"Another Child, Another Mother”: African-American Women, Erasure, and the Global Ethics of Loss”
Racial Democracy Crime and Justice Network
14th Annual Workshop: Intersectionality, Crime and Justice, July 14-15
Center for Law and Justice, Rutgers University, Newark
 
This paper places the problem of homicide in African - American communities in the United States into a global human rights framework and draws upon African-American women's philosophy, activism and everyday practice as a means to highlight, trace and contextualize an important body of diagnostic theory and praxis that has continually met with and combated erasure and spectacularization in the public sphere. Following Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley, I understand African-American women as “theorists and proponents of radical humanism committed to liberating humanity and reconstructing social relations across the board,” and creating “revolutionary conversation about how all of us might envision and remake the world." Particular emphasis is turned toward interviews and testimony from African-American women who have lost children to homicide and how their thinking and community work form intellectual sites for resisting public silence and apathy toward homicide, and creating strategies for ending cultures of violence.  More often than not, these women knew, practiced and theorized about these strategies long before their children were killed, but were unable to have their interventions and concerns taken seriously in public forums or translated into policy change. The erasure of their voices not only impacts life, justice and anti-violence movements locally, but also globally.