What if Trayvon Martin had been a black woman?

CNN host Piers Morgan posed this hypothetical question to Marc Lamont Hill on Tuesday night:

What if Trayvon had been a young black woman and she had been scared by being followed by this guy? If it had been a young black woman walking home and she had turned around and punched him in the face, for argument's sake, we wouldn't be having this conversation, would we? He would have been convicted.

Hill agreed, remarking that black men are viewed as "purveyors of violence" and not as victims. But what about the scores of unnamed black women whose killings have been largely ignored and all but forgotten? A look through history proves that from lynchings, to intimate partner violence, to police brutality, the murders of black women in the United States have rarely evoked much empathy.

Contrary to the Morgan-Hill thesis, I contend that if Trayvon Martin were a young black woman, we would not even know her name.

Trayvon Martin's murder and subsequent profiling have been likened by some to the lynchings of black men that stained American history during the 19th and 20th centuries, casting him as a latter-day Emmett Till. But popular memory has virtually erased the lynchings of Mary Turner, Marie Scott and Laura Nelson and the 115 black women, who were hung alongside their husbands, brothers and sons. The strange fruit of a stranger sex that also dangled from southern trees.

There was neither much sympathy nor outrage over the death of Deanna Cook Patrick, who was found dead in her bathtub two days after she called 911 for help in August 2012. Deanna had suffered a known history of violence at the hands of her attacker: her ex-husband Delvecchio Patrick had been arrested for assaulting her three times, and pleaded guilty to all three charges.

Though Deanna told the 911 operator that Delvecchio had tried to kill her three times before, the dispatcher failed to mark her call as "urgent" or report it as a "murder in progress". Subsequently, two police officers arrived at Deanna's home 50 minutes later, but left when no one answered.

Does the name Rekia Boyd sound at all familiar? Only weeks after Trayvon Martin's murder, Detective Dante Servin gunned down the 22-year-old Rekia on the west side of Chicago, yet her name has largely escaped the media spotlight. Like Trayvon, Rekia was a passer-by, her life taken in the middle of the night by a single shot. While the family of Rekia Boyd was awarded $4.5m in March 2013, a year after her death, Detective Servin faces no criminal charges to date.

Seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones was shot to death as she slept on the couch with her grandmother during a midnight Swat raid on her home in 2010. Last month, three years after her death, the child's killer, police officer Joseph Weekley, walked from a Detroit courtroom after his involuntary manslaughter case was declared a mistrial. Where were the headlines and protests?

So, why are female victims so often omitted from the narratives of violence African Americans face?

Black feminist scholar bell hooks says:

No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence, as have black women … When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men.

This could explain why Marc Lamont Hill failed to cite the names of African-American women like Rekia Boyd, whose family grieves alongside the Martins. Black women's names are too often left out of rally cries against senseless violence. We remember Oscar Grant, Amadou Diallo, and Sean Bell, but how many march for Tarika Wilson?

Instead, the victimization of young women is subsumed into a general well of black pain that is largely defined by the struggles of African-American men. As a result, any insight about this important intersection of race and gender is lost under the umbrella of a collective sense of persecution.

Despite Piers Morgan's assertion that if Trayvon Martin were female, then her case would assure a guilty verdict, all the evidence suggests otherwise. The same social and cultural protections afforded white women are not readily granted to African-American women and girls.

If Trayvon Martin had been a young black woman, no police chief would have resigned over a bungled investigation. No CNN host would be discussing the case of her accused killer. And we wouldn't be livestreaming her murder trial and hanging on every word of each witness.

The reality is we would probably never have heard of her.

• Editor's note: the headline on this article was amended at the author's request at 9.30am (ET) on 12 July