Black women have historically and continue to experience some of the highest rates of violence, including lethal, physical, and sexual violence; highest rates of maternal mortality and stress-related medical conditions; and some of the highest rates of poverty and unemployment, of any group in the United States. Black women also have the highest rates of stops, police violence, arrests, incarceration, and carceral control among women, and represent the fastest growing prison and jail populations in the country. Black women also bear the brunt of the financial impacts of mass incarceration. Black women have been subjected to a long history of reproductive control, and are increasingly being denied access to abortion and comprehensive reproductive and gender affirming health services, and are primary targets of child welfare policing and the foster system.
Schools, instead of serving as places of learning, nurturing, and growth, have become pathways to prison. Black students are more likely than white students to be suspended, expelled, subjected to corporal punishment ,arrested, and referred to law enforcement while attending school, and are routinely denied the opportunity to fully participate in public education. Black students are twice as likely to be arrested or referred to law enforcement while at school.
In order to fully achieve the Vision for Black Lives, it is essential to center the experiences of Black women1 , girls, trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people, and to understand the ways in which imposition and internalization of cisheteropatriarchy has fueled multiple forms of racialized gender-based violence against and within Black communities.
Some of the policy recommendations made in the Vision for Black Lives specifically focus on Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people, and all recommendations are intended to benefit all Black people, including marginalized groups within Black communities, such as Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people.
This policy brief offers specific recommendations for ending the war on Black women and girls, including trans and gender nonconforming Black women and girls. It overlaps with and complements the policy briefs on ending the war on Black trans and gender nonconforming people and ending the criminalization of Black youth, and should be read in conjunction with both.
We are committed to confronting and dismantling all systems of oppression that fuel and are served by violence against our sisters, siblings, and kinfolk through the demands articulated in this brief, and throughout the Vision for Black Lives. Black people cannot be liberated so long as cisheteropatriarchal values and harms continue to animate our policies, institutions, economies, cultures, movements, and communities.
1 “Recognizing that the category of “woman” was constructed in the context of anti-Blackness in such a way as to exclude Black women, trans, and gender nonconforming people, the Movement for Black Lives uses the term “woman” in its most expansive definition, and explicitly intends for it to be understood as fully inclusive of trans women and femmes, and of all people who identify as women.”
Black women have historically and continue to experience some of the highest rates of violence, including lethal, physical, and sexual violence; some of the highest rates of maternal mortality and stress-related medical conditions; and some of the highest rates of poverty and unemployment, of any group in the United States. Black women also have the highest rates of police stops, police violence, arrests, incarceration, and carceral control among women, and represent the fastest growing prison and jail populations in the country.
The policy recommendations contained in this brief are informed by the reality that, throughout the history of the U.S., during slavery and beyond, African descended women and girls, including queer, trans, and gender nonconforming women and girls, intersex, and nonbinary people, have been subject to systemic and structural torture, physical and sexual violence and abuse, forced childbearing, forced caregiving, denial of the right to parent, violent separation from their children, medical and gynecological experimentation, forced sterilization, criminalization, lynching, and structural economic exploitation by a system designed to profit from our bodies.
History also teaches us that this war on Black women, girls, trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people serves larger structures of power and domination, including colonialism, chattel slavery, racial capitalism, cisheterosexism, and ableism.
This history continues to reverberate in the present day-lived experiences and conditions under which Black women, girls, trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people survive, even as it is hidden behind the pervasive myth that Black women and girls are doing “well” in comparison to Black heterosexual cisgender men, who have been framed as the primary targets of racial terror, state violence, and racial structural exclusion.
Black feminists have exposed how the war on Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people has been promoted and justified through persistent narratives framing Black women as inherently inhuman, sexually deviant and promiscuous, deranged, violent, predatory, deceitful, inviolable, and incapable of experiencing emotional or physical pain, and by establishing and maintaining the category of “woman” in opposition to—and to the exclusion of—Black women, trans, and gender nonconforming people, and as a category inherently subservient to men.
Ending the war on Black women, girls, trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people requires us to not only challenge laws, policies, and practices, but to unpack and dismantle the narratives which underlie them.
Finally, “solutions” offered in response to the war on Black women, girls, trans, inersex, and gender nonconforming people often fail to protect us and, in fact, contribute to further harm. We reject responses to racialized gender-based violence that legitimize and place more power and resources into structures which devalue and harm Black lives, including the lives of Black women, girls, trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people. Systems of policing, prosecution, prisons, punishment, and surveillance have consistently failed to protect Black women, girls, trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people, and have been primary sites of racialized gender-based violence, violation, and criminalization. Here and throughout the Vision for Black Lives, we advocate for divestment from these systems of violence and punishment, and investment in systems and structures that will keep all Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people safe.
This includes investment within Black communities in acknowledging and transforming the ways in which internalization of cisheteropatriarchy and white supremacy continues to create avenues for us to harm one another. We are committed to developing, articulating, and being accountable to the demands we make of ourselves, each other, and our communities to effectively prevent, respond to, and ensure accountability, restoration, healing, and protection for Black survivors of gender-based violence outside the criminal punishment system.
Ensure that Black women have access to resources that will enable them to escape and avoid interpersonal and community violence, including living wage employment; quality, accessible, and affordable housing; immigration status; universal, quality, and accessible health care; comprehensive, culturally appropriate community-based mental health care; universal, quality, and accessible childcare; and healthy environments.
Ensure full access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care and eliminate discriminatory barriers to health care for all people.
Eliminate the foster system’s power to permanently and irreversibly destroy Black families through termination of parental rights.
The war on Black women, girls, trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people takes many forms, including state, community, interpersonal, economic, and reproductive racial gender-based violence. Each fuels, facilitates, and reinforces the others.
Black women in the U.S. face some of the highest rates of interpersonal and community violence, including family, interpersonal, homophobic and transphobic, and sexual violence, childhood sexual abuse, “corrective” rape of lesbians and gender nonconforming people, street harassment, and stalking, in the United States. For instance, Black women experience some of the highest rates of domestic violence, including fatal violence, in the country:
Black women are also targets of gun violence:
Black women experience the second highest rates of sexual violence in the U.S. after Native women. Black trans women and nonbinary people and Black disabled people report the highest levels of sexual violence among Black people:
Although frequently erased from conversations about racial profiling, police violence, criminalization, mass incarceration, and deportation, Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people are central targets of all forms of state violence, including physical, sexual, and fatal violence by law enforcement agents, criminalization, and incarceration.
Black women also make up a growing proportion of migrants to the U.S., particularly from the Caribbean, and are therefore increasingly targeted for state violence in the context of immigration enforcement.
Black women experience poverty at higher rates than Black men and women from all other racial and ethnic groups, except Native American women.
Additionally, Black women are denied access to income support programs through time limits, family caps, restrictions on migrants’ access to benefits, and impossible conditions of compliance. The “welfare queen” stereotype, in particular, has been widely deployed to limit the economic security and reproductive autonomy of Black women.
Black women bear the brunt of the financial burden of mass incarceration. In addition to being one of the fastest growing prison, jail, probation, and parole populations, almost 1 in 2 Black women are related to someone who is incarcerated. As a result, they are often in the position of paying exorbitant bail, fees, and fines, stretching their already severely limited financial resources.
Caregiving—raising children or caring for elders or people with disabilities—housework, and other forms of care work that women are expected to perform for free is often not considered “real” work. Employers, and society at large, are therefore excused from paying the total wages a family actually needs to survive.
Thirty percent of the caregiving workforce is made up of Black women. Although the care economy is the fastest growing sector of the economy, wages are not growing and protections for workers are minimal.
We demand an end to the war on Black women, girls, trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people, and reparations for all historic and present-day forms of racialized gender-based violence.
Challenging and ending the war on Black women, girls, trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people requires action on many fronts articulated in demands outlined throughout the Vision for Black Lives. Some specific policy prescriptions are outlined below.
The 2019 Blueprint for Sexual, Reproductive and Health Rights and Justice, endorsed by over 80 organizations, asserts the fundamental human rights of all individuals to:
In order to protect and promote these rights, policy makers must:
We value Black families. We value opportunities for Black families and communities to keep their children.
Caregiving—raising children or caring for elders or people with disabilities—housework, and other forms of care work that women are expected to perform for free is often not considered “real” work. Employers, and society at large, are therefore excused from paying the total wages a family actually needs to survive.
Thirty percent of the caregiving workforce is made up of Black women. Although the care economy is the fastest growing sector of the economy, wages are not growing and protections for workers are minimal.
These solutions address the needs of survivors of racial and gender-based violence, working class and low- and no-income women, disabled women, trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people, pregnant people, parents and caregivers, migrants, and criminalized women, including people in the sex and drug trades.
