The Missing Black Female: The Politics of Intersectionality and Crime

The scholarly literature on race and crime in the United States is dominated by analysis of men’s experience. A robust literature on the massive build-up of imprisonment and other repressive practices of the state – arrest, surveillance, parole, supervision, and so on – has emerged in legal scholarship over the past decade and the dominant focus has been on male incarceration rates, particularly African-American males, and the causes and consequences of the carceral state for this population (Western 2004; Weaver 2007; Alexander 2010). The scholarly literature obscures two important social phenomena: the vast disparities in violent victimization across race and gender, and the political agency of black women. In this paper, we address this gap both theoretically and empirically. Specifically, we highlight political and cultural dimensions of the intersection of race and gender that result in the obfuscation of black women as both objects of economic, social and political marginalization that result in stunningly high rates of homicide victimization, as well as their role as agents of change and mobilization in urban communities. While the over-representation of white female victims of violence is well-known in the literature, what is rarely observed is the exceptionally high rates of murder for black American women – rates that exceed those of white males for much of the past forty years. We explore the dimensions of these rates of murder, over-time and cross-sectionally, and situate them in the larger literature on politics and intersectionality. At the same time, we provide evidence of robust political mobilization on the part of black women in high-crime communities in an effort to reduce violence, improve life chances for young people, and provide women and girls with greater autonomy and control.