I Don’t Want to Die in Your Cell: Black Women and Girls as Victims of State-Sanctioned Violence

• In Event: Victims as Offenders, Victimization under Correctional Supervision and State-Sanctioned Violence

Abstract

Whether Black women and girls are being slammed to the ground or manhandled by police, thrown in jail and found dead in a cell, or shot to death, the criminal justice system has repeatedly shown it has no regard for the Black female body. Black women and girls continue to battle the intersecting oppression of race, gender and justice while living in a society that routinely derogates them. This paper, which is based on research I have completed for my book on Black women and police violence, critically examines the multiple ways in which Black women and girls experience state-sanctioned violence. I argue that their victimization is a function of the roles that race and gender play in the dehumanization of Black women and girls, and ensures that they will never survive in a criminal justice system that victimizes them because it was never designed to protect them. Furthermore, interviews I have conducted with relatives of some Black women killed by police illustrate how these families are also victims of state-sanctioned violence when they are left behind to fight for justice from the same system that killed their loved ones, and are further victimized when justice does not prevail.

Author

• Breea Willingham, SUNY Plattsburgh