Abstract
As feminism moves into its third wave of examining gender inequality, Beth Richie reminds us of the unfinished business of the second wave. To make this point, she revisits black feminist efforts to end an inheritance of private humiliation and public angst to forge a new social and political reality. Arrested Justice clearly elucidates how, collectively, feminists’ eight stages of advocacy activism won the campaign but lost the war through dependence on the criminal legal system and crisis intervention strategies (e.g., Title II, Violent Crime Victims Assistance Act, The Victim of Crimes Act, and The Violence Against Women’s Act) that worked for white women, but not for their black sisters. More important is Richie’s analysis of a set of institutionalized social services accessible via legislative processes and criminal legal systems that place these black women in precarious situations, grounded in suspicion of law enforcement for their aggressive tactics and occasional maltreatment, gender performance and life circumstances and/or sexuality threatening normative standards, protection of themselves, and choosing bad options due to victimization for safety’s sake.
Akin to Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1993), Richie chronicles the life histories of lower status African American women by highlighting their need for intervention in what appears to be a permanent trauma resulting from victimization in this race-gender-stratified society. From the introduction and through each chapter, Richie’s analysis of these women’s narratives leaves readers querying how did/do they survive the physical and psychological abuse coupled with social and cultural hostility. As readers ponder their question, it quickly becomes clear that Arrested Justice decries the sustained sidelining of black women in the face of narrow-minded men, public policies, and institutionalized social structures—feminism notwithstanding. Richie argues forcefully that the oratory of second and now third wave feminism’s (mainstream white-dominated feminism) theoretical apparatus is not applicable to lower status black women. Not only is this due to their lack of compliance to dominant standards of womanhood, but even more so to the fact that feminist ideals and goals have become one-size fits all, using a white dominant standard. Consequently, the analysis of the forms of violence these women face reveals that they are under assault in a prison nation. The land that they inhabit is constructed and maintained in their communities, at the neighborhood-level, complete with inside locking gates guarded by social, cultural, and physical violence patrolling its perimeters. No regard is given to these women’s emotional and mental well-being in this homeland. Its exclusivity is its male-dominated organizations’ (and individuals’) denunciation of the power, need, impact, or contribution of feminist’s linking of gender inequality and racial justice. For many race-conscious African American women, this is a powerful dynamic, albeit one that hinders their moving outside of this homeland. By identifying these tensions, depth is added to the social, political, and cultural spaces these women occupy. Richie’s analysis also calls into question the failure of mainstream feminist frameworks to link domestic-based anti-violence movements to the impasse of these women. Thus, these women reside in a land of fear, despite public policy changes in the last two and a half decades.
Embedded in her analysis of the adversity endured by lower status black women from adolescence to womanhood, replete with media depictions when their tragedies go public, Richie emphasizes that these women engage society from an existence deeply rooted in a forgotten country (or community, your choice), where in the twenty-first century gender and race persist as their master status, and societal institutions and its policies as their jailers. From the brutality in public housing, to injustice in the courtrooms and streets, they are trapped without an escape mechanism. More important, they fall outside of the widely accepted understanding of violence against women, like statistical outliers. Such methodological language announces to readers the salience of finding a pathway away from perilous households, disadvantaged neighborhoods, and contested streets, while at the same time illuminating the plight of women—the most stigmatized and least protected.
Emotional manipulation and intimacy, home as a hostile social environment, and being trapped by loyalty, are three prominent themes connecting the on-going violence within these communities. Taking each premise separately, Richie deliberates how men emerge as relationship regulators, relying not so subtly on the need for intervention to alleviate a disquieting trauma that is not always visible. This theme is amplified as home becomes a hostile social environment communicating the instability of a place which ought to be a sanctuary. Fortunately, as readers absorb this premise, they are captured by the knowledge that this concept inextricably extends to neighborhood public safety, where physical assaults and violence likely occur in proximity to the home. These women are left exposed to harm as innocent bystanders, as uniform protections simply disappear (the police) and if they exist, they are minimal (serial killer Anthony Sowell). This argument becomes even more powerful as Richie compares the reasonably high probability of black female victimization without redress to that of white women, whose avenues for legal redress are vigorously pursued. Yet community-wide social prognostications abound, especially with reports of high-profile male violence and/or abuse.
Unsympathetic community-wide choirs become a coruscating pronouncement against the women who report this peril, while they attempt to engage indifferent uniformed service providers. Social support, capital, and opportunity for self-efficacy to care for themselves and their families barely exist with fewer opportunities for meaningful employment, safe housing, and/or pursuit of education—these vanish. “Trapped by loyalty” or circuitous cohesion to their community, black women’s commitment to a healthy, individually independent family life minus harm and isolation is befuddled and problematized. Richie brings to the forefront the difficulty these women face as they attempt to strengthen their lives, in spite of their historic responsibility for racial uplift over and above their positioning against black men. Very clearly highlighted in Richie’s analysis is the idea that discrediting black men furthers the abuse of black women, but also discredits their community.
Richie constructs a male violence matrix informed by the tenets of black feminist theory and argues that it is a starting point for a black feminist antiviolence praxis, contending that a black feminist analysis of male violence makes it difficult to overlook or discount black male violence across numerous settings. Furthermore, she advances that such an assessment exhibits mainstream accomplishments at the expense of the radical work of women against violence, but demonstrates how to end violence against women and disassemble the prison nation as a conservative social service delivery system.
Richie extends the use of this male violence matrix to discuss its use in helping to erode brutality for non-black, Latina immigrant women, contending that black feminist analysis will facilitate understanding of how some immigrant women’s partner domination through isolation from family, community resources, and agencies concerned with immigrant rights for women without legal status results in not reporting abuse by partners and/or sexual assault.
Richie’s analysis of the anti-violence movement for black women is impressive and a must read for the scholar-activist as it brings to mind calls for change dating back to the 1960s and 1980s. It reveals the uneven disquiet of lower status African American women.