#SayHerName and Nudity as Political/Social Protest

Yesterday a group of protesters gathered in downtown SF to bring attention to unarmed black women and girls killed by police as part of the nationwide SayHerName campaign/protest bringing attention to the deaths of Tanisha Anderson, Miriam Carey, Michelle Cusseaux, Shelly Frey, Kayla Moore, Aiyana Jones, Yvette Smith, Rekia Boyd, and others. A lot of the BlackLivesMatter attention has been given to the police killings of black men (Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tony Robinson,  etc.) AAPF Associate Director Rachel Gilmer told The Huffington Post, “When we wear the hoodie, we know that we’re embodying Trayvon. When we hold our hands up, we know we’re doing what Mike Brown did in the moments before he was killed. When we say ‘I can’t breathe,’ we’re embodying Eric Garner’s final words... We haven’t been able to do the same thing for black women and girls. We haven’t carried their stories in the same way.” So while this is another way to raise awareness about racial injustice affecting black people, it is also extremely important in that it ensures that these women/girls are not forgotten and brings more gender equality into the movement.

Part of what interested me in regards to the San Francisco protest specifically was the use of nudity (being topless) as a way of bringing attention to the fact that black women and girls are being killed. The article I read said that, “Chinyere Tutashinda, founding member of the BlackOut Collective and a member of the Bay Area chapter of Black Lives Matter, said the women followed the tradition of women in West Africa who bear their chests to say ‘enough is enough.’” It also makes a comment of the fact that this country “‘…commodifies black women and black bodies but ignores the death of black women and black girls.’" This really got me interested in the use of nudity as a part of political and social protest, especially in San Francisco where public nudity has always been so much apart of the culture.

Getting back to the wider campaign, here is a poem by Aja Monet written as a contribution to the movement:

Here are the two of the articles I read about SayHerName and the SF protest, if you want to read more. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/21/black-lives-matter-naked-protest-san-francisco/27742833/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/21/black-women-matter_n_7363064.html