the nation, and in poverty statistics.
Notes
[1] I follow Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins and Catharine Mackinnon in capitalising the word ”Black”, though I will leave ”white” un-capitalised (Crenshaw 1991, Collins 2004, Mackinnon 1982). This is to recognise that Black is not merely a skin colour, “but a heritage, an experience, a cultural and personal identity, the meaning of which becomes specifically stigmatic and/or glorious and/or ordinary under specific social conditions” (Mackinnon 1982).
[2] It should be noted that the deaths of indigenous Americans, and Latinx are equally unknown and their encounters with police brutality are vastly underrepresented (Embrick 2015:6).
[3] While I acknowledge that an intersectional approach is necessary, the focus in this particular article is to draw focus on Mya Hall’s death in the framework of police brutality directed against Black women. Other researchers have focused more in depth on issues of oppression directed against transgender women (cf. Sokoloff & Dupont 2005, Moran & Sharpe 2004).
[4] There is no existing record of what name Baartman was born with, but it is known that she was named Sartjiee when she worked as a domestic slave in Cape Town. Later she was baptised and known under the name Sara. Since it is assumed that Sara’s baptism was voluntary, I will refer to that name (Crais & Scully 2009).
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