never assaulted. That’s not a statement about who I am or how I engage; it’s just the luck of the draw. There’s a tendency to assume that the women who do have negative interactions are at fault, but if you can be shot standing still or asleep in your own home, can be brutalized for seeking help, then it would seem that engaging the police at all is inherently risky.
I live in a city where we sit on a porch or in the park on warm nights. Should socializing with my neighbors include the risk of death? Some of the best moments of my life have included hanging out in the park with friends. Just shooting the shit, you know? Have we been loud? Probably. But there’s a reason it was an off-duty cop new to the neighborhood and not a patrol car that encountered Rekia Boyd. People who grow up in the area wouldn’t call the cops over something as mundane as people hanging out in the park. Because they know that any encounter with Chicago police can escalate quickly, and no one wants that on their conscience over some hollering. I don’t believe that a large group of Black bodies equals crime, but I know a lot of people trumpeting on and on about the joys of gentrification who do.
So, there are new neighbors who talk about how great the properties are and how scary the longtime residents are even if they never quite say why they find them so frightening. The cop mistaking a phone at someone’s ear for a gun? That’s part of the same system of “scary Black man” myths that killed Trayvon Martin in Florida. It’s so embedded in America’s collective psyche that we’re criminals that it probably didn’t even occur to the cop who killed Rekia in Chicago to consider that Black people could be out enjoying one of the warmest March days in history, and that their presence shouldn’t be a reason to suspect anything more than an impromptu block party. No weapons were recovered at the scene, a woman is dead, and a man is injured and has been charged with assault for standing outside talking on his phone. That’s what it means to be Black in America. That’s what it means to be a Black woman in America. When annoying a new neighbor carries the risk of being shot, the question isn’t whether gun violence is a feminist issue; the question is why mainstream feminism isn’t doing more to address the problem.
In order to build that bright feminist future, we need to invest in becoming the kind of society where resolutions to disputes, safety concerns, and crimes aren’t reliant on someone’s access to a weapon. That means shifting our cultural assumptions about what constitutes safety, as well as changing our public and private policies to minimize the overreliance on violence as a solution. We need to be willing to accept that a legacy of bigotry means that moving to a new place requires you to understand that everyone has a right to be there, to have their culture and community. We need to be willing to listen to victims of intimate partner violence, to take their fears seriously the first moment they report feeling uncomfortable or unsafe, instead of invalidating or second-guessing them because we think someone looks harmless. As a culture, as feminists, as potential and actual victims, we’re often too socially and emotionally entangled with dangerous people to recognize the risk until it is too late. We need to support violence-intervention programs at all levels, and not assume that gun violence is a systemic issue in the inner city and episodic everywhere else.
We also need to stop normalizing hate and stop assuming hate speech is harmless, regardless of who it targets or who says it. While it is true that not everyone who makes bigoted comments will go on to commit violent acts, our normalization of that kind of hideous rhetoric serves as tacit permission for the people with those views to escalate to violence. Intervening early can save lives. It’s not about bubbles (liberal or otherwise); it is about treating gun violence as a community health problem and devoting resources to curing it.
It’s time to treat domestic violence and hate speech as the neon red flags that they are and take the necessary steps to reduce the risks instead of hoping that