Family members of Charleena Lyles, including her sister, Monika Williams, lead a march through north Seattle on June 20, 2017, in Seattle, Washington. Officers from the Seattle Police Department shot and killed Lyles, a pregnant mother of four, on June 18. (Photo: David Ryder / Getty Images)
“Expanding our understanding of the forms and contexts of police violence experienced by women and gender-nonconforming people of color enables us to better understand the full shape and reach of state violence in ways that are essential to countering it,” Andrea Ritchie writes in her essential new book, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color.
When police violence is publicized, of course, it’s usually police violence against men. The violence inflicted on women of color is often minimized or completely erased. For that reason alone, this book is extraordinarily necessary. But Ritchie goes further: She emphasizes that devoting space and analysis to the impact of police violence on women and gender-nonconforming people of color is not simply about filling in gaps. She emphasizes that we cannot truly understand what state violence means in this country without wholly recognizing its gendered scope. And without that understanding and recognition, we cannot effectively resist it.
Police violence against Black women, Indigenous women and other women of color often takes forms that don’t make their way into most conversations about police violence — for example, sexual harassment, sexual assault and a failure to respond to domestic violence calls. In Invisible No More, Ritchie shows that…