Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology (review)

In the United States, recent years have witnessed highly publicized violent attacks involving men of color. The April 2007 Virginia Tech University massacre left 33 dead, including the shooter, 23-year-old South Korean immigrant Seung-Hui Cho. In 2002, a series of sniper shootings terrorized the metropolitan Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland areas. The culprits were two black men, leader John Allen Mohammed and his young protégé, Lee Malvo. Ten years prior to these shootings, police brutality against black men surfaced as a result of the videotaped beating Los Angeles police officers inflicted upon cab driver Rodney King. The officers were acquitted of the beatings, which led to the notoriously destructive L.A. race riots. These high-profile incidents represent a minute percentage of the violence that occurs throughout the United States that involves people of color.

Outside of the United States, one of the most complex issues plaguing contemporary societies is gendered violence; women around the world have united to bring awareness to the violence they experience at the hands of men. Incite! Women of Color Against Violence is an organization comprised of women of various races, ethnicities, and countries dedicated to examining areas of violence neglected by the mainstream Women’s Movement. In 2006, the organization published Color of Violence: the Incite! Anthology, a collection of works devoted to illuminating violence against women of color. While the anthology contributors are concerned with domestic violence (the major focus of the mainstream Women’s Movement), they promote a social justice agenda that seeks to eliminate violence against all women by advancing “radical analyses of violence developed by women of color” (3) and by centering their work upon women who are often overlooked (i.e., Indian women, indigenous women internationally, poor women, disabled women, lesbians, and trans gendered individuals).

The Color of Violence anthology is divided into three sections. The opening section, “Re-conceptualizing Antiviolence Strategies,” extends the notion of violence against women beyond the domestic sphere and uncovers what the organization classifies as “state violence” (1), or violence committed by agencies, organizations, structures, and entities of the government. The seven contributors of this section include professors of law, education and Arab-American studies as well as women holding administrative positions at national institutes and collectives. The “state” violence they uncover includes governmental health and reproductive policies within the United States, aggressive intervention strategies of family-centered agencies against blacks, governmental maltreatment of Native Indians in relation to crime, education, and hospital care and economic policies of international agencies that increase poverty and disability in third world countries such as India.

The global perspective in the opening section deepens knowledge of the widespread violence against women of color and identifies the wide array of international women of color. For example, an article about the “Black Women’s Movement in Britain” (13) notes that “black” in British antiviolence arenas refers to women of African, Asian, and Caribbean descent (270). By opening the anthology with this article, the authors immediately broaden definitions of race beyond the traditional binary designations given in the United States.

Not only are the opening articles diverse in race and ethnicity, but they also reveal the various types of violence women experience outside the home. In “Heteropatriarchy and Three Pillars of White Supremacy,” Incite! Organization co-founder Andrea Smith delineates the nuances of the oppression that “women” and “people of color” experience. Her framework seeks to account for the different manifestations of oppression by classifying oppression into the three categories of: 1) slavery/capitalism, which categorizes blacks as property; 2) genocide/colonialism, which aims to cause indigenous people to disappear; and 3) Orientalism/war, which designates certain groups of people as inferior and a constant threat to civility. In the process of distinguishing the assorted forms of oppression to help organizations effectively strategize to end all manifestations of oppression, Smith attacks almost every institution. She condemns the military and people of color who join the military; she attacks the U.S. Constitution; she laments...