Color of Violence

 By Nadine Naber 

Between March 26 and 29, 1,600 radical women, gender non-conforming and trans people of color gathered in Chicago for the fourth “Color of Violence” conference, organized by INCITE!. COV4 commemorated the 15-year anniversary of INCITE!, a national activist organization of radical feminists of color advancing a movement to end violence against women of color and our communities through direct action, critical dialogue and grassroots organizing. For 15 years, INCITE! has been engaging in grassroots organizing projects, critical conversations, national actions, transnational campaigns and community building strategies to end colonial, racial and gender-based violence against women of color, trans and queer people of color, and our communities. COV4 highlighted emerging strategies and new frameworks that focus on ending violence without relying on policing, mass incarceration, restrictive legislation and other systems of violence and control. 

COV4 was a platform for furthering our conversations about (1) how anti-violence movements must centralize an analysis of state violence and how racial-class justice movements must centralize an analysis of sexual violence in order to account for realities that disenfranchised women of color and transgender people of color experience and (2) how state violence shapes and impacts interpersonal violence.

Rally for Marissa Alexander/Picsora

By Emma Roderick

In January 2014, Marissa Alexander, whose lengthy prison sentence for firing a warning shot into the air in order to fend off an attack from her estranged husband galvanized feminists and anti-racist activists around the country, was released after spending three years in prison. She will live another two years under house arrest, wearing an electronic ankle bracelet for which she must pay the state $105 per week. Alexander did not harm anyone. But what about women who do kill their abusers?

These women get significantly less media attention and significantly less support from feminists. Yes, they are the sympathetic subjects of several hit country singles: Miranda Lambert’s “Gunpowder and Lead” and Martina McBride’s “Independence Day” have both been covered on American Idol, and I remember rocking out to the Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” with friends when I was 13. Even when the women in these songs appear callous (Ain’t it dark, wrapped up in that tarp, Earl?) they are clearly the heroines: young, white, and conventionally attractive, they win the moral high ground. Only one of the songs alludes to legal consequences.