I could be any of the women we have seen brutalized or killed by police in recent years as videos proliferate. I could have been that little girl down the street who was shot in the ankle while I wrote the draft of this chapter, or I could be Rekia Boyd, a young Black woman in Chicago who happened to be standing next to a man holding a phone to his ear when an off-duty police officer, mistaking the phone for a gun, opened fire and shot her in the head. The man with the phone was shot in the hand. Rekia died at the scene. She committed no crime, and the officer who shot her served not a single day in jail despite admitting he shot over his shoulder as he drove away. He wasn’t working, he was a newcomer to the area who owned property nearby, and still the gun in his hand took a young woman’s life.
I can’t tell you how many times I have been in contact with police officers over the years. I’ve just been lucky about the kind of officer I have encountered. I have been verbally abused by a police officer, threatened, harassed, but never assaulted. That’s not a statement about who I am or how I engage; it’s just the luck of the draw. There’s a tendency to assume that the women who do have negative interactions are at fault, but if you can be shot standing still or asleep in your own home, can be brutalized for seeking help, then it would seem that engaging the police at all is inherently risky.
I live in a city where we sit on a porch or in the park on warm nights. Should socializing with my neighbors include the risk of death? Some of the best moments of my life have included hanging out in the park with friends. Just shooting the shit, you know? Have we been loud? Probably. But there’s a reason it was an off-duty cop new to the neighborhood and not a patrol car that encountered Rekia Boyd. People who grow up in the area wouldn’t call the cops over something as mundane as people hanging out in the park. Because they know that any encounter with Chicago police can escalate quickly, and no one wants that on their conscience over some hollering. I don’t believe that a large group of Black bodies equals crime, but I know a lot of people trumpeting on and on about the joys of gentrification who do.
So, there are new neighbors who talk about how great the properties are and how scary the longtime residents are even if they never quite say why they find them so frightening. The cop mistaking a phone at someone’s ear for a gun? That’s part of the same system of “scary Black man” myths that killed Trayvon Martin in Florida. It’s so embedded in America’s collective psyche that we’re criminals that it probably didn’t even occur to the cop who killed Rekia in Chicago to consider that Black people could be out enjoying one of the warmest March days in history, and that their presence shouldn’t be a reason to suspect anything more than an impromptu block party. No weapons were recovered at the scene, a woman is dead, and a man is injured and has been charged with assault for standing outside talking on his phone. That’s what it means to be Black in America. That’s what it means to be a Black woman in America. When annoying a new neighbor carries the risk of being shot, the question isn’t whether gun violence is a feminist issue; the question is why mainstream feminism isn’t doing more to address the problem.
In order to build that bright feminist future, we need to invest in becoming the kind of society where resolutions to disputes, safety concerns, and crimes aren’t reliant on someone’s access to a weapon. That means shifting our cultural assumptions about what constitutes safety, as well as changing our public and private policies to minimize the overreliance on violence as a solution. We need to be willing to accept that a legacy of bigotry means that moving to a new place requires you to understand that everyone has a right to be there, to have their culture and community. We need to be willing to listen to victims of intimate partner violence, to take their fears seriously the first moment they report feeling uncomfortable or unsafe, instead of invalidating or second-guessing them because we think someone looks harmless. As a culture, as feminists, as potential and actual victims, we’re often too socially and emotionally entangled with dangerous people to recognize the risk until it is too late. We need to support violence-intervention programs at all levels, and not assume that gun violence is a systemic issue in the inner city and episodic everywhere else.
We also need to stop normalizing hate and stop assuming hate speech is harmless, regardless of who it targets or who says it. While it is true that not everyone who makes bigoted comments will go on to commit violent acts, our normalization of that kind of hideous rhetoric serves as tacit permission for the people with those views to escalate to violence. Intervening early can save lives. It’s not about bubbles (liberal or otherwise); it is about treating gun violence as a community health problem and devoting resources to curing it.
It’s time to treat domestic violence and hate speech as the neon red flags that they are and take the necessary steps to reduce the risks instead of hoping that they’ll go away. It’s time to treat gun violence like a feminist issue—not just when it plays out in domestic violence or mass shooting but also when it impacts marginalized communities. We will either work to make it possible for all of us to be safe from gun violence or none of us will be.
HUNGER
My first marriage ended in divorce, and afterward, I was on food stamps, I had a state-funded medical card that gave me and my son access to medical care, and I was living in public housing. I was fortunate at the time that this particular set of social safety nets allowed me to leave my abusive ex and stay gone. I could raise my child in relative comfort and safety. Today, many of those safety nets have been greatly diminished, and in the case of public housing, it has nearly fallen away completely in many areas. We know in the abstract that poverty is a feminist issue. Indeed, we think of it as a feminist issue for other countries, and that we are in a place where bootstraps and grit can be enough to get anyone who wants it bad enough out of poverty. But the reality is that it takes a lot more than gumption. I was lucky: I’m educated. My grammar school and high school curricula prepared me for a college education. I joined the army to pay for my degree, and since I was in Illinois, a state that has a tuition-free Veteran Grant Program for state schools, it didn’t matter that I was doing this in the days before the GI Bill paid enough to be useful.
I was poor, and it wasn’t easy, but I had the handholds it can take to be upwardly mobile when you’re marginalized and life is working against you in other ways. A childcare subsidy meant that when my ex didn’t pay child support, my child was still able to attend the high-quality preschool on my college campus. I got a bachelor’s degree in four years, went on to work full-time, and took a host of other perfectly boring but necessary steps that brought me to where I am today, with an advanced education, a wonderful family, and a career that I enjoy. If this were the usual heartwarming, feel-good tale about single parenting and poverty, you might come away thinking, “Well if she could do it, why can’t everyone else?” And you might expect me to say, “It was hard, but I learned so much, and I remember that time fondly.”
What I remember is hunger. And crying when I couldn’t afford a Christmas tree. I remember being afraid that I couldn’t make it. That I would lose my child because I couldn’t provide. It’s hard to take a rich woman’s children; it is remarkably easy to take a poor woman’s, though. As a society, we tend to treat hunger as a moral failing, as a sign that someone is lacking in a fundamental way. We remember to combat hunger around the holidays, but we judge the mothers who have to rely on food banks, free or reduced lunches at school, or food stamps for not being able to stand against a problem that baffles governments around the world. Indeed, we treat poverty itself like a crime, like the women experiencing it are making bad choices for themselves and their children on purpose. We ignore that they don’t have a good choice available, that they’re making decisions in the space where the handholds are tenuous or nonexistent.