From Michael Harriot: How a City Ignored the (Systemic) Rape, Murder and Terrorism of Black Women for Four Decades

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." -James BaldwinSincere conversations around ending vi

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

-James Baldwin

Sincere conversations around ending violence against women and girls in the US must include the courage to confront our entire history.

When people say, “No one is a slave today. Slavery is over.”

This is the system that slavery built. We must overhaul and reform it.

In the United States of America, slavery (400 years) set up a framework for bias, discrimination, oppression, violence, rape, disenfranchisement, and mass incarceration of people based on race. Blackness.

When the people victimized by this framework have a natural human reaction to this suffering, that too is derided and criminalized.

So, the after-effects remain at play indefinitely.

As intended.

“Why don’t Black women call the police?”

“Why don’t Black people just work with the police?”

“Why didn’t she report?”

“Why are Black women less likely to report?”

Even some of my white female colleagues, women’s rights advocates, expressed the opinion that Black women past and present don’t call the police because we “take violence too lightly“.

They didn’t ask appear interested or curious about some of the real reasons.

At some point, as a Black person, you get tired of responding to people who have no tangible connection to your community acting as self-appointed experts because “they saw something on t.v., read a book, saw this video, or like hip-hop.”

Ongoing Outside Interference

There are generations-old unspoken reasons that crimes against women and children grow in minoritized communities. That substance use grows. That mental health deteriorates.

Like the not-new and not-uncommon reasons you are about to read about. Historic. Tradition for this country, at this point.

Everyone knows that abuse of power is about as old as human existence and far too prevalent.

Everyone knows that until…..a Black person, especially a Black woman or girl speaks about it from experience.

RE: The United States

“How you gone win

when you ain’t

right within?”

Lauryn Hill

Here is a collective of articles

related to Kansas’s decades-long

race and sex-based tragedy.