Sonya Massey and Police Violence against Black Disabled Women
Disabled people are already at a high risk for police violence. That risk Increases when they are Black women
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Weeks ago Sonya Massey was enjoying her summer and her family. Now she's dead, and a national news story.
Because a racist and violent Illinois cop who police departments bounced to other police departments murdered her, Massey joins Sandra Bland and Tanisha Anderson as a Black woman with a disability executed by law enforcement.
A white paper from the Ruderman Family Foundation found that the media does not mention disability when a police officer kills someone despite half of all people killed by police in the United States live with a disability. Despite efforts at expanding the discourse, feminism still excludes disabled women especially Black disabled women.
Anna Wafula Strike, a Black British Paralympian, argued in her 2018 Guardian commentary on the #MeToo Movement that feminism’s erasure of disabled women harms them by ignoring the oppressions they face and failing to address their unique needs.
As Wafula Strike wrote in her Guardian op-ed, her childhood in Kenya as a disabled girl removed her voice and socially isolated her because some members of her society viewed her disability as a curse from God.1 However, these practices and views are not unique to the Global South. Even in the Global North, disabled women of all racial backgrounds are often viewed as weak, damaged, voiceless, an economic drain on society, passive, and in need of an able-bodied white male savior for redemption.
For Black disabled women though they face violence from the police who are often white males. Among the Black women most at risk are the mentally ill2. Massey, Anderson and Bland all lived with mental illness. A 2017 William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law article by Michelle S. Jacobs emphasized that death is “[t]he most severe violence” against Black women.3 These deaths become “invisible” because of white-centered media coverage and lack of institutional, cultural and sociological education.4
Five years before Jacobs’s publication, the United Nations noted racial disparity in its report on violence against disabled women:
Social sanctions relating to poverty, race/ethnicity, religion, language and other identity status or life experiences can further increase the risk of group or individual violence for women with disabilities. Women with disabilities who also belong to (or are perceived as belonging to) disfavoured or minority groups may face compounded violence and discrimination based on several factors simultaneously. The recognition of that reality — variously referred to as intersectionality, multidimensionality, and multiple forms of discrimination — is important to any examination of violence against women with disabilities.5
To paint Black women with disabilities with the same brush as disabled white women does them an immense and dangerous disservice; their life experiences with systemic and cultural racism impact how their disabilities are viewed and treated and are unique to them.6 Four years before the now ex-deputy lynched Massey, Time published an article about the police inflicting violence specifically on Black Americans who live with disabilities. A year later the Urban Institute published its essay arguing that an intersectional framework must be used for social policies, law-enforcement training and education and promoting a greater awareness to the general public; this framework can help reduce and eventually end police violence against Black disabled Americans.
Feminist disability scholars Sami Schalk and Jina B. Kim cite in their Signs article “Integrating Race, Transforming Feminist Disability Studies” that knowledge produced by feminists-of-color disability theorists provide a much-needed theoretical framework and “method [that] highlights the ideological and rhetorical deployment of ableism within [the destructive] legacies”7 that stripped “sustaining resources from populations of color”8 and committed “ableist violence”9
When women are disabled, of color, part of the LGBTQIA community, or a combination of the three, feminist disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson states they face increased bigotry and sexism since their body and existence further deviate from predetermined societal white, cis gender and abled-bodied norms.10
Schalk and Kim’s “Integrating Race, Transforming Feminist Disability Studies,” advances Garland-Thomson’s 2002 article advocating for feminist disability theory. The authors advocate utilizing and incorporating feminists of color theory into feminist disability studies to construct a deeper feminist disability theory and practice. It “aims not to be additive -- simply layering disability on top of a laundry list of identities -- but to demonstrate how disability is in fact central to the gendered and sexual management of women and queers of color.”
Until the general public and institutions like law enforcement and the media abolish their racist, ableist and sexist framework built on the foundation of white supremacy, the fact sadly remains that more disabled Black women like Massey will lose their lives to police violence.
Anna Wafula Strike, “Disabled Women See #MeToo and Think: What about Us?,” The Guardian, The Guardian, March 8, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/08/disabled-people-metoo-womens-movement-inclusion-diversity
Michelle S. Jacobs, “The Violent State: Black Women's Invisible Struggle Against Police Violence, 24 “William & Mary Journal of Women & the Law. 39 (2017, 53-55.
Jacobs, 41.
Jacobs, 52-53.
Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Its Causes and Consequences, United Nations General Assembly, United Nations, August 3, 2012, 6.
Civic Engagement Guide for Allies and Advocates of Black Women with Disabilities, Black Girls Vote, 10.
Sami Schalk and Jina B. Kim, “Integrating Race, Transforming Feminist Disability Studies,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society vol. 46 1 (Autumn 2020): 38.
Schalk and Kim, 38.
Schalk and Kim, 38.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” NWSA Journal. Feminist Disability Studies. Vol 14 13 (Autumn 2002): 21
As a woman of color with a disability, thank you for posting this.
This is a really important post. Black women already face outrageous abuse from law enforcement. Imagine being disabled and at the mercy of a police officer such as the one who cold-bloodedly murdered Sonya Massey.