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Masked Violence against Black Women and Girls
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Journal Article
Masked Violence against Black Women and Girls
2021
Overview
In May 2020, mass media outlets widely reported the murder of twenty-seven-year-old Breonna Taylor in Louisville, KY. Two months later, in July 2020, some news outlets also reported the story of Grace, a fifteen-year-old Black girl in Michigan who was incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic for not completing her online schoolwork. These two incidents are connected: violence against Black girls in schools and classrooms is inextricably linked to the anti-Black state violence that Black women and girls face in society and in their homes. The violence that Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Korryn Gaines, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and many more have experienced results from the same interlocking systems of oppression that marginalize the suffering of Black girls in schools. However, there is a lack of exploration about how these systems - schools, criminal justice, juvenile justice, law enforcement, and media - operate together and simultaneously shape and enact violence against Black women and girls.Assault and violence against Black women and girls that result in murder are masked forms of Black death. Information about their deaths is rarely shared across mass media platforms. Brittney Cooper argues that there is much less outrage surrounding Black death when it is Black women and girls who are murdered. She suggests that one reason is that they are often killed in their homes rather than in public spaces and therefore there is less public recognition. Because their murders often occur in containment and confinement, Black women and girls' narratives become hidden, covered up, and written off in ways that deny their victimization and justify the violence they face. I have come to understand these kinds of \"erasures\" as endemic to the structure of this anti-Black world, which only sees us when we are \"dead and dying.\" Indeed, we would not know about Breonna Taylor's life and that she was an \"essential\" worker if she had not been killed. A recent 20/20 documentary segment about her murder shows how Breonna Taylor was at first considered a suspect in her own murder case for months, which diminished the availability of accurate information about her death. Criminal legal systems, law enforcement, and mass media outlets mask the violence against Black women and girls when they withhold or obfuscate information about their deaths in order to refrain from impugning their murderers as well as to position the murdered women and girls as non-human and therefore deserving of violence.The current moment has also sparked a heightened awareness of the ways Black women and girls are harmed by anti-Black violence through various oppressive structures. Recent literature suggests that Black girls experience higher rates of exclusionary discipline (suspensions and expulsions), have more frequent interactions with law enforcement in schools resulting in school-related arrests, and face verbal as well as physical violence from security officers, school staff, and administrators, starting as early as preschool. It is critically important to address how police violence against Black women and girls is a type of \"masked\" violence and social death that young Black girls experience in schools. While more recent discourses suggest Black girls' experiences with law enforcement and the physical violence in schools warrant our attention, so do the ways they disproportionately experience quotidian assaults that are often overlooked. Drawing on my study of middle-school Black girls in predominantly white suburban schools, I specifically examine the mundane, everyday forms of anti-Blackness, or \"anti-Black girl violence,\" to address the specificity of school violence Black girls face. Seeing school practices through the lens of anti-Black-girl violence, I argue that schools perpetuate and maintain anti-Blackness against young Black girls through \"reformed\" school policies and practices enacted by staff, teachers, and administrators in specific ways that mask Black girls' suffering, thus creating an environment in which their lives, their feelings, and their pain do not matter.
