Hood Feminism Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot - Mikki Kendall Page 0,13

brief moment I lied to myself again and blamed the military, and not the fact that we were locked in a toxic dance that couldn’t get better. The last time that man hit me was during a fight that started over something mundane, but I changed the locks and called the cops myself that time. “It wasn’t any different from what happened before,” is what I might have told you then. We had a fight, and I wish I could tell you that I knew for certain we were done. We were certainly close to done, our relationship a flawed pressure cooker always riding the line of exploding.

But a year into knowing it needed to be over, weeks into what should have been a slow and amicable dissolution, the proverbial steam whistled so loud it was too far and too much to ignore. In the moment, as mad as I was, somehow I was still shocked when he pinned me to the fridge with one hand around my throat, aimed his fist just so to knock me out, and released. Then he dragged me across the floor, took my keys, and left. Our two-year-old son saw all of it, and I will forever regret not getting out earlier; but I also know that my tenuous plans to get out hinged on getting into a place I could afford on my own, getting childcare, and crafting a life where no matter what he did or didn’t do, I could make it.

I wasn’t quite there, but when that last bout of violence erupted, I knew the clock on my perfect plan had run out. I had a place I could mostly afford with only my name on the lease, and I got on with it. That didn’t mean the violence was over exactly; it just moved out of my house. He still sent me angry, abusive emails and text messages, he stalked and harassed me, and he still threatened violence despite restraining orders and arrests. But the good news, the best news? He didn’t have a gun. He could threaten, he could yell, he could hit me, but what he couldn’t lay his hands on was a projectile weapon that would have turned survivable rage into that split second that can’t be taken back. I got lucky, because we were in Illinois, a state that enforces the restriction on gun ownership for anyone with a recent history of domestic violence. Was he angry enough to kill me if a gun had been available? Yes. He might argue something different now, but I know what I saw in his face, and I know how hard he punched me, and that a hard head meant I ended up with bruises and ringing in my ears and not something worse.

Intimate partner violence isn’t the only risk of violence that Black women face. Police violence, particularly being collateral deaths in police misconduct, is a risk that is rarely discussed in feminist circles but is something that Black Lives Matter and campaigns like #SayHerName attempt to address. Their work is made more difficult not only by the lack of any official data but also by community norms that center on cisgender men.

I could be any of the women we have seen brutalized or killed by police in recent years as videos proliferate. I could have been that little girl down the street who was shot in the ankle while I wrote the draft of this chapter, or I could be Rekia Boyd, a young Black woman in Chicago who happened to be standing next to a man holding a phone to his ear when an off-duty police officer, mistaking the phone for a gun, opened fire and shot her in the head. The man with the phone was shot in the hand. Rekia died at the scene. She committed no crime, and the officer who shot her served not a single day in jail despite admitting he shot over his shoulder as he drove away. He wasn’t working, he was a newcomer to the area who owned property nearby, and still the gun in his hand took a young woman’s life.

I can’t tell you how many times I have been in contact with police officers over the years. I’ve just been lucky about the kind of officer I have encountered. I have been verbally abused by a police officer, threatened, harassed, but