Until this summer, we haven’t much seen or heard police abusing black women’s bodies with the visual clarity of video. We have witnessed the worst of police abuse on video a lot with black men, from Rodney King back in 1991 to Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Walter Scott and Eric Harris just in the past year. But until last month, we have mostly only seen agents of the state abusing black women recreated in fiction, on shows like Orange is the New Black.

Hearing Sandra Bland verbally abused by Texas state trooper Brian Encinia on 10 July for answering honestly when the officer asks her, “Are you OK?” is a new experience, his voice rising in cartoonish rage when this black woman (quite rightfully fearful of his threatened abuse) will not submit to him. Also new are the horrors of hearing him threaten Bland that “I am going to light you up!” with a taser, and the cringe-inducing terror of hearing the black woman’s piercing screams offscreen that “you’re about to break my wrist! Can you stop?!”

With the abuse of a young girl in McKinney calling for her mom, and Bland’s blood-curdling screams near Prairie View, two citizens in Texas have shown irrefutably how black females are abused by police as well, sometimes with tragic consequences. And unlike the men’s videos (which have sometimes been silent), the pornographic effect – seeing the grotesque, degrading and violent exploitation of human life – of both of these videos have come from hearing the voices of black suffering and calls for help. For Bland, it never came.

Not that anyone who knows American history could ever think black women haven’t suffered as much or more than black men; their suffering has often been kept more invisible, but is no less intense. Raped in slavery, terrorized during Reconstruction, segregated during Jim Crow, incarcerated in the War on Drugs, and left to fend alone as 1.5m black men went missing during today’s era of mass incarceration, black women have always been abused by white supremacy, and often directly at the hands of white men who thought they owned their bodies.

When McKinney cop Eric Casebolt pinned that young black girl to the ground, and when trooper Brian Encinia threatened to pull Bland out of the car and use a taser on her after a traffic stop, they were doing what white men have often felt entitled to do to black women’s bodies throughout American history. The expectation of black female submission to white masculinity is so ingrained in our culture, Garrison Keillor found it corny enough to compose a love ballad called Tom and Sally – between Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings – on the public radio show A Prairie Home Companion. The rage in Encinia’s voice, both when his voice is screeching, “Turn around!” at Bland, and while he’s quietly justifying later why he had to arrest her even though “she never swung at me”, is palpable. Once their exchange started, the man in the uniform had to prove to the black woman who was boss, even if that could included “having to” taze, tackle, cuff and/or arrest her.

Depressingly, though, bringing this long-standing treatment into stark visibility might not be enough outrage to end the terror.There was great hope by social scientists that police body cams could de-escalate officer encounters and mitigate the level of violence. But with their increasing use, alongside citizens taking videos of arrests, police killings have not slowed in this past year of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Nor, as some of the most recent videos suggest, are cops prone to act with much more humanity, whether they’re unwittingly on camera or knowingly so. I know the “well, if she’d just been more obedient!” crowd will justify Encinia’s abusive treatment of her, disregarding that the chain of events leading to her death could have been stopped by him.

And I am quite simply terrified that this latest pornographic video will visually reinforce the American misnomer that black women’s bodies are there for the taking – and that’s just the way things are.