“I Don’t Wanna Die in Here”: Black Women, State Violence, and the Politics of Disposability in the US South

“The Scourged Back” is perhaps one of the most widely used and circulated images for showing the violence of chattel slavery. The soul-crushing photograph captures the whipped and scarred back of a formerly enslaved Black man, Gordon. The image is so iconic that when photographer Dario Calmese, the first Black photog to shoot the cover of Vanity Fair, photographed Oscar-winning actress, Viola Davis, he sought to “recreate the well-known image.” Taken in 1863, the photo shows Gordon with the marks of an institution that delighted in its inhumanity towards Black people. The visual archive of anti-Black violence across all eras of U.S. history also has an abundance of examples of what Black WGFs endured- but it is an archive we often ignore or only engage sparingly. The more commonly used archive to grapple with anti-Black violence suggests that the enslaved body was male, the strange fruit hung from poplar trees were Black men, and the people being disproportionately killed by the police are only Black men and boys.

This paper will engage more recent examples of state violence against Black women and girls in the U.S. South to broaden how we think about the still-evolving archive of anti-Black violence. In the twenty-first century, Black women and girls occupy a status of perpetual vulnerability and disposability. While it would be irresponsible to merely liken or ahistorically compare experiences of Black women chained together on slave ships in the 1700s or on chain gangs in the early 1900s in the U.S. South to some of the experiences of Black women and girls I will discuss in this paper, understanding the fixity of disposability politics, their origins, and their afterlives is at the core of thinking about how Black women and girls in the U.S. South fit into a long history of violence.