#sayhername

Evangelicals have been increasingly involved in racial justice struggles, including #BlackLivesMatter. There is also a strong evangelical feminist movement that addresses gender inequality in church and society. But there is relatively little organizing around the intersections of race and gender that center the experiences and oppression of women of color.

This is why it is critical that evangelicals support campaigns like #sayhername that highlight the intersections of racial and gender oppression.

As leading organizer on police violence against women and trans people of color, Andrea Ritchie, has noted, it is often black women and other women of color who are doing much of the work against police violence, yet their experiences with police violence go unaddressed. The result is that we often have a very truncated analysis of what police violence is.

As Mariame Kaba of Project Nia notes, police violence is not simply just the killing of peoples. It includes the every day forms of harassment, surveillance, and profiling that support both gender and race hierarchies.

For instance, a huge proportion of trans women of color report being subjected to police violence. It is not just killing, but this kind of surveillance and harassment that has the impact of policing both race and gender. Because black women in particular, as Ritchie notes, are never seen as truly “feminine,” they are both subjected to harassment, but at the same time, denied protection by the police when they suffer gender violence.

Gender policing includes not just outright killing, but also the monitoring of black and Native women through child protective services — who often deem them as inadequate parents. It includes the surveillance over pregnant women of color who are substance abusers who are simultaneously criminalized and denied access to treatment centers. It includes the routine sexual assaults committed against immigrant women by border patrol, as scholar Sylvanna Falcon has described. It includes the police harassment of women of color who are sex workers. It includes the lack of police action in addressing the crisis of murdered and missing indigenous women throughout the hemisphere.

Thus the campaign to #sayhername is not simply about remembering and organizing around black women and other women of color who have been killed by the police. It is about re-conceptualizing what police violence means. When we center women of color in our analysis, we see that police violence is much more than individual acts of police brutality. It is an entire system of harassment and surveillance that keeps oppressive gender and racial hierarchies in place.

We are then left with the task of not just holding individual police officers to account, but re-conceptualizing what justice, safety, and accountability should be.