in sixth grade is common, but only some communities are assigned a narrative that makes it about being too smart, and not about more mundane things like clothes, hygiene, or social awkwardness.
I know that everyone’s road to acceptance and embrace of their culture is not the same, and that a collective understanding of what it means to succeed at all costs is ultimately impossible. But as we talk about feminism and Black Girl Magic and the folks who make a way out of no way, we need to welcome the idea that those who pushed us ahead weren’t valuable just because of what that did for us as individuals. They have and had value in their own right. The shadow economies they build are about survival and success, but they are also about making sure that no matter what happens, the future is always an option. White savior narratives embedded in feminist rhetoric tend to position the people who don’t get out as not being worth the effort of engagement, of needing to be led toward progressive ideologies instead of understanding that the conversations that need to happen between the proverbial hood and the hills are ones between equals who have had to face different obstacles to arrive at the same destination.
MISSING AND MURDERED
I’ve technically gone missing several times in my life. When I was eight, it was falling asleep at a friend’s house during recess. When I was sixteen, it was getting in the car with an ex I thought I could trust and drinking something that knocked me out for over a hundred miles. The first time, my teacher noticed that my friend and I were missing. The second time, no one noticed, but I came away from the experience wiser, if not unscathed. I might have gone missing a third time in my early twenties while walking in Mainz, Germany.
But by then, I was no longer in the business of ignoring my instincts. Not in the tiny dark tunnel under the bridge between Mainz and Mainz-Kastel. Not in the middle of the night when a man blocked the exit with his car and demanded I join him for a party. My German was terrible, but it was enough for me to understand that it wasn’t a party I wanted to attend. I ran at him, ran across the hood of his car, and perhaps my foot grazed his face on my way to safety. I wasn’t sure if I was in any real danger in the tunnel under the bridge, but I didn’t want to find out. Fortunately, it turned out that a lot of luck, street smarts, and a well-placed kick can save you sometimes. I was scared, lectured by a Turkish grandmother, but I got to go back to my apartment that night.
I can’t say I never had another scare like that; I’m a Chicago girl, and for a number of reasons, it is easy to be Black and go missing here. Almost as easy as it is to be Indigenous and go missing, or to be a Latinx and go missing, to be trans and of color and go missing. Sometimes that means that someone has been murdered and no one knows what happened, because the trail was cold from the start. As a result of Missing White Woman Syndrome, a phenomenon where media coverage of white women who have gone missing blankets the airwaves (sometimes off and on for decades), it’s no surprise that when women disappear from marginalized communities, the issue doesn’t always get a lot of attention. Excuses are made about drugs, risky behavior, or simply that the missing person in question is an adult who likely moved on to someone else somewhere else. Even when the bodies pile up, it is entirely possible that the police will ignore them because of their race.
Right now, in Chicago there are clusters of murdered Black and Brown women whose bodies have been found since 2001 and their murders are largely going unsolved. Chicago police have insisted there is no evidence of a serial killer in action, though in a city with a police murder clearance rate of only 25 percent it’s difficult to assess how much work has been done to solve these crimes. Murder clearance rates are down around the country, with a national average of 59 percent, but Chicago’s is among the lowest in the country. Even though the