The families of these women often suffer in relative obscurity. Their daughters’ deaths don’t elicit the marches or news coverage that could catalyze accountability . When most people think about anti-black violence, like lynchings or police killings, they think about men. Women rarely come to mind first. That’s why I created the #SayHerName hashtag to counter this tendency.

It’s true that more men of all races are killed by the police than are women. But black women make up less than 10 percent of the population and 33 percent of all women killed by the police. Data released by the Fatal Interactions with Police research project indicates that from May 2013 to January 2015, more than 57 percent of black women were unarmed when killed. And they are “the only race-gender group to have a majority of its members killed while unarmed.”

They are killed in many of the same circumstances as men, but critically, their being female does not inoculate them from the rapid escalation — often fueled by race-based fear — that often happens. Police officers with eager trigger fingers don’t care if a woman’s child is next to her, or India Kager and Korryn Gaines might still be with us, or if a child might die during a police raid, as Aiyana Stanley-Jones’s tragic death illustrates. Being elderly, homeless or mentally incapacitated does not seem to give police officers pause, as the losses of Kathryn Johnston, Margaret LaVerne Mitchell and Pearlie Golden reveal. Neither does being in one’s own home, or Michelle Cusseaux and Kayla Moore’s lives might have been spared.

The silence around black women is not simply a matter of indifference. It happens even in spaces created for them. When I and a group of bereaved mothers who lost daughters went to the 2017 Women’s March, only mothers of men killed by the police were invited on stage. I still remember the devastated looks on their faces when they realized their losses would remain obscured.

If we want to get a broader sense of the problem here, we have to be able to critique both race and gender conventions and stereotypes, and usually class, too. We must consider implicit and explicit biases against black women. Their interactions with the police may be different from those of white women and, in some ways, black men as well.