POLITICS Hearing the often silenced voices of black girls and women in America Intimate injustice 3 SPATRICIA WILLIAMS ome years ago I attended a play about the race riots in Los Angeles in 1992. The event, sponsored by the Institute for Arts and Civic Dialogue, was followed by an open discussion among actors, producers and a broader than usual audience. What I remember most is an older black woman volunteering that a white man sitting next to her had just asked for her view on a particular matter. Most importantly, he had asked in a way that made her feel that he honestly wanted to know. “In my entire life,” she said, “I have never had a white man ask what I was thinking about anything at all.” Her pleased surprise resonated with many other women of colour in the audience who recognized themselves in her experience: age, gender and racial dynamics combined in a peculiarly potent vector of social anxiety. The topic of women being silenced, sexualized, bullied, or ignored has been in the news a great deal recently. There has been an unprecedented outpouring of testimonials from women describing their own experiences at home, in the boardroom, on television and in government. Further pockets of debate are concerned with whether white women speak over black women, whether black men talk over black women, or whether minorities have any voice at all. Lack of civility is underwritten by broad habits of courtesy that dictate whose voices count; which bodies are or are not capable of speech, witnessing, forming an opinion. Who speaks to whom? Who is spoken of? Whom do we horrify into silence? In the US, such questions are intimately tied to the longue durée of race, slavery, practices of colonial disregard, and the struggle for Civil Rights. And among the voices most insistently suppressed, written off, and written out are those of black women and girls. “Long portrayed as a masculine endeavor, the African American struggle for progress often found expression through an unlikely literary figure: the black girl.” So runs the premiss of Nazera Sadiq Wright’s Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. It is arresting in its pithiness: the “unlikeliness” of black girls in political struggle, in literary figuration, in the geography of childhood or adolescence. That purported lack is suggestive – being “unlikely” is also about being unliked, and so generally hidden or ignored. Assertion by such a one may be seen as unsettling, wrong, or at best surprising. Shatema Threadcraft’s Intimate Justice: The black female body and the body politic takes up a similar theme, exploring “the ways in which the black female body . . . [has] been constrained and diminished within the American body politic”. If forced breeding was the norm for black women in slavery, she says, forced sterilization and eugenics programmes to reduce the black birth rate became prominent features of public policy in the century that followed. If the white feminist movement was largely “Five Day Forecast” by Lorna Simpson, 1991 about leaving the cloister of the domestic sphere for employment in an erstwhile man’s world, black feminism’s goal has been more about access to private spheres of shelter from public exploitation. The tension between intimate feelings and imposed stereotypes is foremost in both Wright’s and Threadcraft’s books. Together, their research draws on nearly 200 years of mostly under-attended literature to help us make sense of enduring polarities in aesthetic, moral and legal judgements. A study by Georgetown University’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, too recent to have been addressed in either book, is a case in point. Researchers found that African American girls are viewed as generally “less innocent” than their white peers – a bias that begins when they are as young as five years old. (Black boys face similar prejudices but not until they are nine or ten.) Compared to girls of other races, black girls are perceived to warrant less patience, protection and support; they are also thought to be prematurely knowledgeable about a range of adult topics, particularly sex. This leads to their being less mentored, more harshly disciplined, and more frequently criminalized. The authors refer to “adultification”, a process by which children are not accorded the realities of inexperience and impressionability. If “the Negro” has been relentlessly figured as childish, not so actual black children. Black Girlhood unpacks the historical assumptions behind such figuration, cultivated during slavery, and considers the sometimes reactionary efforts to reverse established tropes in the years after Emancipation. “Conduct manuals”, designed to redeem wayward black girls, proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One such handbook was entitled Floyd’s Flowers: Or, Duty and Beauty for Colored Children, written in 1905 by Silas Floyd, a black minister whose ambition was to instruct young ladies in the arts of refinement. The “types” into which he divided his flowers described labels by which black girls are, Wright argues, judged to this day: the obedient Christian, the prematurely knowing girl, the self-respecting working girl, the educated girl, the uplifter of the race, the don’t-care girl, the loud girl. Anxious instruction took place against the backdrop of a larger society that degraded black femininity and deemed it incorrigible. Deborah Gray White’s classic study, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female slaves in the plantation South (1999), describes the most powerful antebellum typologies as the Jezebel, the Mammy and the “sassy” ball-buster (who later morphed into Sapphire, the gold-digging, emasculating “angry black woman” of a wife in the blackfaced radio comedy, Amos ’n’ Andy). One might add to this list “the lying girl” – a figuration that crops up repeatedly in forensic scenarios. Consider the case of Rachel Jeantel. During the trial of George Zimmerman, the Florida vigilante who shot dead Trayvon Martin, the prosecution called to the stand the nineteen-year-old Jeantel, who had been on the phone with Martin until moments before he was shot. As Eric Deggins wrote in the Tampa Bay Times: [Jeantel’s] difficulty in carrying herself the way mainstream pundits and legal experts expected was painfully apparent. She mumbled. She spoke in a jumble of words and phrases that other attorneys and even the mostly-white jury couldn’t understand. She had to admit dictating a letter she once claimed she wrote, which was sent to Martin’s mother describing what she heard during the night of his death. That admission came in the most painful way: Jeantel confessed she couldn’t read cursive writing. Jeantel first met Martin in the second grade. They had reconnected only a few weeks before his death, when he had called because he remembered her birthday. Benjamin Crump, the attorney representing Martin’s family, later revealed that Jeantel particularly valued Martin’s friendship because he was one of the few people who never teased her about her weight or dark skin. That side of Martin was concealed in the courtroom as Zimmerman’s defence team built a picture of the pair as “thugs”. In the media as well as on crossexamination, Jeantel was not merely mocked but demonized as an ugly, combative liar, out to crucify an innocent man. Writing in Salon magazine, Brittney Cooper observed that “These kinds of terms – combat, aggression, anger – stalk black women, especially black women who are dark-skinned and plus-sized like Rachel . . . . [I]t became easy for the white male defence attorney to treat [her] as the one who needed to be regulated”. Distrust of black witnesses dates back to one of slavery’s most intractable premisses – that a slave’s word is incredible. It was a logical corollary of Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney’s premiss in the infamous case of Dred Scott vs Sandford (1857), that black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit . . . . bought and sold and treated as ordinary articles of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it”. (As the legal historian Ariela Gross wrote in Double Character: Slavery and mastery in the ante-bellum southern courtroom, 2000, “honor thrives best with a dishonored class”; and the honour at stake was that of white men who increased their stock of slaves by routinely raping their women.) Imagining black females as incapable of credible testimony has far-reaching consequences. In the US, African Americans represent 17 per cent of all girls enrolled in public schools, yet they are 43 per cent of those suspended, expelled, or arrested by school police. In wider society, the rate at which black girls and women are disciplined, arrested, or crimi- TLS J ANUARY 5 2 0 1 8