Invisible No More

This was a banner for the #SayHerName vigil in NY

In Invisible No More, Andrea Ritchie brings forward the invisible stories of women of color’s interactions with the police. She discusses the violence against women of color and gender nonconforming people by military authorities and law enforcement agents being a tool of continued colonization.

Ritchie talks about the police encounters of Sandra Lee Circle Bear and Sandra Bland and how women of color’s lives have no value evident by the dehumanizing treatment they experience at the hands of officials. Not only do they not have value to the military authorities and the officers but also within our society and within social justice movements, their lives are not acknowledged. The Say Her Name movement is an example of the re-integration of women of color into the narrative in the movement of justice for black lives. When I first saw #SayHerName on social media, I didn’t give much thought to its origin because I thought of it as another “social justice hashtag”. I thought it was more about white conservatives not wanting to acknowledge what happened to Sandra Bland; I didn’t realize that women of color were also made invisible within their own communities and how deep the Say Her Name movement was actually going. 

*I'm including this TedTalk by Kimberlé Crenshaw titled The Urgency of Intersectionality. It's only 20 min!

The concept of violence against women of color as a tool of colonization reminds me of a case in Canada where almost 1200 aboriginal women were reported missing over 30 years. Later, about 1000 of those women were found to be murder victims. One thousand Native women. In an Andrea Smith reading, she talks about how one way white supremacy works, is through the idea of genocide and the structure of colonialism and this is exactly what happens here. Sexual violence against women is also a way of colonizing the land through the colonization of women’s bodies. When violence against women is enacted and the native people begin “disappearing”, there is more justification to non-indigenous people colonizing and controlling the land because the indigenous people, not only no longer pose a threat, but simply don’t exist.

How can we critique social movements that are not gender-inclusive?