This op-ed is written by a member of Teen Vogue’s 2020 Youth Voter Committee. Read more about the project and the author here.
Walking through the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina, during a recent protest against police brutality, I remember seeing two Black girls, both under the age of 10, marching and holding up a Black Lives Matter sign. While a white woman fawned over what a “good job” they were doing and how “proud” their mother must be, my facial expression shifted. I couldn’t help but mourn the loss of their innocence.
Our Black babies should not have to risk their health in the middle of a pandemic to defend Black life while many of their white peers are playing house inside. Little Black girls should be allowed to be kids, yet time and time again, we see images like that of seven-year-old Wynta-Amor Rogers plastered across social media. Black girls, specifically darker-skinned Black girls, are inadvertently thrust into this activist position by those applauding them for their strength and “passion.” We are robbed of the chance to transition into womanhood, stripped of softness or delicacy and expected to perform like superhumans while being treated as subhuman.
Nineteen-year-old activist Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau of Tallahassee, Florida, needed help, and the world — the world which she was trying to change — failed her. Like me, Salau was of Nigerian descent. Admittedly, there are far too many African children like Salau, who are silently subjected to family abuse under the guise of traditional values, religion, and obedience, as alluded to in tweets from her and her peers. She sought refuge from it, staying in a church as she tried to “escape unjust living conditions” and battled housing insecurity. After a protest on June 6, she posted on Twitter that she was assaulted by an older Black male. Following the incident, she shared details and her whereabouts via Twitter and disclosed that she had survived another prior assault in March. She was reported missing that same day, and found dead a week later. The 49-year-old suspect, Aaron Glee Jr., was arrested on June 14 and charged with felony murder and kidnapping. The Tallahassee Police Department failed her, her family failed her, and the community failed her.
My Blackness and my womanhood go hand in hand; I do not experience them as separate from one another. As Black women, we exist at the crossroads of both race and gender-based violence. We experience racism from non-Black women, who throw their faux solidarity to the wind when we bring light to issues that affect us specifically. From cishet Black men, we experience physical assault, harassment, misogynoir, and gaslighting, though we fight for them relentlessly. Our lives are threatened by agents of white supremacy, day in and day out. Breonna Taylor’s life was essential, yet she and so many other Black women and girls — Salau, Riah Milton, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Korryn Gaines, Dominique Rem’mie Fells, Atatiana Jefferson, and more — have been treated as expendable. Black women show up for everyone, but who will show up for us? When it comes time to help “strong Black women” and “fearless Black girls” in need, there are no national calls for justice, only radio silence.
A vast portion of the disregard for Black women stems from the adultification of Black girls, which leads to undue punishment, negligence in the face of pain, and more. Nationally, in schools, Black girls are criminalized more frequently. A 2014 report from Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies and African American Policy Forum found they are six times more likely to face out-of-class suspensions for the same infractions their white peers commit. Darker-skinned Black girls are almost twice as likely to receive a suspension than their own lighter-skinned Black female peers, a 2017 study in School Psychology Quarterly found. According to a 2017 University of Florida Levin College of Law study examining violence against Black women, Black girls are perceived as needing “less protection and nurturing” and “more knowledgeable about sex.” These assumptions lead to the hyper-sexualization of Black girls in our own communities, with Black men calling them “fast” or promiscuous and engaging in predatory behavior towards them.
These dangerous tropes mean life or death for Black women. Institutional racial biases that claim Black people are “not as sensitive to pain” as white people subsequently influence the fact that Black women have the highest maternal mortality rates, dying 2.5 times more than white women in 2018. Ujima, Inc.: the National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community reports that one in four Black girls will be sexually assaulted before the age of 18; for every Black woman who reports being assaulted, though, 15 do not. Lest we forget the countless abducted and/or missing Black girls, the alarming rates of Black trans women who are killed yearly due to transphobic hate crimes, and the Black women victims of police violence.
As I sit here, Breonna Taylor’s killers are still free and #SayHerName has been co-opted across social media platforms. It was created to raise awareness of our plight because Black women are so often forgotten — but still, we remain neglected. When we raise our voices, we’re met with pushback from our own community, tone policing, and claims that we’re being divisive and perpetuating “oppression Olympics.” The energy that is directed towards critiquing Black women’s bodies, sexualities, and hair choices is not the same energy we receive when we need protection or allyship in real life. While there are CNN specials dedicated to the Black male experience in America, Black women and girls like Salau get nothing other than the immense burden of fighting for a world that refuses to fight for us. Though we’ve fought alongside everyone, even those who persecute us, who will stand with us? Until people take #ProtectBlackWomen to heart, it’s the world against Black women.
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