50 Years later and the Bombings Continue

It might seem like a bit of hyperbole, the title. After all no one has bombed a church and killed four innocent Black girls in the last fifty years. So it must be a bit overdramatic of me to suggest that some fifty years later racism is still a key factor in the deaths of Black girls and Black women in the U.S.

I listened to the brief nods of recognition given to the 50^th anniversary of the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. This was the bombing that resulted in the deaths of Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair. Many talked about what a horrific event this was and how it helped to fuel the modern Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. In the midst of the brief ceremonial recognition period, there was very little historical context provided and the coverage I saw did not ask how such acts of racialized-gendered violence are still present today.

This was the case because so many of the brief references dealt explicitly with the ideologies of racism and White supremacy as though it was not dynamic and continual. Whether intentional or not, there seems to be a desire to have such behavior only be couched in the past—a past that seems to start and end with the bombings and the immediate aftermath. What is ignored is the long history and continuing racialized-gendered treatment of Black women that is evident in the U.S.

I won’t rehash much of this history. Several have done a wonderful job of detailing Black women’s lives during the slavery era, the Emancipation Period, and the 1960s. Instead, I want to focus on how the bombings continue today and why there seems to be no protest.

I whish that I could offer a complete overview of Black women’s socio-political and economic position in the United States, but I can not do so at this time. Even more so, I wish that I could present a historical review of their socio-political and economic position of Black women. While we have little bits and pieces of this story, it remains disjointed. Instead, I present a snapshot of a few issues that I believe capture the nebulous position of Black women in the United States and show how racialized-gender continue to influence their lived realities.

Black women and Incarceration

According to the Sentencing Project, 

“The number of women in prison, a third of whom are incarcerated for drug offenses, is increasing at nearly double the rate for men. These women often have significant histories of physical and sexual abuse, high rates of HIV infection, and substance abuse. Large-scale women's imprisonment has resulted in an increasing number of children who suffer from their mother's incarceration and the loss of family ties.”

Additionally,

Black women, in comparison to other groups of women, are experience higher rates of incarceration according to the Sentencing Project. Black women, in 2010, relative to White women were incarcerated at nearly 3 times the rate (133 versus 47 per 100,000). Hispanic women were incarcerated at 1.6 times the rate of white women (77 versus 47 per 100,000).

Black women and AIDS

The CDC informs us that “At some point in their lifetimes, an estimated 1 in 32 black/African American women will be diagnosed with HIV infection, compared with 1 in 106 Hispanic/Latino women and 1 in 526 white women.” While the rate of infection seems to be decreasing, Black women remain disproportionately impacted by HIV and AIDS

Black Women, employment and wealth

According toThink Progress, “Unemployment rates have declined for most subgroups of women since the start of the recovery, but not for adult African-American women.”  

The National Women’s Law Center states, 

“The June 2013 unemployment rate for adult African-American women (12.0 percent) was higher than their rate at the beginning of the recovery in June 2009 (11.8 percent), and was nearly 1.7 times higher than their rate at the beginning of the recession in December 2007 (7.1 percent).”

“Black women working full-time, year-round were typically paid only 64 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men. Hispanic women working full-time, year-round were typically paid only 54 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.”

Finally,

“African American women have continued to increase in educational attainment more rapidly than white women, yet the proportion of African American women in the service sector still hovers around 25 % compared to 15.4 % of White women. In addition, African American women are under-represented in management-level and professional positions and face significant barriers in the transition from low-wage jobs to professional occupations.”

What does this mean for Black Women and the Black Community?

Black women have made substantive progress since they were forcibly brought to the U.S. They have made improvements in terms of accessing education for example. However, the data above paints a grim picture for Black women as a group. They highlight how race and gender influence Black women’s experiences.

Gendered-racism is the thread that undercuts all of the above issues. Structural inequalities, and oppressive structures, rooted in race and gender hierarchies, are at the heart of the growing health and economic crises. These growing crises threaten to take Black women away, often thought of as the backbone of the community, from the community. So while there might not be bombings of churches in the U.S. today, the underlying ideologies that led to the bombings continue.

Consequently Black women continue to die and no one seems to be sounding the alarm.

This is the fourth post of my 31-day blogging challenge. This is the second post under the general theme of “Critical Social Issues” You can tweet me at Dr_JZ using hash tag #31dbc to share your thoughts. 

Black Women’s Public Cries: Mothering, Death and Activism

Trayvon Martin

I don’t know how many times I’ve sat down to write this piece; each time I walk away thinking I’m not ready for this. The pain I feel about the loss of our children leaves me with such grief that I literally become immobile. After the recent shootings in Aurora, CO I thought about dusting this piece off—I wrote this piece on Mother’s day 2012. However, I was still crippled. It’s taken me a few days to comprehend the depth of my feelings. I realized that I was mourning. I was mourning in a way that I’ve never mourned. It seems that every since the brutal killing of Trayvon Martin, I’ve been in mourning for the children of my community.

Trayvon Martin’s murder touched me in a way that I can’t always explain. It is only upon reflecting on my feelings with an older, and much wiser, woman was I able to name the fact that I was in mourning for this child. A child I never met. Yes, I was compelled by the nature of his death. But for me it was something much deeper. It was as though I had lost my child.

As the weeks progressed and we learned more about Martin’s murder, I made a conscious decision not to listen to any of the rhetoric of the case. Although I made this decision, I continued to think about this “case”. Particularly, I kept thinking, If this were my child, how would I respond? Would I become an activist and mourn publicly, or would I mourn only in private? Then I started thinking of all of those Black women who lost their children to colonialism, the institution of slavery, and the institutionalization of racism and its correlate poverty. Then I stopped and asked myself, what would society look like if all these Black mothers choose to challenge the systems that robbed them of their children? Also, what would society look like if all of us who “other-mother”, as I found myself doing for Trayvon Martin, also publicly cried out?

 What would a global social movement, in protest against the brutal and senseless killing of our children, look like?

There is no way for me to chart the loss, broadly defined, of our children at both the national and global levels. But consider the following:

• In 2008, Blacks, [in the U.S] constituted 17 percent of the youth population (10-17). They constituted:

o   31 percent of all juvenile arrests.

o   26 percent of all juvenile arrests for drug abuse violations.

o   52 percent of all juvenile arrests for violent offenses.

o   58 percent of all juveniles sent to adult prisons. 

• African Americans were overrepresented among police shooting victims in every city the publications [ColorLines] investigated. The contrast was particularly noticeable in New York, San Diego and Las Vegas. In each of these cities, the percentage of black people killed by police was at least double that of their share of the city’s total population. 

The U.N.  32 children under 10 among the dead in Syria

•   More than 400 children in Syria have been killed since the start of the uprising last March, according to human rights activists.  .

•   In 2008, 65,646 children age 0-9 died of AIDS in South Africa. 

In his speech to the National Urban League, President Obama stated, "Every day and a half the number of young people we lose to violence is about the same as the number of people we lost in that movie theater" in Aurora, Colorado. Our children are dying!

These are somebody’s children. They have been removed from our communities as a result of structural violence—poverty, lack of health care, lack of education, and racism. We will probably never see the faces of their mothers. We’ll probably never see their tears. Many of them will remain nameless and unknown to us. Hopefully they will be comforted by a loved one. Hopefully, some stranger will walk by and bless them with a smile. 

Over time, many of us will forget their stories. As the media spotlight another story, the cries of these mothers will move to the recesses of our minds. We’ll move on to worry about what’s for dinner, how to make the next car payment, and the everyday challenges we face. Sometimes the tragedy is just too much for us to bear and we need a reprieve—we need to avert our eyes. We leave these mothers to mourn on their own. But, what if there is an alternative? What if we turn our grief into action?

Mamie Till Bradley, Emett Till's mother, crying over Emett's coffin

 What if we moved the conversation away from gun access (a valuable and much needed dialogue) to include poverty and other forms of oppressive structures? How might this help to form a movement that’s inclusive of mothers and other-mothers? We cannot turn our heads in the face of such violence. We need to (re)claim our communities. We cannot sit back and wait for others to come in and do it for us. They will fill our ears with rhetoric and no action. Our fore-mothers, such as Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, provide us with a platform to build a movement. We need to write, we need to sing, sing like Nina Simone so that the world can hear our pain, we need to influence and make policies—in both the public and private sectors, we need to occupy the streets. We need to throw open our coffins and show the world the brutality our children suffered. We need our version of MADD. We need a mother’s day to honor these women. Such a day is needed to let them know that we recognize their pain. We need a social movement—one that addresses the multiple causes that encourage and perpetuate the deaths of our children. Let's turn our grief into activism.