Invisible No More ─ Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

A timely examination of the ways Black women, Indigenous women, and other women of color are uniquely affected by racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement.

In recent years there has been increasing awareness of the daily violence at the hands of law enforcement agents faced by women like Sandra Bland, Dajerria Becton, Mya Hall, and Rekia Boyd—on the streets, in their homes and workplaces, and at the border. Invisible No More places these individual stories into broader contexts, centering Black women, Indigenous women and women of color squarely within conversations around the twin epidemics of police violence and mass incarceration. It also documents the evolution of a movement for justice for women of color targeted by police that has been building for decades, largely in the shadows of mainstream campaigns for racial justice and police accountability.

In the current climate Black, Indigenous and communities of color are being targeted for increasingly militarized policing, heightened immigration raids and border enforcement, expanded exclusion, surveillance and criminalization of Muslim communities, and an intensified “war on drugs” and police presence in our communities. Now more than ever, it is critical that we ensure that the voices, experiences and organizing of women of color in the cross-hairs of racial profiling, police violence, exclusion and deportation are at the center of our resistance.

Informed by twenty years of research and advocacy by Black lesbian immigrant and police-misconduct attorney Andrea J. Ritchie, with powerful contributions by Angela Y. Davis, Mariame Kaba, and Charlene Carruthers, this groundbreaking work demands a sea change in how police violence is understood by mainstream media, policymakers, academics, and the general public, as well as a radical rethinking of our visions of safety—and the means we devote to achieving it.

Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant and police-misconduct attorney, and a 2014 Senior Soros Justice Fellow, with more than two decades of experience advocating against police violence and the criminalization of women and LGBTQ people of color. She is currently Researcher-in-Residence on Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Criminalization at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and the coauthor of Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women (AAPF, 2015) and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon, 2011). She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Chicago.