What Next - Her Life’s Work Became a Scapegoat. Now What?

You know, I was thinking about you given that this year there have been a number of prominent and brutal acts of violence against black women.

I'm thinking of the former Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Justin Fairfax, he murdered his wife and he killed himself.

I'm thinking of the fact that the deadliest mass shooting in a couple of years was in Louisiana, a man killing a number of his own children and shooting his wife.

And yet it feels to me like these stories, which were so horrific and striking to me, they were in the headlines for like a day or two, half a day, and then they were gone.

Yeah.

Like, what am I to make of that?

Yeah.

Well, you know, we start with, and this is, in my view, sort of classic intersectionality.

So, you know, every minute of every day around the world, women are being killed.

It's just the greatest form of mass violence that is normalized.

There's not even really a debate about it.

So you start with that.

And then you add to that the different valuations that are associated with different kinds of lives.

So we have mass killings on a regular.

We have death, Black death, on the regular.

You put mass killings and you put Black death together, you're going to get maybe a 24-hour news cycle about these things.

Do you think it's framed correctly? Because it's framed as a mass shooting or domestic violence.

Do you even think that's the right framework for us to

look at these acts? Yeah, that's such a good question because one of the things that really underwrote my article on intersectionality and violence was not to call it domestic violence.

It is interpersonal violence.

But domestic violence framed it as a social pathology, not as a systemic way in which patriarchy and misogyny actually become material, even in our own lives and even in relationships that are most close to us.

I also think, though, that there has to be a way of identifying how we ourselves, who are vulnerable to this kind of violence, have been trained not to think that the hands that once caressed us may choke the life out of us.

We tend to think that the people that we have to be afraid of is the other.

Stranger.

When statistically, it's the person who's in the bed with us or the person who's sitting at the dinner table with us.