Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Ferguson and Feminism
As we all face our outrage after the Grand Jury's failure to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson, I invite you all to look at the killing of black youth through a different lens than we perhaps typically do. This article and many others strive to show that this is an issue of reproductive rights, a so called "women's issue". As we have discussions of intersectional feminism, it is important to consider the many perspectives and experiences of different feminist issues. As terrifying as the implications of the Grand Jury's decision yesterday are to me, I will never be able to understand that fear as a black mother, terrified to lose her child to racist, unprovoked, violent attacks. We all deserve to make reproductive choices about having or not having children, but that needs to come with certainty that those children will not be feared and attacked for the color of their skin.
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I was looking around a bit to see what I could find relating to a feminist perspective on Ferguson, and I found this collection of critiques collected from various sources:
ReplyDeletehttp://colorlines.com/archives/2014/08/black_feminists_respond_to_ferguson.html
Linked in the article above, is another collection (http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2014-08-black-unarmed-women-girls-without-weapons-killed-law-enforcement/), but of black women who have been shot - many in situations reminiscent of the ways black men have been shot. I found that reading the description of each incident really highlighted a point from the first article, that "...when black women encounter police, we are not given the protections generally afforded to white femininity. Our womanhood does not mitigate the threat of police force."