Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation

5. The Matrix: A Black Feminist Response to Male Violence and the State

[ 125 ] 5 The Matrix A Black Feminist Response to Male Violence and the State Tamika Huston was 24 years old when she went missing in Spartanburg, South Carolina in May 2004.1 Natalee Holloway was 19 when she disappeared almost a year later during a high school graduation trip to Aruba. Originally from a wealthy suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, Natalee Holloway was a member of the National Honor Society and was planning to attend the University of Alabama on a full scholarship after a trip full of abandon and fun. Despite reports of circumstances that suggest that she and her fellow students were not well supervised during the trip, once it was confirmed that she was missing, Special Agents from the FBI, members of the Dutch military, and hundreds of volunteers joined her family and their influential network of friends in the search for the missing young woman. Holloway’s case immediately received national attention by the United States’ news media, and soon after, her story became an international media sensation. The ongoing investigation, arrests and re-arrests of various suspects, and progress made toward solving the crime, were lively topics of national news broadcasts (CNN), TV documentaries, and Internet websites, and soon the case will be made into a television movie based on the book by her mother Beth Holloway called Loving Natalee. Returning to Tamika Huston, despite the similar profiles of the young women on almost every measure, Tamika’s case was not considered “wor- Feminist Response to Male Violence [ 126 ] thy” of the kind of attention that Holloway received. Tamika was also an accomplished student, she came from a loving family, and she had plans for her future that included raising the child that she was carrying. In her case, however, when she was reported missing, the local police investigation was slow to start and was not joined by national agencies, likely subjects (like her former boyfriend) were not interviewed, her parents had to “beg” for media attention, and the national media was particularly slow to respond. In the end, tragically, both women were the victims of young men, and the disregard for their lives could be read into the individual patterns of the crimes. For Huston, however, the source of her disregard extended far beyond the person who murdered her to the social, political, and legal responses to the case of her being missing. So profound was the difference in how the media covered the cases—the saturation of coverage for the young white woman and the blatant disregard for the young Black woman—that some high-profile reporters (Gwen Iffel from CNN, for example) described the phenomenon as the Missing White Woman Syndrome to illustrate how violence against women is taken seriously only insofar as it has an impact on those groups of women with social privilege. Beyond the considerable attention given to this controversial example of how the media and law enforcement respond to and treat Black women who are in dangerous situations with more disregard than their white counterparts, the story of Tamika Huston is also one that illustrates how Black women create structures of resistance by taking matters into their own hands. This was the case for Derrica Wilson, one of the founders of Black and Missing Foundation,2 a national organization whose mission it is to “provide an Equal opportunity for all missing.” The group works to increase attention to the disproportionate number of Black people who are among the “missing” (women and children in particular) and the layers of oppression that Black people experience, especially Black women, that make it easy for the state to ignore this particular form of inequality . They do so based on an analysis of structural inequality, with a fierce commitment to justice, and because they understand that individual danger for Black women needs to be understood as part of a larger pattern of social neglect based on their race, gender, and other socially stigmatized identities that are marginalized in contemporary society. Feminist Response to Male Violence [ 127 ] In this chapter, I present a Black feminist analysis of male violence against Black women as an alternative conceptualization of the problem that takes into account the buildup of America’s prison nation. A Black feminist analysis not only provides a much better explanation of the multiple dynamics of race, sexuality, gender, and class; it also accounts for the various forms of violence women experience and...