Imagine if I posted about all the murder suicides or the man who tied up and killed his 4 young daughters that were perpetrated by white people. I don’t have a need, like some of you do, to make myself feel better because I’m superior or to form bonds with strangers online by ‘othering’ people who look different than me. Your own parents, siblings, relatives and friends are different from you, stop trying to make black people the same, especially by saying we’re all criminals. It also erases that many of us are irritated by the exact same things you’re upset about.
I’m a woman! That stabbing was absolutely frightening. Yet, because I’m black I’m in here defending my blackness instead of the reality that I’m more likely to be the victim of being stabbed than anyone!
“Some people can be rehabilitated, some people are just mean and evil,” said Karen Spencer-McGee, a 60-year-old survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault who lives in Memphis, Tennessee. “So there are some things that should be punishable. But you cannot address crime without addressing poverty and the miseducation of Black and Brown people.”
In 2023, Black women faced the highest rates of victimization (27.2 violent crimes per 1,000 women), according to federal data. Despite this, Spencer-McGee and other Black women at the Crime Survivors Speak March on Washington shared a common feeling that they were dismissed by police or treated as suspects after experiencing violence. Research bears this out, indicating that crimes committed against Black people are less likely to be solved by law enforcement and less likely to receive news coverage than crimes targeting White people.