This is part of the Political Philosophy and Race Speaker Series.
The location will be posted closer to the date.
Title: Black Femicide and Toni Morrison and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Democratic Storytelling
Abstract:
Black women are 10% of the US female population yet represent 59% of women murdered. Most of those deaths were instances of intimate partner violence, and thus, a form of Black femicide. More pregnant women are murdered than those who die of the top three pregnancy-related complications, yet Black women account for 44.6% of all pregnancy-related fatal intimate partner violence in the US. As well maternal- and abortion-related deaths are considered a form of “passive” femicide. Today 57% of Black women of reproductive age in the US live under abortion bans and/or severe abortion restrictions, and Black women are three times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than white women.
Despite the above, more people are mobilized in response to the deaths of Black men than those of Black women. Kimberlé Crenshaw understands this asymmetry as partially rooted in Black women’s lack of “narrative capital,” and has called on women to “share their stories” of violence in order to redistribute said capital and occasion greater mobilization. But those who call on Black women to share their stories of private violence must reflect, not only on the complications of sharing publicly these stories of violent intimacy, but on how Black political leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois have written spectacular violence, and specifically lynching, into the story of who Blacks are and why they are here. This talk considers the people-making stories of Du Bois alongside Toni Morrison’s stories, the deaths she centers in her work, the ephemeral collectives she sought to build through these stories of intimate violence and death, and how she would have the stories shared to argue for a more effective method of storytelling to increase mobilization in response to Black women’s deaths.
