[00:01:58] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

In your essay, you open with a scene from the Charleston shooting at Mother Emanuel Church - The period following this shooting during which the police withheld the names of victims, but there was a plea on social media on Twitter actually - from activists that the names of the victims be released so that their names be associated with the Say Her Name movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. What was the significance of making that connection?

​

[00:02:21] Prof. Catherine Squires

Well, because if we're thinking about African-American people using Twitter and particularly people who have a high level of identification with their African-American culture, participating in the speech traditions of that culture, and also not allowing the kinds of exclusions or overlooking that often happens when black lives are lost to be replicated in the types of media forums that African-Americans have more control over like Twitter is really important. So, when I saw that particular Twitter participant declarer like I need the names of the Charleston victims because these two movements are crucial to history, that idea of saying the names and making them public and trying to humanize people being a central tenet almost of what Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name is about - to keep that visibility of real human beings in circulation was just top-of-mind for this particular activists also resonated with the practices of those hashtag campaigns

​

[00:03:34] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

One of the interesting things about using this hashtag in relation to the shootings is that prior to this, I think both hashtags had not been associated with mass shootings right? They've been associated with police brutality and I think that the Say Her Name hashtag was used with Sandra Bland - actually before that, but these mass shootings, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, they typically indiscriminate writing? They look for large soft targets they don't have a specific gender target or specific racial target. I think Charleston was probably one of the first - and the Pulse Nightclub shooting, so to gain by broadening the scope of the use of that hashtag.

 

[00:04:09] Prof. Catherine Squires

Well, I think, in part because you know one of the victims was a Reverend from the church and so in the Black Lives Matter pantheon of names – part of the reason why Say Her Name is was even necessary is to elevate the fact that women were also being victimized by state agents like police or prison guards, etc. whereas the face of the black lives matter movement, so to speak, had always been male, even if the activists who started the hashtag themselves were women identified people.

 

Why I was attracted to this case and how the #SayHerName became part of it, is exactly what you said ‘this hadn't been part of mass shootings', you know, there was no Say Her Name going on with the UCSB shootings when Elliot Roger massacred people in Santa Barbara. Of course, none of the female victims there were African-American but I do think it's really interesting to think about how a hashtag that was originally associated with state-sanctioned violence like police violence, then moved over very quickly to a white supremacist shooting which really shows the resonance between the racist underpinnings of racial profiling and the ways that African-Americans are over policed and thus also overexposed to police violence and that there's really a connection there between the anti-black violence of Dylann Roof and anti-black violence of police.

 

[00:05:49] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

I want to talk a little bit about the history of the #SayHerName because like I said before, my awareness of it started with Sandra Bland, but it was introduced before that – I think 2015 by the African-American policy forum. They introduced the hashtag I guess, create a subset the Black Lives Matter movement. It's funny I was talking to someone today and I mentioned the hashtag and talking about you doing this podcast – they've heard of the # BlackLivesMatter but not the Say Her Name movement, which I think is really interesting. I guess the people who introduce the say her name hashtag - Why was there a need to introduce gender specific hashtag separate from Black Lives Matter?

 

[00:06:25] Prof. Catherine Squires

Well, I think you pretty much said it in your own intro there that the idea that women are equally vulnerable to police violence is sometimes hard for people to wrap their minds around because for so long, the face of the Black victim of racist violence has been a male lynching victim or a male victim of a police shooting or a male civil rights leader who is murdered right? So, because our public imagery is so overrepresented with black male victims of this kind of racist violence.- to actually have to generate a specific hashtag to get people to see how vulnerable women of color also are to this kind of violence is necessary and you wouldn't think that would be the case; You know, in the 21st century, but it really is and it also resonates really well with a lot of the work that's been going on about the prison industrial complex where we see that women and specifical women of color are the fastest growing proportion of people behind bars mostly for nonviolent offenses.

 

So, that same pattern of over and hyper-policing communities of color is of course going to also impact women and girls who are in those communities - not just because they might be related to men who get caught up in the system but they're also getting caught up in the system and being abused by the perpetrators of that system. Sometimes, literally being caught in the crossfire when police are coming to arrest or harass other people in their households and sometimes, they are the targets themselves as in the case of Sandra Bland.

 

[00:08:22] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

I think it's really interesting about the Black Lives Matter movement and justice movements having men at the forefront is that - you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think black familial culture usually matriarchal. Women are typically at the forefront of a family culture in black families and so to not have women at the forefront of these racial justice movements seems incongruent - I guess

 

[00:08:52] Prof. Catherine Squires

I don't know about being able to make a blanket statement that black family structures are essentially matriarchal, but I think the very notion, particularly when we think about the new histories of the civil rights movement that are coming out and people looking at the longer civil rights movement; stretching back to the antislavery movement, you can find women working in those movements from the very beginning.

 

Those strategic assessments about you know, ‘who's going to actually be taken seriously as a leader?' That kind of discussion has gone on for centuries. So I think it's really interesting with the Black Lives Matter movement that the women who were responsible for creating that hashtag Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Mattie and Patrice Colors have been very active and other people have allied themselves with them in this matter to say ‘look it is women and queer people and others who have taken up this fight and who have used their creative and strategic energy to make sure that these victims of police violence are not forgotten and that we start having a different conversation about not only what's going on in terms of oppression against black people but also how we actually respond to that oppression, not by doing the same old same old which is: find you - one black leader, right?' There that actually going back to the history and lifting up the more communal and gender diverse movements that have always been part of the movements for black lives. It's just that sometimes the official historiography in the media always like to look for that charismatic black male leader because that's what they're looking for right? That's what they are used to. So, they've been very clear and I think others like Kimberly Crenshaw who started with the African-American policy from the #SayHerName.

 

They've been very clear that having suppressed or hidden women's work in the past was actually a detriment to the movement and also meant that certain issues did not get resolved or addressed or we actually literally could not see problems that were emerging when we didn't include gender in the frame. So, I think, for the most part, it's that really pushing for intersectionality - not just as we need to have X number of women present at the leadership table which of course we do, but also that we actually use the tools from black feminism to actually analyze what's happening and to be able to anticipate what are some other problems that are involved or that overlap with police violence that was not thinking about if we only have the lens trained on black males.

 

[00:11:55] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

Right, you mentioned that the exclusion of gender and sexuality in the analysis of racism can lead to blind spots and problems. What are some examples of that?

 

[00:12:07] Prof. Catherine Squires

For example, if you're thinking about the achievement gap, the so-called achievement gap and a lot of folks have looked at the ways that you know black male students are the most behind, so to speak, or the ones that show the greatest gap between themselves and their white peers. If you don't include both genders in your analysis, then you're going to miss a lot of what's going on in terms of what's happening with the over-policing of black girls at schools etc.

 

I think it's also important to think about this in terms of when people are looking at the issue of violence right? When people look at the issue of sexual violence for example, a lot of folks have talked about this that one of the problems in the 1980s and the 90s is when more mainstream feminist groups were looking at trying to get a sexual assault taken more seriously by the police etc. and domestic violence in things like this, they look to the police as a solution for this. So, making it easier for people to call the police, making it easier for police to gain access to people's homes, etc. to protect victims but what they didn't anticipate because they weren't thinking about the lens of how race and gender intersect with policing is that the types of neighborhoods and the types of couples who were going to be more exposed to police and also the way that black women, in particular, are perceived as being sort of stronger than white women and also more quick to be violent than white women - that actually, domestic violence policing might lead to more women who were actually victims of domestic violence in communities of color with being over policed themselves and being targets for arrest.

 

When you start to try to look at a problem from the vantage point that takes into account race and gender or race and gender and class or sexuality and race, then you start to see some of the other unanticipated outcomes that only using one line of identification would get you

 

[00:14:41] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

I was actually thinking about this in the context of  - this is a bit of an aside because I know you didn't write about the #MeToo that was recently trending but I'm black and I've also been the target of sexual harassment, so I was torn when I saw the #MeToo trending on twitter or just on social media generally and whether to use it or not, because it's really similar in that the #MeToo; when I saw it, I thought about it in a broader context of sexual-harassment and sexual assault, not necessarily aligning with my own experiences. I think that when you experience a lot of these things as a black woman, it doesn't often align with what women and non-women of color experience right? I guess that the question is, do we need a subtag or like a sub-movement for all of these major movements? You know, is it important to call out the black woman's experience with sexual harassment and sexual assault with something like #MeToo

 

[00:15:39] Prof. Catherine Squires

I think so, if only in the sense that complicating the conversation a little bit without taking away the necessity of the critique. So, the question needs to be raised right? Yes we're glad that these very high profile men are finally being called to account for their illegal and disgusting behavior, and then the question becomes, ‘why is it so hard for women, particularly women of color who work in the service sector to get anyone to believe that they are suffering this kind of harassment and worse every single day as they work in hotels or restaurants or in massage parlors or wherever they might be.

 

So, if we think about how these white-collar and entertainment world – mostly, white female stars and superstars in the technology world and superstars in Hollywood and the news they are getting a platform very quickly for coming out and talking about their experience, but what is happening in labor laws and immigration laws that make it really dangerous for many women whose status is much more dependent on keeping a job. It's so much more dangerous for them to report this kind of abuse that might be happening on the job with their coworkers or with their employers. So, #MeToo is great, but is that going to generate any kind of solidarity with women who are much more vulnerable, who really don't have the money to hire the lawyers, who are not in the kinds of jobs where you get hush payments? You know, these are the sorts of things that we need to push our sisters who are on the #MeToo hashtag to say, and then what else right? And then what else

 

[00:17:43] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

So, the motive for the Charleston shooting - when the hashtag was introduced by the African-American policy forum, they pointed to the white supremacist patriarchal nature of the ideology behind that right? Also, you wrote about that in your essay. What are some of the examples of the classic display of patriarchal behaviors in the Charleston shooting?

 

[00:18:05] Prof. Catherine Squires

Well, I think the classic – I mean, I hate to even repeat the things that he said, or that were found in his social media, but the most chilling thing that was reported was that he told one of the survivors that he had to do it because black men were coming for white women and so that really old and violent understanding of white patriarchal privilege where white men used the defense of white women as an excuse to terrorize black communities - the idea of white female purity being at the apex of civilization and that white men are bound to protect, that white womanhood; which of course, means ensuring white purity for the next generation because you know the threat of the. Black male to the white female is that ‘pollute the blood of the next generation', so you know from the era of slavery through the Ku Klux Klan through the anti-integration resistance in the 50s and the 60s and that continues today.

 

That idea that [00:19:30]; famously called the threadbare lies and then almost got lynched herself, back in the 1890s. It just has so much purchase in this neo-Confederate mindset. This idea that black people sexuality is out of control and white men are the ones who need to control it

 

[00:19:54] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

I think someone pointed out that the logic just breaks down because most of the victims in the Charleston shooting were women, so if his the justification was to protect white women from black men breaks down and not really sure how you can make that connection, or how he made that connection, but you know – I guess you don't want to go too deeply into his brain

 

[00:20:17] Prof. Catherine Squires

I think just destroying black bodies whether they are male or female is just its open season correct? And for him, he picked a place where he could be pretty sure he'd be the only person armed. Also, destroying Black women means you're destroying the future mother's you know and sisters and aunts and grandmothers of the community as well. So, we know that one of the main weapons of war is always to attack and try to degrade women and we see that all over the world with no mass rape being a weapon of war. So, for people who believe in - like a race war; If they believe in white supremacy and that it's really a numbers game and if you - actually one of my colleagues is actually writing a book about white women in the neo-Nazi movement and one of their big goals is to have as many children as possible to outbreed what they call the inferior races who are breeding too much and so you'll see these websites and they actually weapon eyes their children.

 

They say ‘you need to have a quiver full', so they imagine their children to be arrows that they can then shoot out into society to do battle. So, if you don't have a quiver full of children, then you're not a good archer, so this mother as race warrior by having more than two children is part of that whole community that pulls sub-community that imagines this sort of zero-sum game in a race war that white women do their duty by having more children.

 

That's a big digression, but the logic is actually they are right? That part of the battle is to outbreed and outlast

 

[00:22:22] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

I think somebody missed the point of motherhood

 

[00:22:28] Prof. Catherine Squires

I think there's a lot of things about the family that is warped but to get back to that patriarchal initiative right, what's the role of women? To have children, So, the white man's role is to make sure that those children come out pure.

 

[00:22:44] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

I suspect that he may be giving his thinking a little bit too much credit and in relation to its organization; if he's that organizing thinking but you know, again, we don't need to really analyze the thoughts. I wanted to talk about a Black Twitter specifically and in the power of hashtags in a kind of proliferating these movements. Both of these movements Sat Her Name and Black Lives Matter exist outside of social media. So, how does social media on Twitter specifically and Black Twitter give more power to these messages?

 

[00:23:16] Prof. Catherine Squires

It's really all in the circulation and I guess my scholarship specifically isn't in trying to find one to one relationship between what's happening on Twitter and what's happening in the streets. Although, I think we see that sort of amplification of facts. You can't guarantee that people are going to come out just because you put it on twitter obviously. I learned very heavily on my colleague Charlton McIlwain's work. He's at New York University and he's actually shown through network analysis how well networked Black Lives Matter activists are with other pre-existing networks of Black activism, as well as more left-leaning media and particular celebrities who show a lot of social consciousness and political awareness.

 

So, being networked already with all of those other sites and media and individuals who are influential has made Black Lives Matter a - really helped amplify the message very quickly once the activists decided that this is the hashtag; This is what we're doing and they were already networked-in. So, then every new iteration, every new piece of messaging or output gets to resonate through those channels, so I think it's really important to remind ourselves that even though it looks like Black Lives Matter came out of nowhere in the wake of the murder of Trayvon Martin, really all of the activists who came up with that brilliant hashtag had been working on things in different networks of activism for a very long time. So, yes it was a stroke of brilliance, but it was a stroke of brilliance that was born of a lot of hard work and networking prior to the release of the hashtag.

 

There's actually a lot of good histories and oral histories of those three women and what they had been doing and the work they been doing in their communities, and with youth etc. before that, so I think we can learn a lot about collective action from that

 

[00:25:47] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

Right and The same is true and I alluded to this – before The same is True; with her name hashtag and it was actually introduced. It doesn't have the same history as Black Lives Matters, introduced in 2015 it was before Sandra brand really took off after it was associated with the death of Sandra Bland

 

[00:26:04] Prof. Catherine Squires

Yes and I think the ways that Sandra Bland herself had been activated by Black Lives Matter and that made her story even more resonant with the message that the African-American Policy Forum was trying to get out when Say Her Name joined with BlackLivesMatter. I think that really created oscillation between two overlapping sets of networks. One that was much more solidly about black feminists and one that was much broader and I think it just makes a lot of sense that they came together after Charleston as well.

 

[00:26:47] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

It's good that Twitter and social media outlets can give power to a lot of these movements, but you mentioned something in the essay that I don't quite understand. There's a comment that says ‘when a hashtag is re-twitted intensely, it activates the potential for the race to exceed itself by multiplying its connections. What did you mean by that?

 

[00:27:03] Prof. Catherine Squires

Well, there I was working off of some of another scholar's ideas Sanjay Sharma's work on black tax was what I was working off of there. Once you've put a hashtag out on twitter and it gets its own space in the social media universe. You don't get to control anymore what people attach it to. So, a comedian could decide that what you said was lame and then start ironically repurposing your hashtag and actually another person who's in the book here, Sarah Janelle Jackson, who did the chapter on the violence against women act - she has a brilliant piece about the #MyNYPD. This is actually a perfect example of what I mean by ‘it can start to exceed just one person, or even one group's definition of meaning, of what blackness means or what the actual hashtag means'.

 

So, the New York Police Department wanted to do a public relations campaign to showcase positive things about the New York Police Department and so their PR department came up with this hashtag my NYPD and invited the public to share stories on twitter or pictures of themselves with police officers, you know, like at the baseball game or in the park or a cop that helped you get your cat out of the tree or whatever it was, and so they thought that this was good to just generate positive anecdotes and start circulating on twitter well they -  I don't understand how they could not have foreseen that, especially after you know? Black Lives Matter and Zuccotti park and everything else, that activists wouldn't hijack this hashtag and then use it to circulate all kinds of easily obtainable anecdotes and photos of police brutality and police disrespect. So, it just was out of control, and then it's not like they could tell Twitter to shut down like don't allow people to use the #MyNYPD because it's not offensive, it's not you know it's not using pornography, it's just my NYPD. So, it got out of control

 

It's a milder case - what I'm looking at in this essay, but the African-American Policy Forum is trying to highlight police violence against women of color and show that it's not just men who are targeted or harmed. It's not like I don't think they minded and of course, they themselves endorsed the use of Say Her Name to make sure that Black women victims of gun violence, of mass shootings, were also included in the public morning. So they endorsed it.

 

I can't imagine that at some point a white female supremacist was killed if someone started repurposing Say Her Name for that situation. I can't imagine the African-American Policy Forum being okay with that, but you could imagine a world in which that happens just like you have All Lives Matter right? So, these sorts of things, that's the risk you run when you send a hashtag out into the world and particularly one that has a meaning that's attached to an understanding of a racial community. Once it goes out there and people start remixing it and playing with it and attaching it to different things that have meaning for them, it starts to expand our understanding of what it means to be black, it's no longer static.

 

I think that's part of what Sharmot is talking about when he gets excited about the potential of a space like Black Twitter to really make the category black much more elastic than it usually feels sort of in dominant or mainstream media because you have this recirculation is reverberation and people are attaching and reattaching different associations and understandings of black experience to these hashtags that by definition, there are not static. They start to interact with our own understandings of what it means to be black or a part of the African Diaspora and I think that's really exciting. For some people, it's really scary, but I think it's really exciting.

 

[00:31:45] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

Right, back to the NYPD, I think I found that there are some people and some groups who should just not introduce hashtags [00:31:53 INAUDUBLE]

 

[00:31:59] Prof. Catherine Squires

Yeah, some people should stay away from twitter and their advisors should make sure they don't go on twitter too often

 

[00:32:08] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

Yeah. You mentioned that there is the power to expand the use or the meaning of a hashtag. Is there is a risk of diluting its original meeting – and I'll just mention that I was looking up to Say Her Name hashtag last night in preparation for this to see how it's been used most recently and it's expanded. I think it was used in relation to - there is a journalist I think, that was that was killed [00:32:31] her name, so I guess the risk is there like you mentioned before. Are the gains worth the risk?

 

I would say so. I mean anytime you put any creative object into the public; it's out of your hands. You can make arguments about how it should be used to what it does refer, but at the end of the day, spending most of your time trying to convince other people exactly how the user has to be policed is probably not worth your time.

 

For a journalist to be associated with Say Her Name I think is really interesting especially since we still have in terms of like foreign correspondence or political journalists who are doing undercover reporting. We still have a very male sensibility of who's out there in the war zones or who's out there getting the tough interviews and I think most people still have a prototypical man as that foreign correspondent door - that person who goes into a war zone. So, I'd say that's really an interesting use of the hashtag that resonates at least with its intent to make sure that people don't forget women who are in situations where violence is a possibility.

​

[00:33:47] Prof. Catherine Squires

I think that something that activists have always had to deal with right? Now, Say It Loud; I'm Black and I'm Proud, or Black Power. Black Power is still a phrase that had people sometimes cringe when they hear it because it was so over associated with the image of the first and the gun. If you actually look at the Black Panther party platform and the programming that they did, guns were just only one very small part of their architecture of self-defense and it wasn't aggressive outwardly except for - towards aggression from the police.

 

A lot of that media hype around what does Black Power mean? It helped the Panthers get a lot of publicity and it excited a lot of people, but it also has led to a continuing debate over the nature of the movements of the late 60s and early 70s, and what different groups are actually arguing for so Twitter just makes it happen faster. I think for people of color and for women of all colors, it's always been you always have more scrutiny and you always have more pushback when you put an idea out in the world. So, preparing yourself for that is really important and I think for the most part the way that people have responded to counter attempts like all lives matter etc. has been really astute. They've been really good at having answers ready for people who push back and say, why Black Lives Matter, why not All Lives Matter? You know, so there's been a lot of ink and a lot of gigabytes spilled on that, but they were ready with those answers really fast.

 

[00:35:35] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

Can you talk a bit about the rule of Twitter in relation to public mourning? I guess in the tradition of mourning in black communities

 

[00:35:42] Prof. Catherine Squires

Right, so I made a connection to the tradition in some parts of the African-American church, of having the funeral and the funeral oration be a moment where one can speak truth to power and to situate the death of a beloved person from the community within the larger context of the challenges the community faces and then telling the story of their life in a way that not only upholds their spirit, but also shows how they contributed to pushing against oppression and unfairness..

 

That tradition stretches back to the days of slavery and really continues and you see it in things like when Mamie Till allowed her son Emmett's body, which had just been destroyed when he was kidnapped and murdered in the 1950s to be in an open casket to let photographers take pictures of it so that his body then became a symbol of resistance, and ‘I'm not going to feel ashamed of what happened to my son, the shameful thing is that he was murdered' and to not be afraid of that and to use the space of what some people would say is sort of funeral and she just be bound to the family to make a public statement so I see the repetition. It's almost a ritual repetition of the names and people just retreating the names over and over and over again in different combinations with different graphics and different associations as a part of that public mourning that becomes productive and a call to activism, not just a call to remember the individuals but a call to think deeply about one's place in the larger movement

 

[00:37:33] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

Right, so you in the essay, talking about the case of Cierra Finkley, and #SayHerName was used in relation to her case. What happened with Cierra Finkley?

​

[00:37:43] Prof. Catherine Squires

Well, she is an African American woman in Madison Wisconsin, and like another case that other people might be familiar with in Florida, she was arrested after shooting at an abusive ex-partner who had actually been chasing her and kicked down her door and so unlike a lot of white men who get the benefit of the doubt that they are acting in self-defense. She was charged she was charged and she was taken to jail. So, we see this happen in lots of cases and like I said earlier, in terms of the way that people respond to domestic violence.

 

Oftentimes, black women are seen as being sort of hyper, strong and often a masculinized and so they are not believed. Police don't believe them when they say they're defending themselves because of the stereotypes of African-American women being aggressive and mean and so Cierra Finkley was defending herself and her daughter when she was being stalked and chased and this man actually was chasing her in his car and kicked down the door to her apartment but yet and still, she was taken to jail.

 

[00:39:01] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

Yeah that's insane

 

[00:39:03] Prof. Catherine Squires

Yeah and the same thing with the woman - I'm forgetting her name. My apologies, but in Florida, which is the state of stand your ground right? where George Zimmerman was able to argue that he felt so endangered by a teenager with skittles that he had to shoot him. She shot a bullet into the ceiling when her abusive ex-came into her home and she was taken to jail because she was seen as aggressive and threatening. She didn't even shoot at the guy, she shot into the ceiling and in the stand your ground states, she was not allowed to stand her ground. She was even in her own home - Unlike George Zimmerman.

 

That double standard in the way that the stereotype of the aggressive woman of color who must be guilty of something comes into play is something that we have to be really on the lookout for. Also, part of the say her name campaign is the ways that black women get profiled is slightly different but just as deadly as is black men

 

[00:40:13] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

I remember that case. It's actually in one of the essays within the book. I think it's the Ladykiller's chapter. The case where she shoots a warning shot actually doesn't have him in and she was given. I think something like 20 years and the judge threatened to give her more than 20 years and she didn't hurt anyone can kill anyone you know. I think that without movements of hashtags like Say Her Name, women like Cierra Finkley would be forgotten. She was given, in the end, quite a bit of legal support and social support, and I don't think she's actually in prison right now. I think without those hashtags, her case wouldn' have gotten the attention and help that that she needed

 

[00:40:54] Prof. Catherine Squires

I agree, I mean back in the day, it would've been a telephone tree, to find out who might be willing to write letters, but now you can you do a go fund me page for a lawyer. I mean there are all sorts of things that are possible now through these networks.

 

[00:41:11] Jenn Taylor-Skinner

Prof. Catherine Squires, thank you so much for talking to me today.

 

[00:41:15] Prof. Catherine Squires

Thanks for inviting me. I'm glad that you found the book and I look forward to hearing what my other authors say when they are able to talk to you in the future.