Don’t Forget about Her — Black Women and Mass Incarceration

This speech was written and presented at The Ohio State University in February 2016:

I challenge you for one moment to close your eyes and take a mental note of all of the things you think of when you hear mass incarceration.

For me, the term invokes images of the thousands of Black men locked within the confines of cold prison walls and the young black boys who suffer at the hands of the school to prison pipeline because their teachers rather suspend them then understand what it means to be a black boy in this country. But how often do we imagine what it means and what it feels like to be a black girl?

Let’s face it: orange is not the new black for black women. Since 1985, girls and women are among the fastest growing population of people in the American criminal justice system. So as a black woman, this means you account for 30% of all of the women incarcerated while only making up 13% of female population. The rise of the numbers of black women in detention centers means that more black babies are born in prison infirmaries then placed in the foster care system or with another family member. Black girls in school are suspended 6x more than white girls; however, we constantly erase these narratives in discussions about the impact of the school to prison pipeline. Around 85% of the women, both black and white, behind bars have a history of sexual and domestic abuse. And if I began to discuss the bias that a black woman with a criminal record will face as she applies for jobs, housing, and government assistance, we might be here all night. The plight of black women and girls in the prison-industrial complex is linked to the problem that men face as a result of institutional oppression. So while citing the statistics about the 745,000 black men in prisons and jails across the country, we must at the same time advocate for our sisters.

One of the many disparities in the mass incarceration narrative is that only Black fathers are being taken away from their families with damaging affects on the black family structure. However, as Super Bowl Champion Demaryius Thomas can tell us, black women are often ripped away from their families as well. As a result of the punitive punishment criteria set by President Reagan’s War on Drugs and the landmark 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, Thomas’s grandmother was sentenced to life in prison and his mother, 20 years for drug trafficking when Thomas was only 11 years old. 17 years later, Demaryius Thomas has never forgotten the image of seeing his mother being arrested by federal authorities only moments before she walked him and his sister to the school bus. His reality is also the reality of so many others who have grown up in a world without their grandmothers, aunnties, sisters, and best friends because the criminal justice system has decided that incarceration is the answer to deviance. As Dr. Angela Davis said in February at Denison University: “We have to say that now is the time to begin to imagine alternatives, to begin to think about the possibility of a landscape without prison and to begin to think about other ways of addressing harm.”

The reality of mass incarceration is that the journey to institutionalization begins long before a person is booked for their first offense. With programs like My Brother’s Keeper and the Urban Prep charter schools located across the city of Chicago, there have been proactive attempts to make sure young black men know their worth and potential far before the tenets of white supremacy and institutional oppression shatter their self-worth. Ohio State’s very own Bell National Resource Center for the African American Male welcomes approximately 50–60 Black freshmen every school year while our black girls are expected to navigate through the university system and become successful and strong Black women without a national resource center providing support and guidance throughout the journey. Where are the resources for girls? Is it not as important to protect our mothers, daughters, and sisters? We have allowed women to stand on the front lines of the fight for Black liberation and spearhead movements like Black Lives Matter while somehow pretending that the system doesn’t affect them.

Freedom emerges from the process of struggling and we can’t continue to allow black women and girls to struggle alone and struggle silently. By depriving girls from the opportunity to succeed as we do their male counterparts, we send the message that they are only worth mediocre and underfunded programming. We send the message that their lives only mean something after they have become under the control of the criminal justice system or in the case of many Black women within the past year, once their bodies are found lifeless in a jail cell. Raynette Turner. Sandra Bland. Tanisha Arnold. Ralkina Jones. Gynna McMillen. We have to Say Her Name while she can still hear it.