Black Girl Gone: Misogynoir,Hypervisibility,and Black Women

Bam! Thunk! Bam! I awaken to commotion at my front door. Clash! Boom! It sounds like someone is trying to knock down my door. I hear voices outside my ground-floor apartment. My boyfriend, Kenneth, wakes up immediately. The banging is getting louder and louder. We are convinced that someone’s trying to break in. We walk out of my bedroom and down the hallway. I watch as he asks who’s at the door, but they don’t identify themselves. A battering ram takes the door out. Kenneth, licensed to carry, starts firing to defend against the intruders. The intruders, police officers, return fire. More shots stream in from the window. Several pierce me. I collapse. My clothes become drenched in my blood. As I lay there in my expanding blood bath, my dreams of becoming a nurse and starting a family fade. Soon, I stop breathing. Like an animal, my body remains on the cold, bloody floor. Later, I’m pronounced dead at the scene. My name is Breonna Taylor (Oppel & Taylor, 2023; Riley, 2020).

I never expected to become a hashtag, let alone becoming one of many Atatiana Jefferson’s. Atatiana’s neighbor had called the police to do a welfare check because her front door was open (Sandoval, 2022). Like me, she heard a disturbance outside of her window while playing video games with her 8-year-old nephew. And like Kenneth, she was licensed to carry, which prompted her to point her gun out of her window. She was killed by a police officer. It was said that her father died of a broken heart weeks after. I can’t imagine what my mother is feeling. “I haven’t had time to sit and grieve,” my mother stated in a Nightline interview (Taguchi et al., 2020). Months after my murder, the media erupted in anguish at the death of George Floyd. Of course, protests ensued. Mine and Atatiana’s deaths were removed from the broader narrative of Black Lives Matter, a movement started by three queer Black women (Black Lives Matter, n.d.). Soon, conversations shifted solely to murders afflicted on uncles, sons, fathers, grandfathers, and other men. It became apparent that the lives of our aunts, daughters, mothers, grandmothers, and other women didn’t generate the same empathy from the public. Why can’t they see my reflection in the eyes of their sons and fathers?

“I don’t want their names gone in vain,” exclaimed Oluwatoyin Salau, commonly referred to as Toyin, while protesting in front of the Tallahassee Police Department. Toyin is a brown-eyed, fierce advocate for ensuring that the message of Black Lives Matter includes all Black lives—Black men, Black women, Black children, and Black LGBTQ+ people, particularly trans women like Nina Pop who are constantly erased from the larger context of Black Lives Matter conversations. Her youth and enthusiasm erupted as she feverishly spoke about how she can’t alter her Black skin and her Black hair. At the Tallahassee protest, she stands in front of a crowd of protesters of color, most of whom are wearing masks. As sweat drips down her forehead in the blistering heat, the crowd cheers her on for her bravery and voice. “We’re doing this for our brothers and our sisters that got shot, but we’re doing this for every Black person. Because at the end of the day, I can’t take my fucking skin color off.” On June 14, her body, as well as the body of an AARP volunteer Victoria Sims, was discovered in the southeastern part of Tallahassee. Earlier, Toyin tweeted about a sexual assault that she experienced at the hands of a Black man who disguised himself as a man of God:

The same niggas I’m risking my life for are the same niggas who are convinced they are stealing away my “innocence” or jewel not knowing that I am standing on a rock. Therefore, I can never be broken or robbed.

Her series of tweets include graphic details about what transpired inside her attacker’s home regarding her rape, as well as details about his apartment complex and his vehicle. Her rapist came forward to confess to raping and murdering Toyin, as well as to murdering Victoria Sims. Their names are Toyin Salau and Victoria Sims.

In late June of 2020, Althea Bernstein was driving downtown in Madison, Wisconsin, and she was stopped by a red light. While waiting at the intersection with her window down, she could hear someone yelling a racial slur at her. Almost immediately, four White men approached her car to pour lighter fluid on her face and throw a lit lighter at her. Althea was able to drive away while putting out her flames. On the east coast, a viral video makes its rounds on the internet depicting a young Black girl who is seen talking to a group of Black boys. The young boys appear to ask her if she is going to kiss another boy. Later in the video, the group of Black boys pick her up and throw her in the dumpster, which is a stark reminder for some Black women of how easily we can be discarded by society. Why won’t they stop hurting us? How is such disregard for Black women’s livelihood able to sustain itself?

Beaten, raped, and killed from both sides of the aisle. Why? Misogynoir. Misogynoir, coined by Moya Bailey, involves the intersecting oppression of racism and misogyny that Black women endure (Bailey, 2021). It’s often said that women are just an extension of men like we weren’t supposed to be here too. Aligning Black Lives Matter conversations with the oppression solely afflicted against Black men operationalizes to dehumanize Black women and to represent only a subset of the Black experience. Black women’s experiences have often been omitted from antiracist discourse and feminist theory because they focus on specific experiences that are either racist or sexist. All of the women are White, and all of the Blacks are men (Crenshaw, 2011). Thus, the entire premise of Black women existing as subhuman is validated. The media constantly showcases some Black women in stereotypical roles: Sapphire, the angry, Black woman; Jezebel, the overly sexual Black woman; Matriarch or Superwoman, the hero; and the mammy, the asexual nursemaid (Bell, 2004). These stereotypical caricatures can deem Black women as abnormal, even while occupying spaces as hypervisible and hypersexual in modern society. This is evident in the case of Sara Baartman, whose body was viewed as oversexual and inferior even while her body was put on display for paying customers (Mowatt et al., 2013). This hypervisibility has sexually commodified some Black women for market exchange even while being unjustly targeted by sexist and racist attacks (Mowatt et al., 2013). This double jeopardy, coined by Shirley Chisholm, of intersecting identities places Black women in inferior categories, rationalizes our murders, and dehumanizes our experiences (Curwood, 2015). Viewing the various recordings of Black death daily has made the media desensitized to some of the experiences of being a Black woman. Some of our struggles continue to be “structurally invisible and impermeable to broad empathy; these killings recede from the foreground quietly,” as stated by Brittney Cooper, author of Eloquent Rage, in a New York Times article (Cooper, 2020). Our deaths become easier to digest while more lives are lost. There must be something about the pain of Black women and Black trans women that appears to be fascinating.

Is death the cost of existing in this Black body? Will I succumb to the same fate as Breonna, Atatiana, and Toyin? It can’t be normal to have my life minimized to a hashtag. I arrive at my old home and I am embraced by my family. I succumb to social media’s rabbit hole and get into various heated discussions with random men. I can’t believe this Black man is questioning my anger. “Stop wasting your breath Jessica,” I mumble to myself while rolling my eyes. Midnight had passed and it was time for me to go to sleep. I lay awake thinking about Breonna Taylor. Someone could break in. Who would protect me? What would my killer be like? How would death feel? Rekia Boyd. Nina Pop. Sandra Bland. Korryn Gaines. Atatiana Jefferson. Dominique Fells. Breonna Taylor. I drift in and out of consciousness. I have to stay awake. I could be next. I am every Black woman. I am Jessica Morgan.