High Murder Rate of Young Black Men through a Feminist Lens

I have not thought of feminism in an interdisciplinary way, or at least not thought to use those words. I remember my brother speaking about the extrajudicial killing of Michael Brown, an African American teenager in Ferguson, MO, as a Feminist issue. I was initially very confused. How is the killing of an unarmed young man by a police officer a Feminist issue? He explained that when young African American men are shot down in the streets, their mother’s are left to bury them. Unfortunately, cases like Michael Brown’s and Trayvon Martin’s are not uncommon. Data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows that “the country’s young black men are nearly six times more likely to die from homicide than young white men…” (Campbell, Janie. “Homicide Leading Cause Of Death Of Young Black Men, Says FAU Researcher.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 10 Apr. 2013. Web. 14 Sept. 2014). This article gave a few reasons for this, some being low graduation rates and poor job opportunities.

In the fairly well covered cases of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, both parents were involved in both of the boy’s boys’ short lives. However, this is not always the case for other young men who’s  whose sudden deaths have not been publicized to the same extent. Many poor black women have children without partnership at a young age. According to a government statistic in 2010, 72 percent of black babies were born to single mothers, (“Blacks Struggle with 72 Percent Unwed Mothers Rate.” Msnbc.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Sept. 2014.). This happens for a few reasons. A couple of which are: 1) Limited access to healthcare such as abortion clinics and contraception; and 2) Insufficient sexual education in middle and high school, which can lead to early and dangerous (non-consensual/ unprotected) sex. All of this combined means that many young African American women are having children without the support of a partnership, and before they reach economic stability. The sacrifices these women are choose to make in order to raise their children are immense. As my brother argued, mothers of black children live with an almost constant fear of loosing their children to a number of different threats. In cases like Trayvon Martin’s, the simple risk he ran was being a young black man, he was left as a casualty of institutionalized racism. His grief-stricken mother and father are impacted greatly by the loss of her child. Feminist and race theory helps us understand a scope of the pain of young back men’s deaths.

There was an episode of The Melissa Harris-Perry Show, shortly after the killing of Trayvon, when Melissa voiced something, I as a white woman would not think of. She talked about feeling such relief when learning she was pregnant with a girl and not a boy. She said, if she had a son, he would too easily be put at the same risk as Brown and Martin were and so many young black men before them. As we read Cane, I now see parallels between the paranoia and anxiety that cripples Kabnis and this fight for survival of young black men and their mother’s have. I’ve become increasingly aware of patriarchy rearing its gross head through herstory and I find myself becoming more in-tuned to it’s connection with institutionalized racism.

As a recent graduate of Earlham College, my brother, with a Sociology/Anthropology degree underarm, seems to be asking more of the difficult questions I found irksome at a young age. However, now I find them exciting. And I think my feminist ways are rubbing off on him.  

I was surprised and happy to see a passage on Feminist theory in Interdisciplinarity. It’s author Moran writes: “Feminist theory… is about challenging the values and priorities of the existing disciplines rather than merely integrating them,” (Moran, Joe. “Theory and the Disciplines/ Feminism and the Body.” Interdisciplinarity. London: Routledge, 2009. 92. Print.). The majority of popularized academia has been developed and led by white men. Because of this, marginalized groups including women get left out of this “higher” way of thinking. Through my brother’s re-conceptualization about Michael Brown’s killing, he integrated the female experience into an issue that is important, but often leaves out the perspective of the mothers affected. This absence of complexity in speaking about the female experience addresses the traditionally patriarchal lens womanhood is viewed through.

Feminist theory seek to bring together disciplines in the sciences and humanities to help account for women’s experience (Moran, Joe. “Theory and the Disciplines/ Feminism and the Body.” Interdisciplinarity. London: Routledge, 2009. 93. Print.). It is argued, that this experience cannot be explored and explained simply through one discipline, as it has often been approached by men. This absence of complexity in speaking about the female experience speaks to the traditionally patriarchal lens womanhood is viewed through.