Hood Feminism Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot - Mikki Kendall Page 0,9
male heroes. She started out as a hairdresser and probably fails to meet someone’s definition of respectable every day. She’s doing the work, though, and changing the way an industry functions for women and with women, one book at a time. Sometimes solidarity is just that simple. Step up, reach back, and keep pushing forward.
GUN VIOLENCE
My grandfather saved my life when I was six. He grabbed my hair and yanked me out of the middle of a gunfight between two strangers as I was walking out of a beauty shop. I remember that my bangs got a sizzling little trim from a round, and I was more focused on that (I really wanted short bangs for reasons that now escape me) than on the fact that a few more inches and my hairstyle wouldn’t have mattered. I am not afraid of guns. Actually, I love guns. More accurately, I love shooting them. I go to the range to shoot weapons I would never want on the street; I talk online occasionally about my time in the military—a time when I had access to many types of weapons, from guns to grenades. Periodically, I even mention my grandfather and his guns. To me, guns are tools; the people wielding them are the deciding factor in whether that tool is used safely or unsafely. That doesn’t mean I think you should take guns to brunch, or to the grocery store, or to a movie theater.
What does feminism have to do with guns? After all, guns aren’t a feminist issue, right? Except they are. They just might not be a feminist issue for your life. Not right now, anyway. But many women, especially those from lower-income communities, face gun violence every day. The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation makes it five times more likely that a woman will be killed. Women get killed by these guns because they are available, because their partners are violent, because an accident with a gun is more likely to be fatal, because of a dozen mundane reasons made worse by the availability of weapons. Although we tend to focus on the impact on young men who are exposed to gun violence, girls are likewise gravely affected. Girls drop out of school at nearly the same rate as boys in an effort to avoid having to pass through places where shootings are common—that is, in an effort to survive. Mothers bury their children because of gun violence. Families are irrevocably changed by guns. Mainstream feminism has to engage with gun violence as an everyday occurrence in the lives of some women. It can’t be treated as a distant problem when in some neighborhoods, bullets are as common as rain. In order to adequately address the needs of the girls and women who deal with the consequences of what amounts to a full-scale public health crisis every day, mainstream feminism has to be listening, advocating, and providing resources. A twelve-year-old girl was shot on her porch a few blocks from my house while I was writing this chapter. The gun used to injure her didn’t belong on the street. She’s one of hundreds of girls who will be impacted by gun violence this year, one of almost two hundred thousand children impacted by gun violence since the Columbine shootings in 1999. You may think that gun violence is a distant problem, nothing to do with you, but if you pause, if you look around, if you look outside the bubble that privilege has created where you don’t have to worry about gun violence on a regular basis, you’ll see it’s a public epidemic that we ignore. Every state, every city, and every income level has been impacted by gun violence.
It’s tempting to pathologize gun violence as a problem that only exists in the hood, in places where ostensibly there is no promise of a future and supposedly no one is innocent, so everyone deserves whatever happens to them. The media often presents a narrative of gun violence as the consequence of Blackness and poverty intersecting, and thus the key to avoiding it is to stay away from poor Black neighborhoods—what we have seen with white flight or de facto sundown towns. We have been led to believe that conditions are so bleak in the inner city that there’s nothing left to protect or support. But while white people measure their safety in cubic feet from Black people, the reality