Thank you so much for having me and the opportunity to have this really important discussion with amazing women from around the world.
I would say as a journalist and as a Black woman, it is how you described it very perfectly in your introduction. I think it was very much the fact that policing, police brutality, and who has the right to protection and security, and even who has the right to defend themselves, has a male-dominated face to it, and there are male-dominated voices around the situation. So often, women show up in media stories as the grieving mother, perhaps as the one expected to grant forgiveness, perhaps absolution for the killing of the Black man by police. Very rarely did I see these outpourings concern, marches, or essays for when Black women were facing, again, not just outright police brutality, but also cases where policing failed to protect Black women from the whims and whimsies of misogynoir here in the United States.
For me, I have always felt that my job as a journalist and my job as somebody who has a platform in these spaces is to uplift that. Again, I am sitting here talking to you all from Dallas, Texas, and some may remember a few years ago the case of the Black teenage girl here in McKinney, Texas, who was seen on camera. That was one of my first pieces, speaking about how cruel it was, and yet just a few weeks later, there was another video of a police officer dragging a Black teen across a classroom. These images were happening, and I felt like I had to speak about it, to call it out.
So why do this? I do this because I have to. Who else really will?
Michele Bratcher Goodwin
That is a really great point to transition on, and I want to come back to you after being with our other guests, because I also wonder what it is like for you as a journalist to get a green light for the stories that are important to tell, because some people may think that given your success, you may be able to write about anything that you want, but it also seems to me that there have been deep barriers in media in terms of being able to present the stories that relate to Black women's lives.
India, I want to broaden this conversation to some of your work and this policing that encompasses Black women and Black girls, because also, the story that Karen is telling is a story about Black girls being policed and not just Black women. It was bad enough that it is Black women but also Black girls. I also want to expand that to the geographies of the body and the policing of sex and the body and your very important book, Policing Bodies: Law, Sex Work, and Desire in Johannesburg, which broadens the conversation internationally and also relates it to the body. Would you please unpack that a bit more for us what that policing looks like?
