#SayHerName: Black Girls and Women in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter

• In Event: 42.038 - Black Like Me: Urban Education and State Violence in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter

Abstract

The #SayHerName (SHN) campaign calls for the remembrance and re-humanization of Black girls and women who have been slain or brutalized by police and state actors. SHN is framed as a contemporary iteration of Black Feminist activism against state sanctioned violence. Black Feminism provides a conceptual lens to focus attention upon the myriad violations heaped upon the lives of Black and Brown girls and women in American society. A Black Feminist discourse analysis provides incisive inquiry and insight into the significance of SHN as a social movement and the continuity of ideas, principles and reform strategies within it. #SayHerName emerged as a re-humanization campaign to disentangle Black and Brown girls from multiple oppressions, those formed in and maintained by the intersections of race, gender and class inequalities. This paper centralizes how Black women’s stories about state violence contribute to theorizing Black Feminist pedagogies.

Black women and girls have been suffering from a failed criminal justice system in ways that are similar to and distinct from Black men and boys. Until very recently, Black and Brown women and girls have become the unseen victims of state violence. The SHN campaign catapulted the egregious state violence against Black women and girls to national prominence, while coalescing with the aims of Black Lives Matter. When Black women and girls’ issues are centered, included and given voice, then all humanity is given an opportunity to truly flourish. Black women’s and girls’ stories of abuse and resilience inspire theorizing toward a Black Feminist Pedagogy (BFP). BFP re-frames the purpose of education to resist the status quo. It advances a process of teaching and learning that uses critical inquiry and problem posing to deepen students’ understanding of themselves and human existence, the study of human societies and cultures in a complex, globalized world. BFP is rooted in applying diverse knowledges for the purposes of human thriving and freedom across the borders of personal, political and societal differences. Therefore, academic training functions in service to the larger aims of human inquiry about persistent problems that needs to be understood and ameliorated.

Author

• Angela N. Campbell, Cabrini College