By Chelsea Neason
On March 18th of this year, the Sacramento Police Department committed yet another act of aggression against our nation. Stephon Clark was standing in his grandmother Sequita Thompson’s backyard—sacred land, the dwelling place of an elder—when they shot him 8 times, likely killing him within minutes.
After his death, local Black people raised an uproar and brought the case to national attention. Activists have hashtagged Stephon Clark’s name, sharing information about the case and organizing demonstrations. Senator Kamala Harris, a Black woman employed by the occupying state, has even briefly weighed in. Marches, vigils and protests are still underway, one of which became the site of another act of murderous violence toward one of our people when someone drove a sheriff’s vehicle into protester and activist Wanda Cleveland in retaliation for the “vandalism” of a few police cars earlier that same evening.
During this time, Stephon Clark’s alleged social media account was brought to public attention. Stephon had used Twitter to launch direct verbal attacks against Black women. He expressed disdain particularly for those with dark skin, saying that “dark bitches bring dark days” and that he “don’t want nothing black but a Xbox.”
He also publicly cosigned contempt for Black children—and by extension himself—when his non-Black significant other quoted him making the statement: “I don’t want no black baby. I’m already black. I don’t need no black baby.”
Black women are responding to this knowledge in a variety of ways that reflect the complicated relationships we have with Black men, white oppression and our roles in the revolution. Kola Boof expressed solidarity with Black women living in the U.S. and facing the choice to march for Stephon Clark or to refrain out of self-preservation. Some, like activist Chyna Fox, have publicly refused to march for a man in death who would have hated her in life. Others such as writer Hanna Drake choose to frame their support of #StephonClark as a difficult but necessary testament to the truth that Black women “were never the enemy,” but the force standing in the gap on behalf of men like Stephon and their children.
But something troubling undergirds many of the viewpoints that Black women have expressed, whether they choose to participate in protests or not. When cisgender, heterosexual men are killed by the state, we seem to repeatedly name the responding marches and demonstrations as being for cishet men.
Some have even re-told the history of Black women’s revolutionary actions in the United States as being for men. They argue that their refusal to participate in responses to state violence are meant to refute what they view as a centuries-long effort by Black women to put Black men on thrones in return for their love and reciprocity, reciprocity that those men have failed to give.
As an Akata woman forming political and cultural identity around the untamed, unbought and unbossed-ness of our revolutionaries, I’d like to complicate that narrative about why women have participated in the struggle. Much of the underlying mythos revealed here demonstrates a Western understanding of protests that gets in the way of any liberatory potential they might have.
Many people seem to view protests as a means to gain the attention of oppressors. In this view, sympathy and outrage become currency, and demonstrations become breadwinning methods. Our healthy traditional ways of mourning our dead—vigils, funerals, wakes, ancestor elevation ceremonies etc.—become harmfully fused with public spectacle aimed at the atrophied heartstrings of white society.
As a result, we are not keeping ourselves safe to mourn in private. Personal details about the lives of slain Black people—“good” or “bad”—must be turned into marketing opportunities. We are buying white attention, and have correctly identified the primary beneficiaries of our bargains with that treacherous currency to have been Black cishet men.
But what does it mean to collapse the long history of Akata women’s nation-building and resistance work in the United States into a mere competition for worthless white attention, only to then give that attention to cishet men in the hopes that they will properly care for us? If this is a true assessment, how can we escape this doubly abusive dynamic?
In 1997, Kathleen Cleaver narrativized her own experiences as a member of the Black Panther Party in an interview, stating:
“…what appealed to me about the Black Panther Party was that it took that position of self-determination and articulated it in a local community structure, had a program, had a platform and an implementation through the statement of how blacks should exercise community control over education, housing, business, military service.”
Were these simply the words of a woman hoping to appeal to cishet men like Eldridge Cleaver, whom she had divorced ten years prior to the interview?
Assata Shakur, warrior and long-time opposer of the state, famously stated: “When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who will drop dead from no other reason than their own guilt and fear.” Was this a free Black woman making sense of her own multi-layered oppression, or offering up her services to cishet men in hopeful anticipation of their eventual appreciation for her womanhood?
Perhaps we should look toward the countless women we do not name. The women who form the core of community organizations—church, local non-profits, families, neighborhoods—are we doing what we do for ourselves? For our children? Or do we live and fight each day in order to hand over every victory to Black men, so that they can be the ruling patriarchs we’ve been broken into needing?
Black women are varied and complex. At any given time we may perform the labor of revolution for all the aforementioned reasons and more. When we reduce our efforts to gain freedom to convincing Black patriarchs to hand it to us while down on one knee, there is a greater chance that our work will be poured into the bottomless pit of trauma economics.
Effective marches and protests are not bids for sympathy or attention. They are acts of war. Black unruled, unruly bodies in the streets are preparing for battle, for the freedom of our nation. We are not showing this genocidal empire how much we want them to change their ways; we are showing each other how to fight for our sovereignty.
Black women are globally adept at simply bypassing the attempts of abusive men to center themselves or challenge our authority. Mino women (nicknamed the Dahomey Amazons) dealt with men and their nonsense from positions of political and military leadership on the Grand Council, consistently voting to trade in palm oil rather than slavery despite their male fellow warriors’ objections. Kenyan women have maintained the man-free Umoja Village for years now, in response to men abusing their wives in their area. Tanzanian women frequently marry each other in order to keep their property and lifestyles intact and husband-free, taking male lovers on occasion if they prefer.
We have created and maintained secret societies, mysteries, and organizations for women alone—from the Sande society in west Africa, to Takumbeng in Cameroon, to the United Order of Tents in the U.S. We have engaged in diplomacy and defended territory as autonomous political beings, from the famous Nzingah the Matamba/Mbundu “female King” to Queen Nanny of the Maroons in Jamaica. Individual Black women have stood up in righteous anger against male oppression without waiting for permission—including Marissa Alexander, Bresha Meadows, Ruby McCollum, Jane Elkins. We have organized wars in response to men’s abuses of power—and won.
Whether we ultimately choose to march under the banner of an individual man or not, Akata/African-American women’s political actions need not be predicated upon cishet men’s failures or our hopes for their success. We need not concern ourselves with the settler state’s or Black patriarchal aspirants’ useless promises in exchange for our loyalty. We need not center Stephon Clark’s individual “innocence” in order to protest, or his betrayal of Blackness when we don’t.
This is war, and our Black female indigenous authority is being violated. If some of us have made the mistake of crowning a thin crust of cishet men as despots, we must depose them. The safety of our grandmothers’ backyards are at stake.
Suggested Readings:
Chelsea Neason, “Call me Akata: Reclaiming our birthright as Indigenous and African people born on American soil,” Black Youth Project, 2018
Toni Cade Bambara, “On The Issue Of Roles,” 1970
Cleopatra Jones, “On Being ‘Race First’, Stephon Clark, and Gendered Black Community Hypocrisy,” Medium, 2018
Chelsea is a writer, southern gothic womanist, Conjure student under Myesha Worthington, and seeker of the Soul Stone.
