Charleston. Baltimore. Ferguson. Dayton. Chicago. Sanford. Atlanta. Brooklyn. Oakland.

Nizah Morris. Aiyanna Jones. Eric Garner. Yvette Smith. Dontre Hamilton. Tamir Rice.

Since the killing of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson in August 2014, protests and acts of resistance have erupted across the United States. This was not the first time an unarmed Black person was shot and killed by police, nor was it the first case of police violence to draw national attention. Communities have organized against police brutality for decades. Long before this contemporary moment of resistance, activists and researchers repeatedly brought attention to the disproportionate state-sanctioned violence that Black communities experience. However, it seems that the death of Brown and the subsequent protests marked a tipping point. In response to the tragic events in Ferguson, there have been over two hundred days of consistent national protest and resistance against racialized violence and police brutality. The duration of this movement in the United States is second only to that of the Montgomery bus boycott, which was sparked by the arrest of organizer Rosa Parks and lasted for 381 days. Gathered under the umbrella of Black Lives Matter, this movement has taken place in the streets, courthouses, university campuses, and malls, as well as outside of police departments.

The founders of the organization and popular hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, describe the movement as “an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression” (Garza 2014). These Black women, two of whom identify as queer and one as the child of Nigerian immigrants, created #BlackLivesMatter after Trayvon Martin’s killer was acquitted, by way of imploring us all to pay attention to the damage anti-Black racism continues to inflict on our society. #BlackLivesMatter demands that we recognize that all Black lives matter, including trans folk, differently-abled individuals, and others who are frequently marginalized. While the movement acknowledges the impact that various forms of racism have on a host of marginalized communities, it emphasizes how the exploitation of Black labor, the objectification of Black bodies, and the subsequent trauma and death of these human beings continues to be central to the political and economic workings of the United States. In this way, it requires people to understand that our struggles for liberation are connected, while recognizing the specific roles that anti-Black racism and white supremacy have played in centuries of oppressive discourse and practices. Throughout these months of resistance, thousands of people engaged in organized and spontaneous disruptions that have taken the form of die-ins, digital activism, blocking traffic and commerce, protests during city council meetings and court appearances, employment strikes, dancing and roller-skating in the streets, interrupting newscasts when residents feel that their stories are not being told, and campaigns highlighting Black experiences at what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2012) has called HWCUs (Historically White Colleges and Universities). Additionally, this resistance against anti-Black racism and state-sanctioned violence has not been confined to the borders of the United States, but has been taken up by Black peoples throughout the Diaspora, in places like Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil.

The essays below are framed around three sets of questions. First, how do we understand #BlackLivesMatter as an intersectional political and theoretical intervention, and how does this intervention help us to better grasp the connections between race, racism, and state-sanctioned violence? Second, in what ways is the history of racism and violence in the United States connected to the transnational and diasporic experience of anti-Black racism and violence? Finally, what are some solutions to these critical issues of Black life and death, and how can activists, researchers, and scholars, particularly those in anthropology, contribute to actions focused on this problem-solving?

Since the last professional meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in December 2014, the organization has responded to its members’ demand that it take an active role in working against anti-Black racism and police violence. This response began with public statements made by the president of the AAA, Monica Heller, and the Association of Black Anthropologists, both of which called anthropologists to action. Additionally, the AAA Executive Board has approved the creation of the Working Group on Racialized Police Brutality and Extrajudicial Violence, which is part of the Committee on Minority Issues in Anthropology. It is our hope that the essays in this forum will contribute to these developments within the discipline, encouraging anthropologists and others to use our training, our skills, and our theoretical and experiential insight to be the change we want to see in the world.

Activists affiliated with #BlackLivesMatter, the Black Women’s Blueprint, and Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal (EMAJ) aim to extend imagination and practice beyond conventional politics, resisting the law-and-order rhetoric that legitimates police and prison brutality. EMAJ, for instance, confronts life-threatening medical neglect of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal as an expression of the vulnerability of black lives to legal violence. Such violence renders black people moving targets for violation and death. Homicides of unarmed blacks by white, nonwhite, or multiracial police forces reflect an institutional anti-black bias in law enforcement. Recent politicized deaths include the police killings of unarmed children and adults: Ayana Stanley-Jones, Rekia Boyd, Trayvon Martin, Miriam Carey, Yvette Smith, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Tanisha Anderson, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray.

After Ferguson, Missouri erupted in 2014 following the police shooting of Michael Brown, President Barack Obama dismissed Congressman John Lewis’s assertion that the Ferguson protests could spark another major civil rights movement. Yet Lewis, a former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist, perceived the impact of an emergent international network of radical opposition. In November 2014, young activists from Chicago, aligning themselves with the “We Charge Genocide” petition of 1951, met with the Committee Against Torture in Geneva to discuss the Chicago police torture ring that forced over one hundred mostly black men into false confessions and imprisonments. Michael Brown’s parents raised the issue of the militarization of police in Ferguson, while #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Women’s Blueprint addressed the committee on sexual assault. The Committee Against Torture’s questioning of the U.S. delegation focused on militarized policing, torture, and rape in prison. When President Obama subsequently discussed remedies to police militarization and prison rape, he did not mention radical black activists’ diplomatic work beyond U.S. borders.

Besieged Reputations

On April 27, 2015, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch (2015) condemned protesters’ violence against Baltimore police and property. Validating what she described as “legitimate peaceful protesters,” Lynch raised the possibility of a Department of Justice investigation into Freddie Gray’s death, an offer that the city accepted the following week. But Lynch’s predecessor, Eric Holder, had rejected Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Police Commissioner Anthony Batts’s calls for a federal investigation after a Baltimore Sun exposé on police brutality. Instead, the Department of Justice settled on a collaborative review of the police department, in keeping with President Obama’s Community Oriented Policing Services initiative. Even as police continued to violate black communities, Attorney General Lynch instructed “the Baltimore community” to adhere to nonviolence. Police aggression was seen as necessary, protected by bureaucracy, unions, and laws such as Maryland’s Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights. Activists rejected this framing and denounced police violence, challenging the position that broken windows were more important than broken necks.

Press reports of Baltimore students rioting after school failed to note what teachers, administrators, and students themselves witnessed: militarized riot police forcing students off buses, blocking subway travel, and refusing to let students leave Frederick Douglass High School for home. In May, a student’s handwritten missive to the alternative press explained that when police commandeered their transportation, corralled, and intimidated them, students reasoned that rather than turn their anger on each other, they would turn it against the police. Just as with the gang threat, media outlets uncritically accepted the predator-teen threat, increasing public sympathy for police. Governor Larry Hogan outlined the military campaign, with Baltimore divided into sectors cleared by police and secured by the National Guard. The mayor set a curfew, lifted only after police indictments. Meanwhile, underreported by the press, gangs called truces as black clergy and community leaders walked the streets with members of the Nation of Islam, serving as moving shields between rioters/rebels, police, and property. This inversion of the 1971 Attica rebellion—in which black and brown prisoners mistakenly believed that National Guard troops would not shoot through white prison guards used as shields—revealed these leaders’ comprehension of the agency, grief, and rage (as well as venal opportunism) of their burning communities. Leaders maintained discipline by keeping everyone within the community, sharing criticisms of police violence and containment strategies. For his part, President Obama (2015) condemned Baltimore “thugs” and acknowledged his inability to control police, even as he called for a national movement addressing the needs of impoverished children.

Gendered Movements

Public perceptions of police violence obscure the victimization of women. A 2010 report from the Cato Institute found that sexual misconduct is the second-most-reported police crime, following excessive force. Black female (and queer) sexuality gets associated with seduction, rendering consent meaningless. Yet the victimization of black men can also end in rape; in 1997, it was Loretta Lynch who prosecuted the white officers responsible for sodomizing Abner Louima with a toilet plunger, leading to the New York Police Department’s largest settlement for police violence. Gender bias in activist movements must be understood in the context of traumatizing police assaults that place black women under rhetorical and physical siege.

Unifying theories of violence and vulnerability, activists reconstitute movements as genders-inclusive, nonelitist, and radical. Offering critiques beyond bipartisan, cost-cutting decarceration and police training, their focus on anti-black racism redefines the resistance of moving targets.

Starting in the late summer of 2014, we have witnessed what some are calling a new form of protest, staged by an intergenerational and interracial populace intent on challenging the status quo of state violence in the United States. Images of large numbers of people in the streets with megaphones and signs, chanting slogans and demanding answers and retribution, are not new. Yet there is something about this moment of protest and the activism it evidences that calls us to reconsider not only how policing occurs, but also how young people, in particular, understand their relationship to the state.

Social media allows millennial activists to organize protests within minutes. Information is both disseminated and critiqued with incredible rapidity. Thus, the image of Michael Brown’s 18-year-old body lying for over four hours in the middle of the street where he was fatally shot becomes the lightning rod for a national movement. The ability to see murdered bodies minutes after they have fallen, hear audio of the victims and perpetrators seconds before their encounter, and respond to mobilizations as soon as the online call is made transforms the killings of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Eric Garner into singular, galvanizing events. At the same time, the specter of violence leveled by the state is all too mundane for many young Black people living in the United States.

Photographs and video footage have captured young Black women, many of whom are in their late teens and early twenties, on the front lines of protests or leading teach-ins and mobilizations in their communities. While the leadership of young Black women has gained a certain level of mainstream visibility, this new focus belies the fact that young Black women have historically been at the forefront of such activities, as initiators of conversations meant to protect the interests and lives of all who claim membership in their communities. My ethnographic research on race, gender, and citizenship in the United States focuses on the ways in which young people of color manage their lives in underresourced, overly policed environments. In more than a decade of research with young Black women in Detroit and high-school-age Black girls in Newark, I have seen how young women take strategic action to protect these cities and the people who call them home, even as this protection is not always reciprocated. For example, the young women residents of a homeless shelter in Detroit confronted issues such as the crisis in public education, a lack of safe and reliable public transportation, and corruption in city and state government with community-based workshops and street theater events. These events provided new forums for Detroiters to identify possible ways of addressing the most debilitating challenges to the vitality and well-being of their community.

In Newark, concerns about the dangers they encountered while traveling to school and work prompted high-school-age girls to interview other Black girls and women about their relationships to the city. The interview transcripts then became the foundation for a performance project that explored how the intersection of race, gender, age, and class influences the ways in which Black women enact community and move through the city. A new understanding of this conscious choreography provided the girls and their community with the ability to experience the urban environment as more than stress, threat, aggression, or violence. In both Detroit and Newark, the young women at the center of these creative political initiatives openly expressed their desire to renarrate racialized neighborhoods marked in the media as areas of crime and destitution as homespaces. In homespaces, an ethos of civic accountability and genuine care is more real and felt than the highly visible acts of violence with which their communities are associated.

In November 2014, I traveled to Missouri to give thanks for the thoughtfully courageous work of young activists who had been active in their community long before anyone was talking about Ferguson or the tragic death of a young man named Mike Brown. There, too, young Black women talked about efforts to support and educate their neighbors that they have been spearheading for years—efforts that will continue well after the names of recently murdered youth have dropped out of conversation and moved to the growing archive of young Black men and women killed under the guise of safety and protection.

The linear and ahistorical narrative of Black activism and protest in the United States is obsessed with identifying singular, usually male leaders responsible for inspiring collective action. A more rigorous and accurate retelling of history, however, points to the actions taken by Black women, many of them young, who established a foundation that supported the highly visible events embedded in popular consciousness as our protest history. This history has shaped our active present and will inevitably transform how we understand future steps toward greater equity and justice. The way we discuss the past, understand the present, and plan for future social transformation must be grounded in a recognition of young Black women’s everyday choreography of survival—the quotidian practices that form the foundation of those overly publicized and hypertelevised protest moments that are impossible to ignore.

Killed Outright or Left to Die: Black (Trans)Women and the Police State by Matt Richardson

Recently, Black trans activist CeCe McDonald called the continuous murder of Black transwomen a state of emergency. In fact, it is only recently that people began to utter the names of Black women as part of a continuous phenomenon of fatal encounters with the police. In 2013, seventy-two percent of all anti-queer homicides were of transwomen and 66.6 percent were of transwomen of color, primarily Black women (NCAVP 2014). In a sharp op-ed for the Huffington Post, historian Kali Gross (2014) declared that “Black women are already dead in America.” Her assertion contextualizes the state-sanctioned death of Black women and girls. Over the years, there have been multiple cases where Black men have been brutally murdered by the state, while the rest of us piteously watch from the distance of mass media. If a Black person makes it through the initial contact with police, there is a continual risk of extreme cruelty and premature death throughout the rest of the process. From the first interaction to booking to county jail to arraignment to transport, time in prison or the physical and psychological terror of solitary confinement, every step can be an experience of derision, denial, and sexual brutality. Black transwomen’s experiences in these spaces are both particular and indicative of how Black women encounter state violence. Although we are poised to notice violence against Black men, there are many other bodies that experience extreme violence and lethal force when encountering police. It is impossible for me to imagine that those with authority, such as the governor of Maryland, would ever declare the death of Black women an emergency. However, I still hope beyond hope that Black people will one day consider the brutal rape and murder of Black women, particularly Black transwomen, significant enough that we will respond as if it were a crisis.

In the past few years, there have been multiple cases of Black transwomen encountering police violence. Two cases that are relatively well known are those of CeCe McDonald and Duanna Johnson. CeCe McDonald, a Black transwoman, was incarcerated in Minneapolis in 2012 for attempting to defend herself from racist and transphobic attackers. Less well-known is Duanna Johnson’s horrific 2008 beating by a white cop, who used handcuffs as brass knuckles to punch the side of her head in a Memphis booking room. Duanna was found slain a few months later after filing lawsuits against the city and the police officers who attacked her.

Nizah Morris’s death is eerily similar, suggesting police involvement in her murder. Nizah was found with a fatal head wound in 2002, minutes after entering a Philadelphia police vehicle for a “courtesy ride.” Police records and eyewitness accounts put Nizah in police custody until moments before she was found bleeding in the street. The officer on the scene determined that Nizah was not the victim of a crime and there was no initial investigation into this case, even though the medical examiner ruled that Nizah’s death was a homicide. As recently as April 2013, police inconsistencies and missing evidence have been declared insufficient to pursue her homicide any further.

In 2013, Berkeley, California resident Kayla Moore died in police custody after being wrestled face down in her living room. Kayla had an outstanding warrant and a severe mental illness. Her roommate called the police while she was having a psychotic episode. Eventually, eight officers showed up at the scene to subdue Kayla, using two sets of handcuffs and a wrap device to restrain her legs. Finally, after 5–10 minutes of struggling, news reports indicate that Kayla “stopped resisting” (Veklerov 2014). Kayla’s death is reminiscent of the death of a cisgender woman, Tanisha Anderson, who also suffered from mental illness. Again, loved ones called the police in hopes of getting some help for Tanisha. The police responded by slamming Tanisha face down on the pavement. She died while resisting her restraints.

In addition to being killed outright in police custody, transwomen experience unique forms of humiliation and violence once arrested; they are often placed in male prisons where they are vulnerable and essentially left for dead. In a 2005 interview, trans activist Miss Major described the never-ending police surveillance of Black transwomen. She has been stopped and arrested by police for a variety of charges, often for simply being in public and for having identification that did not match the state’s expectations. She recounted being harassed by police whether her identification said male or female. If she was on probation at the time, any routine traffic stop made her vulnerable to subsequent incarceration in a male prison.

Transwomen encounter extra humiliation during the arrest and incarceration process. They are more than likely denied female clothes—including underwear—and medically necessary hormones, as well as protection from male inmates. For example, in 2003 and 2009, Patti Hammond Shaw was arrested and placed in the male units of a Washington, DC jail, even though she had undergone genital reassignment surgery and had changed her legal gender markers to female. She was harassed by the male prison population and the guards, who demanded that she display her genitals. Miss Major and Patti Hammonds Shaw are both examples of how Black transwomen are basically left to die in America’s prisons and jails.

If we were to pay attention to the violence and lethal force that Black transwomen encounter, we would broaden our awareness of how rapacious police violence and murder happens to all Black women. There is not enough local and national attention to Black women’s deaths—no large scale, multi-state protests. From the Rodney King beating to Ferguson and Baltimore, Black people have been willing to put their own bodies on the line in resistance to state violence against Black men. When will we put our time and energy into fighting for Black (trans)women?

The recent explosion in protests against anti-black racism and state violence in many U.S. urban centers has parallels with realities in the historically black, working-class, and underdeveloped areas of the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, Port of Spain. These parallels suggest a transnational dimension to current events extending beyond North America to ex-colonies in the Caribbean and their Afro-populations.

To many outsiders, Trinidad is known for its carnival, calypso, and multiculturalism. However, there’s also a violent side to everyday life here. In the 2013 United Nations Global Study on Homicide, Trinidad and Tobago, a small, energy-rich state comprised of two islands and a population of 1.3 million, was ranked the twelfth-most-murderous nation in the world with a murder rate of 28.3 per 100,000 people.

In an ethnically diverse nation like Trinidad and Tobago—the three main demographic groups are Indo-Trinidadian (37.6%), Afro-Trinidadian (36.3%) and Mixed-Trinidadian (24.2%)—ethnic political parties have rotated in and out of the government in each election since the mid-1990s. Yet each government has blamed the same group for the nation’s murderous violence, continuing a tradition begun under colonialism. The current People’s Partnership Government is no exception, with Prime Minister Kamla Bissessar singling out “marauding groups of thugs bent on creating havoc in our society” (Hutchinson-Jafar 2011).

In the transnational language of anti-black racism, these “groups of thugs” are a euphemism for young, Afro-Trinidadian, working-class males from historically impoverished areas of Port of Spain. Responding to allegations of racial profiling back in 2011, then-minister of national security John Sandy explained that the majority of crimes in Trinidad and Tobago are committed by Afro-Trinidadians against other Afro-Trinidadians, adding that this race also comprises the majority of the prison population. Without any acknowledgment of the ways that cumulative advantages and disadvantages overlap with race and class in Trinidad and Tobago, Sandy went on to offer five years of police statistics showing that 1,668, or 72.3 percent, of the 2,307 persons murdered in Trinidad were of African descent.

Just as it was in colonial times, Trinidad and Tobago’s political elite disseminates an uncomplicated image of crime that links criminality with poor, urban, opportunistic Afro-Trinidadian males who kill each other. Rarely are any other groups in society implicated. This is an irony not lost on many locals, since Trinidad and Tobago is well-known for a never-ending list of white-collar crimes that are rarely punished in the courts.

Having marked poor, black, inner-city males and the areas in which they live as the targets for intervention, Prime Minister Bissessar told the nation that she was committed to unleashing “the dogs of war” on criminals (Matroo 2014). Likewise, Deputy Police Commissioner Mervyn Richardson let the public know that “this is a war and we will win” (Trinidad Express 2013). Recent interventions in predominately poor and black areas are numerous and have included declaring a 2011 state of emergency, putting the police and army together on joint patrols, attempting (unsuccessfully) to pass a bill giving the policing wing of the army the power to arrest civilians, and implementing a rapid-response strategy. Millions of U.S. dollars have been lost on failed sports programs supposedly able to solve the crime problem, and the full embrace of the United States–led war on drugs has continued, accompanied both by economic aid and militarization.

In response to media reports that police officers had shot two Afro-Trinidadian teen brothers in the back, then-minister of national security Gary Griffith, a soldier by training, left little doubt about what happens in poor black neighborhoods when they are policed as war zones. “I think it will be inappropriate to state that the police are abusing their power,” Griffith told the press. “They are in a war and they need to protect themselves and protect us” (Trinidad Express 2014).

Does the government of Trinidad and Tobago understand the significance of declaring war on its own citizens? And who is the “us” that Griffith intends to protect? After all, the official designation of a state of affairs as a war is far more than semantics. Naming crime or a political problem a war indicates that those with political power see some of their own citizens as collateral damage and not as equal citizens. For low-income, black, working-class men and their families in urban Trinidad, this usage suggests they have been racialized into a monolithic enemy of the state, which violent state resources must defeat.

At the highest levels, there is no mention of the historical realities of colonialism and how it patterned the present, or of the structural obstacles that individuals might face due to their racialization and/or class position. Those in power avoid tackling the realities behind present-day inequalities and corruption. They fail to consider why certain sorts of criminal behavior might be on the rise. Instead, the response of successive governments has been to establish and develop a war against an urban, black, and relatively poor segment of Trinidad and Tobago’s population.

The omission of the multiple causes of violence is, as Michel Foucault might stress, a function of power standing in for truth. For if the government ever did inquire into these multiple causes, the research of a vast array of scholars would reveal intersecting phenomena including: high unemployment in violence-prone areas, low minimum wages, lack of opportunities for self-development, the shipment of drugs, government financial support to urban gangs, lack of public trust in the police, poor police tactics, heavy-handed soldiers, corruption, poverty, legacies of colonialism and imperialism, the impact of structural adjustments, family issues, and more.

The government of Trinidad and Tobago has, like many other ex-colonial governments around the world, fomented a war against poor black men from economically deprived urban areas. Events in Port of Spain can thus be read as a reflection of historical global racism. They are marked by many of the same cultural logics, such as militarization, poverty, and anti-black racism, that are being dramatically revealed across the United States in acts of police aggression against black populations.