picking off the weakest member of a herd of gazelles. In the face of this kind of violence, we have to be willing to work together; we have to be willing to stand and fight together.
Perhaps the best example of what I have in mind is found in the solutions that some women in India and Kenya who were victims of gender-based violence have found. They band together, prioritizing their safety above broader societal narratives about the need for a patriarch to protect them. True feminist solidarity across racial lines means being willing to protect each other, speaking up when the missing women are not from your community, and calling out the ways that predatory violence can span multiple communities. We must confront the dangers in our own communities, schools, and churches, in order to address this crisis. We have to invest in truly being our sister’s keeper. To take action when we see each other in trouble and step in to back those who are forced to defend themselves with violence as well.
Carceral solutions to violence are a complicated topic. It’s easy to think of arresting predators as a solution, yet laws that govern the state’s response to violence are more likely to be used against victims than against villains. And there’s the sad fact that respectability dynamics don’t just impact how the state responds to reports that someone is missing; they impact how the state responds to those who may have harmed them. But when we center on the safety of those who are most vulnerable to violence, when we make it a priority to prevent violence from occurring or escalating, then there’s a greater chance of a cultural shift toward reducing the danger to all. This is where we fall into the sticky, hard work of challenging not just the ownership narratives propagated by the patriarchy but also into the harder work of undoing the cultural messaging that privileges predators until they have done grievous harm.
We have to be willing to use violence diversion programs more liberally than we use probation, have to have a program that starts in school to unteach the normalization of violence against women.
FEAR AND FEMINISM
In college, I took a class called the Psychology of Sexual Harassment, taught by a woman by the name of Dr. Louise Fitzgerald. It was a good class filled with information that helped me later when I was sexually harassed at work. It couldn’t protect me, but it could prepare me, and for that I am grateful. What I remember most about that class was the day a white girl piped up as we were talking about Anita Hill and asked, “Why do Black women always support Black men?” She was offended that more Black women hadn’t acted in what she perceived as a feminist fashion and rallied to support Anita Hill. She ignored (or more likely didn’t know) that many Black women had rallied behind Hill. What she knew was that all the faces she saw supporting Hill were white women, and for several long, aggravating moments, she attempted to craft a narrative about male privilege and patriarchal attitudes that was completely race blind. It fell apart under the barrage of facts that followed from me, from the Black male TA, and even from one of the other white girls in the class.
In retrospect, it was probably a little upsetting for her, being challenged by so many people at once. We brought up not only the support of Black women for Anita Hill but also media narratives, racism, and the danger of assuming that her memory of a snippet of history was the whole story. At best the conversation was spirited, more likely it felt hostile, and yet the doorway to hostility wasn’t opened by the people challenging her assertions. Her question lacked nuance; her follow-up comments laid bare her belief that somehow Black women weren’t doing feminism right because it didn’t look the way she expected. And woven throughout the conversation was her own unexamined racism in assuming that white feminism held the answers for Black communities.
It was an unremarkable moment in some ways, because none of her attitudes were uncommon. She was all set to fight the patriarchy and was certain that there was only one correct way to do that. The patriarchy sounds like a monolithic entity until you consider the reality that men of color don’t have the