the feminist librarian reads

Despite white mainstream feminism’s adoption of the term “intersectionality,” an awareness of systemic police racism and brutality, the militarization of the police and their effect on black communities (and others—see below) seems to drop away whenever that feminism takes up the issues of sexual and domestic violence. The solutions bandied about and that we are rallied to support tend to revolve around law enforcement, for example, the Violence Against Women Act. But how can we act like the police who respond to sexual and domestic violence calls are somehow not the same police who were tear-gassing black people in their own front yards in Ferguson, not the same police who wrote an op-ed piece telling us all that if we didn’t want to be the victim of police brutality, we needed to obey them unquestioningly and without any show of defiance? When a black woman in Ferguson, or anywhere else in the US, for that matter, is raped, or beaten by her partner, do we as feminists seriously expect her to call the cops? Is that the only solution we’re offering? If so, it’s no surprise that so many black women don’t see feminism as their movement, a movement that has fully embraced the meaning of intersectionality and integrated their interests and concerns. Because they’re right.