IMPOSSIBLE PRIVACY: BLACK WOMEN AND POLICE TERROR

Black women have never known the luxury of privacy in the Americas. Impossible privacy is one of the tormenting dimensions of slavery and its afterlives. White supremacy meets us at every turn. Our every move is stalked and surveilled. Our bodies, our homes, our children, even our graves are not our own; able to be raided, poked, prodded or stolen at any moment. Harriet Jacobs describes this torment (quoted above) in her account of her enslavement. The constant specter of her slave master was one of the agonizing dimensions of her experience as an enslaved woman. White supremacy stalks us. Haunting our interior and exterior lives, leaving us no moment of respite or peace no breath of fresh air. Living under the constant physical and metaphysical gaze of whiteness is more than just inconvenience; it is terrorizing. This terror manifests itself acutely in policing across the Americas. On May 29, 2020. just four days after police officers brutally and publicly asphyxiated George Floyd in front of a convenience store, someone broke into Atatiana Jefferson and Yolanda Carr's home in south Fort Worth, Texas and ransacked it.5 Their neighbor, James Smith, knew something was amiss when he saw a vacuum cleaner thrown into the back yard.