SUNDOWN TO SUNUP: AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY FORUM

As we approach the one month anniversary of the tragedy in Charleston, it is critical to send a message that this brutal massacre will not be forgotten. This blatant act of white supremacy represents a turning point for our racial justice movement.

Beyond the vexing questions of forgiveness and grace, we must address this heinous act and the subsequent assaults on Black churches as constituents committed to racial and gender justice. The media, politicians and others might be willing to move on, but we must confront what Charleston means for us now and in the future.

This is a moment where feminists of all races and genders must aggressively denounce and repudiate Dylann Roof's murderous embodiment of racist patriarchy. White women cannot allow one shred of legitimacy to rest upon Roof’s claims that these nine murders were undertaken in their name. At the same time, all antiracists must commit to a deep and sustainable feminist sensibility—one that sees in Roofs’ rampage the fact that Black women are also targets of patriarchal racism. We can no longer give mere lip service to intersectionality and the indivisibility of social justice; the struggle against patriarchy and racism must be substantively robust and inextricably intertwined.

Please consider signing the following letter and sharing it widely with your networks.

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The Charleston Imperative: Why Feminism & Antiracism Must Be Linked

As we grieve for the nine African Americans who were murdered in their house of worship on June 17 2015, those of us who answer the call of feminism and antiracism must confront anew how the evils of racism and patriarchy continue to endanger all Black bodies, regardless of gender.

As antiracists, we know that the struggle against racial terror is older than the Republic itself. In particular we remember the work of Ida B Wells who risked everything to debunk the lies of lynchers over 100 years ago. Today, we see that fierce determination in Bree Newsome who scaled the 30-foot flagpole at the South Carolina state Capitol and brought down the Confederate flag. As feminists, we recognize how racism has been -- and is still -- gendered. Patriarchy continues to be foundational to racial terrorism in the US, both in specious claims that justify the torture of Black men in defense of white womanhood, and in its brutal treatment of Black women and girls. We also recognize that while patriarchy and racism are clearly intertwined, all too often, our struggles against them are not.

If the reaction to the Charleston massacre is to be realized as something beyond a singular moment of redemptive mourning, then neither the intersectional dynamics of racism and patriarchy which produced this hateful crime, nor the inept rhetorical politics that sustain the separation of feminism from antiracism, can be allowed to continue.

As antiracist feminists of every color, we refute the patriarchal, racist practices that endanger Black people across the nation. In so doing, we also insist that the extremism of Roof’s declaration that Black people “must go” because they are “taking over our country” and “raping our women” should not obscure how anti-Black racial logics are embedded in the routine decisions made by millions of people every day. Decisions about where to live, how to identify a “safe neighborhood” or a “good school,” whom to police, and to whom police are to be accountable, also rest on a longstanding demonization of Black bodies. These choices, grounded in ideologies of Black threat, frame separation from Blackness as a rational choice. The narratives that routinely diminish the life chances of African Americans are not yesterday’s problems. Dylann Roof was born in 1994, yet murdered nine Black people having thoroughly consumed narratives that continue to denigrate Black people over half a century after the supposed fall of white supremacy. The continued assault on Black churches--several which have been burned to the ground since the Charleston Massacre--tells us that even the most extreme expressions of this denigration are not isolated.

We must recognize, at last, that racial violence, including the cycle of suffering and slow death that hovers over Black communities, is structural as well as individual. Equally significant, racial violence has never been focused on males alone. A clear indication of the way that white insecurities can unleash murderous impulses against all Black people, is that Roof murdered six Black women as well as three Black men. In his perceived defense of white women, Roof killed Black mothers, grandmothers, sisters, wives and daughters. To would-be purveyors of Black genocide, there are no collateral victims. Every Black body is a threat; every dead one is one step closer to their ultimate goal.

Feminists must denounce the use of white insecurity -- whether in relation to white womanhood, white neighborhoods, white politics, or white wealth -- to justify the brutal assaults against Black people of all genders. Antiracists must acknowledge that patriarchy has long been a weapon of racism and cannot sit comfortably in any politic of racial transformation. We must all stand against both the continual, systematic and structural racial inequities that normalize daily violence as well as against extreme acts of racial terror. Policy, and movement responses that fail to reflect an intersectional approach are doomed to fail. We want a loving community across difference. In the memory of Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Depyane Middleton Doctor, Daniel Simmons and Myra Thompson, we commit to a vibrant, inclusive, and intersectional social justice movement that condemns racist patriarchy and works to end its daily brutality and injustice. Anything less is unacceptable.
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