Michele Bratcher Goodwin

What this brings to mind are the challenges of understanding this, and so, India, I want to turn to you because it seems to me that something that stitches together all of the conversation that we have been having is something about historical origins. I think that there is an origin story that is here, this kind of consistent, systemic dehumanization, and devaluation of Black women and their lives. This is not something that was thought of yesterday, that the world came to a conclusion that Black women should not be respected, that Black women should be policed and surveilled. This has a very long history. India, given that we are in a milieu of rejection of history, I would love for that to be discussed. If you could share a little bit about what that history represents, I would appreciate that.

India Thusi

Sure. I think what is common with a number of the countries that have been discussed is this history of settler colonialism, and I think policing has some of its origins from there. In this history of settler colonialism, part of the colonialist project is maintaining a racial and sexual hierarchy that really promotes and maintains white supremacy but also maintains a certain sexual order in terms of who is able to reproduce, whose bodies are going to be prioritized. What the police do is reinforce this hierarchy, and I think we are going to speak a little bit later about abolition and how do we respond to this. But I think it is really important to place policing within that history, to contextualize it, in order to understand its legacy, because when we put it in context, understand its legacy, see the work that it is doing now, it is really not that different from the work it was doing at its origins, through the different types of colonial policing, slave patrols, and so forth. Really what it was doing is maintaining this hierarchy, maintaining certain property interests, and in this hierarchy, Black women have been often at the bottom. Their needs, their experiences have been at the bottom, whether as a result of slavery and then their enslaved status or just colonialism and maintaining the racial hierarchy attached to that.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin

It is fascinating that you say that. There are so many important aspects to what you just shared. It reminds me that we are in the middle of a pandemic, and we see how there are essential care workers who have been treated in non-essential ways, as expendable and fungible, and you think about these histories of imperialism, settler colonialism, slavery, and the essential function of Black women's bodies coming in connection with that capitalism and all manner of laws being erected around that. It is these laws that forbid the offspring from taking the status of their fathers, specifically instantiating sexual assault and rape as being part of a cultural narrative, the original policing being police slave patrol, to patrol all of what that represents, and so many other kinds of ways that become essential to global capitalism. And at the very heart of that is the dehumanization of Black women.

Very recently, something has come to my mind in terms of how do we translate this, and I wondered what does a mother say the night before the slave auction to her child. Around the world, we have countries—in Brazil and other places throughout the Caribbean—throughout the diaspora that have never had to ask that question. How do you convey a message of humanity, even though you know you will never see your child again, because this system which claims that it morally can do this has designed laws around this, will snatch a child away from the mother the next morning. She will never see that child again. In these very systems, these systems tell this woman and her child that they are nothing more than the status of property, that they are nothing different than a cow or a pig in the field, and can you just imagine what that mother must amass in providing a message to that child to keep that child whole? Those are the kinds of questions that we do not have to study, but that we should in all of these countries.

Karen, I want to get back to you because in Philadelphia, there is a campaign now of media reflecting on their contributions to certain narratives, how media has been complicit in many ways with the kind of narratives and stories that we are telling, of not telling clear stories or of refusing to tell the stories at all. I want to know how do you navigate this, and do you see media as doing a better job with recognizing some of the harms that you and others have described on this webinar?

Karen Attiah

I am constantly cognizant of the fact that particularly the mass media has been a willing and complicit partner in crime to white supremacy and patriarchy in the United States and elsewhere. To a certain extent, to India's point, thinking about how we just now talked about slave patrols of the past and settler colonization, part of my job is to look at the laws that are being passed now and seeing that not much has changed. My job, particularly as an opinion columnist, is to direct the reader to situate what is happening now as another node of the same poisoned seed.

So let us take the Texas law that effectively bans abortions for women here in this state. It predominantly will affect poor women, Black women, Brown women. It basically is this return to vigilantism, public citizen surveillance of whether or not a woman wants to exercise sovereignty over her own body, which I think is the fundamental human right that has been denied to Black women across the diaspora historically. It has been framed as a Democrat versus Republican culture war thing and less of as a perpetuation of the racial and gender caste system in this country. It can be a very lonely job to frame things as a very violent type of system.

Another example of something that I have written deals with the face of gun violence and its victims. Two years ago the rapper Megan Thee Stallion was shot in the foot by another male rapper, and spoke about how she had to limp out bleeding and how comments were blaming her for what happened. It was insane to me that somebody with that level of fame and money and what we think of as privilege cannot escape the fact that she is a Black woman and still was not deserving of justice. The comments people made when I wrote about it were disheartening and blamed Black culture in general for this sort of violence, and blamed her. How much harder will it be for someone without her resources, someone without her name recognition to get this sort of protection?

When we do go missing, when we do end up becoming victims of domestic violence, the police response is different. I am thinking of the recent story of Lauren Smith-Fields, the Black woman who went out on a Bumble date and was found dead. The police did not even have the courtesy to notify her family that this had happened. They let the white man she went out on a date with just walk away, and I think there were some reports saying that he did not seem like he was of interest. It is these sorts of stories that happen that bubble up to the level of national attention. There was a social media campaign to get Bumble to do something and to shame the police department to do something.

When it comes to a media perspective, it is a deeper systemic issue of covering Black women in general as human beings, even before it gets to the point of death and violence and discrimination, which we have still a problem with.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin

To your point on the historical arc, right now people could go on Google and they could search advertisements and they would see images where papers hundreds of years ago would be complicit in ads on runaway slaves. There are many different ways in which we can see commissions and omissions over time, and they are startling in the present day just how much work has to be done to get the same kind of attention to the kinds of harms that Black women experience.

As you were mentioning abortion rights, I think that is a good segue for us to think about reproductive liberty and independence. I would guess that almost everybody on this call when you thought about or heard about the Texas law, SB8, that bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, making no exceptions for rape or incest, and that provides for individuals being able to spy on and sue people who aid and abet in the termination of pregnancy, thought about fugitive slavery. What is old is new again.

It is very interesting how so many people needed time to get to that, and yet we are talking about populations in Texas that will be affected just like hundreds of years ago, Black women affected if they want to run to freedom, Black women wanting to get to reproductive liberty that is already guaranteed by the Supreme Court, of being tracked and being surveilled or the people in their lives being tracked and surveilled.

Aissatou, I want to turn to you on this question and then to you, Ana, about what these concerns mean in terms of autonomy of the body and how this kind of policing that we have seen all around the world affects women's liberty, autonomy, and privacy with regard to their very bodies. Aissatou, I will start with you.

Aissatou Sene

To talk about how violent the law is, if you are an unmarried woman and you have a miscarriage, you can end up in jail, because if you go and the doctor finds that something is happening, they are saying that you caused it, and the only reason they are saying you caused it is because you are not married. It does not matter if you are twelve years old and were raped. It does not matter if you are nine years old. It does not matter if it is incest. Abortion is illegal. We have been working very hard recently to have it at least legal for incest, for those who are underage, but it is not happening.

At the same time, you have women who can afford it when they know the right man in the country, and so it is about who has what and who has money to actually access it and who knows who. Every time, you face this discrimination on that level. For somebody who is dark-skinned like me, I am not going to be able to afford or to be able to know the people who can give me an abortion in Senegal. For somebody who is light-skinned, it might be easier that even if you get the abortion and people find out, your skin color can make sure that you get out of that situation. It is very complicated to actually own our body in anything because everything that we do, the society, the Senegalese, and also the background as Muslim woman always tell us we did something wrong. The wrong is always on the woman. The wrong is always of what you were wearing. The wrong is always of who you were with. You are the person responsible for whatever has been happening to you or whatever is done with you.

I do not think abortion law is something that we are going to have any time soon in Senegal, and when I was listening and I heard the Texas law in the United States, I thought you all are going back, because for us, we are actually trying to have the conversation, knowing that it might not happen for the next hundred years, but for a country that has it and then a state that has it and then decide to take it back, it is really scary. Whatever is happening in America when it comes to policing Black bodies is scary, and it is taking us back to places you called the third world. It is very sad to watch from a Black woman's perspective and feminine perspective.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin

One also can see this as the dissolution and fragmenting of a democracy. A key to democracy is the ability to be able to have liberty and one's own self and being. If you think about the U.S. Constitution itself, it bothers to protect one's safety in one's home, one privacy. How can your home have even more of a constitutional right than you have in your own body vis-à-vis the state?

Aissatou Sene

I wanted to add something, what we are talking about in Senegal, most of the women who are actually in jail are in jail for abortion or because they have killed their babies, because there is a really high stigma over having babies outside of marriage. These laws are put in place to put women in boxes and make sure that they have no freedom. They have no will of their own whatsoever.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin

Aissatou, what you are expressing is how central freedom of the body happens to be to freedom of liberty. At the key of democracy, the key of a government's legitimacy and rule of law is the ability to be able to govern one's body as a woman, and you can see a fracturing of society when that simply does not happen.

There are any number of things that have come up already in this conversation. With Karen and Aissatou, I could not help but think about how so many of these questions root in white supremacy and histories of colonialism and slavery, but they also have their own meaning within Blackness as well. We know that sexual assault and sexual violence can occur within a Black community, and that too often goes ignored.

Karen, you mentioned Megan Thee Stallion, and I could not help but think about Rihanna and Chris Brown. I was stunned that Chris Brown was still receiving awards after the world saw what he did to Rihanna and still being honored by Black organizations after that. It was absolutely stunning to me.

Ana, maybe you want to start us off with that, about the kind of violence that may be difficult to escape or to bring attention to because it comes from within Black communities.

Ana Paula Barreto

That is a difficult topic. I think about the same thing in Brazil when the victim is a woman or a child. I think that it is even more complicated when it is a child. There is a report saying that the Rio police killed around three hundred children in the past six years in Rio alone. I think if you know a little bit about Rio, there is a lot of violence. It is really almost like a civil war. When the victim is not a male, there is less organizing around the case. There is more difficulty to say the names.

I also want to add that with abortion, it is important for us to reflect on how well organized the anti-rights movement is globally and how they operate the same way in each country. It is also important to recognize that the money comes from the United States. So they are very well organized. They go to Latin America, to Africa, to Asia, but the funders are churches in the United States. We start to see the push for conservative laws in many other countries because they are winning here. Folks see that they can replicate this in other countries, and it is important for us to understand that the anti-rights movements we fight against is global. We also need to further understand how they work and are connected.

To finalize my part, I want to say that when we are talking about abortion, it is very important to talk about class. In Brazil, abortion is legal under the circumstances of incest, rape, and when there is a risk to life for the mother. However, we all know that if you have money, you can do whatever you want in any country in the world. You can travel to another city, and this is very common in Brazil. You just go to a very fancy hospital, and they will attend you and say there was a small surgery that happened. We know that class is a main factor here.

I also want to say that is how we need to connect with class, because when we are thinking about a capitalist society, resources are fundamental for when we are thinking about the quality of life and dignity for many people.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin

I really appreciate that you raised the importance of class and what it has meant to discussions about reproductive health rights and safety, and then also there is LGBTQ status as well, because one sees through colonialism and the imposition of laws that did not previously exist that were very homophobic. These legacies continue to exist in countries where there has been this settler colonialism in parts of Africa and elsewhere.

There is a lot that I think is important about this conversation and a lot that has been raised that is deeply troubling, including the criminalization of reproductive liberties, including, as you said, Ana, the United States exporting these legacies through the Helms Amendment, and what that was understood to mean. If we understand that having reproductive autonomy for women, access to birth control, access to being able to terminate a pregnancy, all of these things translate to being able to complete an education, to attend college, to be able to get the work that one wants. And if you think about a country playing a very heavy hand in squashing that, what then must that mean for the liberation of Black and Brown women all around the world and the purpose, perhaps, of closing that down.

Karen, I want to turn back to you.

Karen Attiah

Ana brings up a really good point about the mobilization of the writing and how this is affecting things globally, and this is something that I struggle with. I would be curious to see what my other panelists think about this.

I was reading an article the other day that encapsulated the so-called “culture wars,” and it had this line that still sticks with me: “The right wing mobilizes while the left tries to persuade.” I would take that further in terms of the willingness of the right to pour almost endless resources and massive organization into implementing their agenda that is taking us all backward. Again, I do not want to make this into a right/left type of political divide, but it is disheartening. Let us take the Breonna Taylor case. It seems like when it comes to Black women's trauma and the violence that we face, both within our communities and from white supremacy, we get hashtags. We get #BelieveBlackWomen. We get this performative response very often that is no match for the perilous policy and real-world attacks coming from the other side.

There is, for me at least, a growing sense of from where is the actual hope to come, and I hear a lot from liberals saying that we just need to persuade, and I see this in the media, all we need to do is persuade.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin

But it does not work. It goes to the point that you are making, and I want to bring India on to this as well, because it is a really great point that you make in bringing in Breonna Taylor. When you think about it, Breonna died before George Floyd. She was gunned down in the middle of the night. She is an essential care worker during the time of a pandemic, and one would think that had it not been for the public lynching that we saw of George Floyd dying under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, would people even know about Breonna Taylor whose death had been weeks before? I think that you make such an important point there.

India, one of the things that you mentioned is that we would get to this point about abolition, and abolition does not necessarily resolve the issue of Breonna Taylor who was gunned down in the middle of the night on a no-knock warrant in just such a brutal and horrific way. But what are the turning points? How do we reimagine, rethink policing? Some people say we need more women in police forces. Some people say that what it is that we need is to defund the police. Some people say we simply need to abolish the police. But I think, if anything, what we have seen from the conversation here is that we have a global problem that is not just one thread but many different threads that historically have impacted the lives of Black women in ways that are quite nefarious.

India Thusi

Yes. Speaking about the legacy of policing, knowing that it has been rooted in white supremacy and maintaining what you were alluding to earlier, Michele, like racial capitalism, this really unequal society that we live in, these different countries, I think it points to the fact that trying to reform policing is futile. There have been attempts to reform it since it was initiated that have not worked, and I think we are at a point where we really need to think about what type of society we want, what type of society can we build that we can focus on preventing harm and not also introducing the harm that comes with state-sanctioned violence.

When speaking about abolition, I think a lot of times people get caught up on what do we do if we have someone who is dangerous in our community, how do we deal with these dangerous few, but what gets lost in the conversation is how do we deal with the pleasure and joys of the many. What about everyone? How do we support everyone's material needs? How do we create a society where we can prevent harm and respond to it in such a way where we can still hold people accountable without relying on just police and cages? There are ways to hold people accountable, and there are communities that are doing this type of work. There are ways that people are engaging in abolitionist projects that are real and that are showing good results, and I think focusing on that positive aspect of abolition is really important.

In terms of whether we can diversify our way into human rights policing or more just policing, I do not think that is possible. If you look at the context of South Africa, where after apartheid there was this effort to transform the police, make it a more diverse police force, they changed their name from “South African Police” to “South African Police Service” to indicate that they would serve the community, serve the people. But you still have racist policing in South Africa with Black people enforcing that racist policing. Even when I did research with police officers in South Africa, they expressed to me nostalgia about apartheid, which I found shocking, but there was other research that reinforced that in terms of human rights placing a limits on their power as police officers.

What that speaks to is that it is the very function of police and using violence to protect certain property interests, protect certain hierarchies, is going to create these situations that encourage violations of our autonomy, our basic rights. I do not think there is a way to diversify policing.

I wanted to comment on some of what has been said earlier. One thing that I have been thinking about throughout this conversation is the Sojourner Truth poem, “Ain't I a Woman?” Black women being recognized as also being a woman. When can you also be worthy of protection? When can your humanity be recognized? We have this idea of who the ideal victim is in society. Even when you look in the context of human trafficking, it was interesting. I did this research. When you used to do a Google search for human trafficking victim, all you would find was white women, white girls, and then you would find Black men or Black shadowy figures or foreign figures behind them, the first several pages of that, which was interesting. I wrote about it. I think they have corrected the algorithm somewhat, but that really speaks to what we conceptualize when we think of a victim.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin

Especially, India, when you think about the original trafficked and kidnapped people, that the definition of exactly “kidnapped” should actually have slave ships.

India Thusi

Exactly. And that is why you can have situations where when a Black woman is a victim, it just gets ignored.

Another example is R. Kelly. The fact that he engaged in his conduct against so many people and he was doing it for so long. I am a geriatric millennial. When I was a first-year in college, I remember this comedian said, “Oh, all of you guys are too old for R. Kelly. It is a good thing he's not around here,” kind of suggesting the fact that even at 17 or 18, we were too old for what R. Kelly was looking for. But what is really problematic about it is that it shows just how widespread and acknowledged the fact that he was engaging in this conduct, the fact that he was this predator, and it was tolerated for so long.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin

I want to celebrate you all as we begin that process of wrapping up our webinar today, because what has been made really clear is that it has been an open secret. It is not a secret at all, but it is right in front of us the ways in which Black women have been denigrated over time systemically, institutionally, and how there has been very little effort to resolve that, to reckon with it at all. These histories stare us in the face, and then they reify over and over again. You mentioned R. Kelly, and there are a bunch of different names that have been floated through this conversation.

My final question to each of you is what comes next. I want to hear about what you are thinking about, what is keeping you up at night, and what you are trying to do to bring attention to the kinds of issues that we are talking about today.

Aissatou, I want to start with you. What is coming next for you? Where are you taking your activism, given today's conversation and what you were doing before today's conversation?

Aissatou Sene

I want to touch a little bit about on abolitionism. I think what India was saying is very interesting. She is talking from a South African perspective, which is Black and white, and also an American perspective, which is also Black and white. As somebody who has been put in custody in Senegal many times and hearing a man say, “Oh, there are too many Senegalese women. We need to kill them.” I put in a complaint against him. He was arrested, and the police put me in custody for ten hours trying to make sure I did not have a personal vendetta against him. I understand when people say we need to change policing, but then as a feminist who works directly with victims of sexual assault, mothers who have lost their children, who works with kids that have been abused, I have seen relief in those people seeing their predators going to jail. Yes, I understand that a lot of people say these are cages. Human beings should not be there. I am not saying any people who are abolitionists need to tell me what is replacing police today, but I want to hear more about what are we going to do, because this behavior is not going to change overnight.

Our Black families, our Black neighborhood, people around us who rape, abuse, and beat us, they are not going to change because the police do not exist anymore. So what are we going to replace the police with? Yes, the police are very bad. It is very bad in America. It is very bad around the world, but for me, there is a little bit of relief for putting some people who deserve to be in jail in jail.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin

I appreciate you mentioning that, and I think it further exposes the complexities of the kinds of conversations that we are having. I do not think that these are mutually exclusive, what India and what Aissatou are coming to.

Karen, I am going to turn to you and then Ana, and we will close out with you, India.

Karen Attiah

What is next is to keep having conversations like this. I think for me as a journalist and a columnist, it is super helpful to be connected to people like India, Ana, and Aissatou, to help remind me and those who I work with in the media of the broader implications of a lot of these questions. I think that community building, resource building, resource sharing, idea sharing is part of the global culture work we need to do. A lot of this is rooted in thousands of years of culture, religion, and patriarchy, but I think increasingly about what does it take to change culture. That is what I am hoping to do a bit more of my work in.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin

That is a very important question, because culture can be so very difficult to change, and at the heart of this conversation and so many other aspects of the arc toward justice relates to culture.

Ana, what comes next with the work that you are doing?

Ana Paula Barreto

Thank you so much. I want to say one phrase that this amazing Brazilian thinker always says: “Between the right and the left, I am Black.” I think that for us as Black people, sometimes the conversation between left and right, I think we need to be careful with that, historically, as far as just speaking.

Now I am organizing a couple of different events and projects around police brutality and women. We are going to have an event with the Human Rights Council next month on the impacts of police brutality on children. You all are invited to attend.

I am also doing a lot of work with the new UN Mechanism of Police Brutality. They just chose the experts. Now we are going to have the first couple of sessions. I will be doing work with them as well.

And, at the end of the year, we are going to have our film festival on reproductive justice and Black women in the diaspora.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin

That is wonderful. Thank you so much, Ana, and we will be sure to make sure that folks know about this important work that you are doing.

All right. India, what is next in terms of your work in this domain?

India Thusi

I am going to keep on researching, writing, being in the community, addressing some of the questions that Aissatou raised, like how do we hold people accountable, how do we recognize the harm that people have suffered, especially when we are speaking about sexual violence.

I think some of the work that Mariame Kaba has done can be instructive in terms of transformative justice, what alternative models might look like, but I think what I want to turn to is not just focusing on what needs to be removed, like removing the criminal system or removing policing or criminalization, but focusing more on what does that positive project look like, what are the structures that need to be built, how do people need to be supported, and just focus my mind on that over the next few years.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin

Thank you very much for that, India, Karen, Ana, and Aissatou. I very much appreciate you joining us today, and thank you to my colleagues at the American Society for International Law for making sure that there was space devoted to Black women, global human rights, and policing. This only scratches the surface. There is a need for greater engagement on all of the kinds of issues that we discussed today, and I look forward to being a part of that with ASIL and also with these amazing women who joined me today. Thank you all so much, and I look forward to the next time.