Emotionality matters, but it is too often set aside or overlooked in battles for a justice that looks like a courtroom verdict or legislative victory

When she was a small child in the 1960s, Esther Armah’s home was turned into a battlefield without warning. The daughter of Ghanaian politician and diplomat Kwesi Armah, little Esther’s family needed higher security. But one night, soldiers and their tanks stormed into their home in Accra.

“Soldiers used rifle butts to break down the door, to break all the windows in our home. The screaming, the boots pounding floors and rifle crashing in glass … And the soldier who put a gun to my mother’s head. My sister became mute,” Armah, now an award-winning journalist and radio host, recalls. “My mother thought my sister would never talk again due to the trauma of that night.”

The aftermath of that night’s violence was left untreated, never mentioned in the family. “The result of that silencing affected my sense of self, my development, my relationships. This was domestic terrorism,” Armah says.

This is the legacy of trauma, a topic which many black women want to see addressed in the public sphere. The first step is simple: talking about it.

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In the US, the scant media coverage on the trial of former Oklahoma police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, who is accused of sexual assaulting 13 black women, is just one example of the deafening silence and apathy around violence toward black women. Only a few op-eds on websites covering the African American community have led the charge and asked, where is the outrage?



Some scholars and activists maintain that what’s missing are in-depth statistics regarding women and girls victimized by police. For others, the oversight is part of a broader problem: the media’s failure to provide a detailed context of how racism affects black women.



But all agree the core problem is the lack of acknowledgment that an offense has even been committed. As a result, victims have to survive the violence itself, but also deal with the pain of never having their pain recognized, either in courts or within their communities.

Armah says black people have a legacy of intergenerational trauma due to unrelenting cycles of violence. She coined the term “emotional justice” – the process toward remedying it. It requires finding and creating the language to describe this trauma and articulating it as a reality; creating space to explore it; dealing with it by developing a counter-narrative.

While living in New York and hosting WBAI’s 99.5FM’s Wake Up Call, she created opportunities for this very dialogue with a mix of celebrities, high-profile activists and scholars.

“Emotionality matters,” Armah says. “It is too often set aside or overlooked in battles for a justice that looks like a courtroom, a verdict or policy passage. Emotionality requires process and practice to navigate it. We need tools to deal effectively with this violence, born of a toxic masculinity that makes girls and women responsible for the traumatized emotionality of men.”

Armah moved back to Ghana in 2014 where she still broadcasts her radio show, the Spin. The guests are a litany of black women from all walks of life. “I wanted Americans to have another narrative about major issues – one informed by the brilliance of black and brown women’s intellect,” Armah says.

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The reality of black male privilege may be hard for some to discuss or envision against the backdrop of well-documented cases of unarmed black men being killed by police. Yet, when looking within African American communities, there are some spaces where men’s issues dominate conversations, while ignoring what’s happening with black women and girls equally.



“It’s been very painful for black women and girls to remain silent and to be sacrificed. We’ve been made martyrs in the racial justice movement,” says Farah Tanis, co-founder of Brooklyn-based human rights organization Black Women’s Blueprint (BWB).

Conviction rates for suspects accused of raping black women are lower than when the victims are non-black, says Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, the director of the African American Policy forum and co-author of the #SayHerName: Resisting Police Brutality Against Women report.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A #SayHerName vigil in remembrance of black women and girls killed by the police. Photograph: Tim Knox/The Guardian

Crenshaw and others began using #SayHerName at Black Lives Matter protests in 2014 when they noticed the absence of the names of women and girls who were killed by police. And while the case of Sandra Bland in July 2015 recharged the momentum behind the phrase, Crenshaw still wants black women to be put at the “center of our concerns”.

“We can say ‘SayHerName’ but if you don’t know the names of women also killed by police, we don’t know the different circumstances under which they are also vulnerable to losing their lives,” she says.

“Until we can remember the names Michelle Cusseaux, Tanisha Anderson, Natasha McKenna along with the names of Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and Michael Brown, the movement will be limited to only the things that we can see, and those have largely been understood as the things that make black men vulnerable to police violence.”

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Valerie’s grandmother was murdered. A white drunk driver purposefully ran her down in Jim Crow-era South Carolina. There was no arrest, no public condemnation and no real closure for the family.



Now in her late 50s and living in New York, Valerie (not her real name) pours water into a bowl of soil to lift up her grandmother’s spirit. She pauses, before saying: “What my family won’t talk about is that my grandfather used to beat my grandmother regularly, and she may have been walking around with a concussion on the day she died.”

No conversation is off limits at the headquarters for Black Women’s Blueprint in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. On a recent November evening, Valerie, a social worker, is joined by other women gathered to pour libations to honor black women and girls killed not only by police, but also by people they knew.

In 2013, black women were murdered by men at a rate of 2.36 per 100,000, two and a half times higher than the rate of 0.95 per 100,000 for white women murdered by men, according to a report by the Violence Policy Center, which found that black women are disproportionately affected by fatal domestic violence.

Another report echoes this reality, finding that domestic violence is the leading cause of death for women ages 15 to 34, adding that contemporary gender and racial profiling of black girls and women “are rooted in the enforcement of slave codes, black codes and Jim Crow segregation”.

“We must be careful in these victimhood vs survivor conversations. Black women have never been given the proper space to grieve for themselves. We have been victims, and that needs to be said,” says Tanis.

Black Women’s Blueprint members have not just gathered to talk about their pain, but set the agenda for the upcoming Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Black Women and Sexual Assault gathering at the UN headquarters in New York in April 2016.

Tanis stands in BWB’s kitchen and reflects on the last year and the emotional toll of their first UN trip to Geneva, Switzerland, in August 2014. The weight of their foremothers weighed heavily on co-founders Tanis and Christina Jaus. The pair traveled as part of a delegation to inform world leaders of America’s atrocities against black women and girls.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Black Women’s Blueprint delegation in Geneva.

Since the creation of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (Cerd) in 1995, no one had ever framed US racism through a strictly gendered lens, Tanis says. But in August 2014, that changed. Their work continues a long legacy of black women saying “here’s the proof, here’s how to address our concerns – now you must see us and we need justice”.

Their efforts are nothing new. Columbia law school professor Crenshaw mentions the case of Rosa Parks as an example: “Parks was a rape crisis advocate before the Montgomery boycotts,” she says.

Parks was the NAACP’s lead investigator on the 1944 case of young mother Recy Taylor, who was gang-raped and kidnapped by a group of white men. The men were tried by an all-white jury and acquitted. Parks’s investigation uncovered other reports of black women bus riders being inappropriately touched and harassed by white men on buses.

As a result, “the Montgomery bus boycott, so often thought of as merely a public accommodations case, was really rooted in the struggle to protect and defend black women’s bodily integrity,” says Wayne State University associate professor and author Danielle McGuire, who is among a growing list of scholars documenting the racist patterns surrounding violence against black women.

Taking another example, McGuire mentions the case of African American Gertrude Perkins. In 1949, as she was walking home from a party, she was arrested for “public drunkenness”. Officers put her in the back of a police car and then drove her outside town where they brutally assaulted her, drove off and left her to fend for herself.

“Her willingness to testify helped spark a major campaign in Montgomery,” McGuire says. Around 2000 “mainstream, professional historians hadn’t written about it in terms of the role racialized sexual violence and black women’s testimony played in the civil rights movement”.

The Perkins case was one of many cases in which black women were assaulted in and around Montgomery, Alabama. Yet more than 60 years later, the fight for historical justice is still ignored.