Esteemed scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw ensures the stories of Black women murdered by the police are not forgotten and lost to history with her new book #Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories Of Police Violence And Public Silence. Crenshaw underscores the importance of the book during this current revival of historical revisionism.
” First, the families lose these women, and then the fact that they’ve lost them becomes lost to their communities, becomes lost to history, becomes lost to the movement,” Crenshaw told NBC News during a sit-down interview.
“And we are seeing the consequences of that erasure.”
Co-authored by Crenshaw with the help of the organization she heads, the African-American Policy Forum, the book centers on the often marginalized stories of Black women killed by the police.
According to the book’s listing on the Haymarket Books website, “Black women, girls, and femmes as young as seven and as old as ninety-three have been killed by the police, though we rarely hear their names or learn their stories. Breonna Taylor, Alberta Spruill, Rekia Boyd, Shantel Davis, Shelly Frey, Kayla Moore, Kyam Livingston, Miriam Carey, Michelle Cusseaux, and Tanisha Anderson are among the many lives that should have been.”
Janelle Monae, whose 2021 song shares the book’s subtitle and helped keep some of those stories alive, wrote the foreword for the book.
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According to the AAPF, #SayHerName is a campaign created in December 2014 by the organization and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies to keep the focus on Black women’s extrajudicial murders by the police. The groups released a report in May of 2015 entitled Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, in partnership with Andrea Ritchie, outlining both the goals and objectives of the movement the groups created. In large part, the book draws on this report and research, and the reason for its creation is summed up in the closing paragraph on the AAPF site: “Including Black women and girls in police violence and gender violence discourses sends the powerful message that indeed all Black lives matter. If our collective outrage around cases of police violence is meant to serve as a warning to the state that its agents cannot kill without consequence, our silence around the cases of Black women and girls sends the message that certain deaths do not merit repercussions.”
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