In the United States similar cases hit home. Less than a year after her son’s death, de Souza died of what her family members said was “sadness.” After Roberto was killed, she stopped eating everything but soup, developed a severe case of anemia and passed away from its complications. There is also the story of Joselita de Souza, the mother of a 16-year-old boy who was gunned down and killed when the police ambushed the car he was riding in with his friends in Rio de Janeiro in 2015. Anthropologist Keisha-Khan Perry chronicles this story in her research on black land rights struggles. Mothers and grandmothersĬonsider the case of Dona Iraci, the 45-year-old grandmother who died of a heart attack when the police in Salvador, Bahia, raided her home looking for her grandson in 2002. But I believe that the people most affected by the sequelae, the fallout of state violence, are black women, particularly black mothers. To be sure, black men also suffer from the trauma and pain of brutal policing. But in addition to working tirelessly to draw attention to the immediate ways that black women are killed and abused by the police, it is also important to consider what happens to black women in the weeks and years after lethal police encounters. The work of researchers like Andrea Ritchie and Kimberle Crenshaw, and black women’s organizations like Assata’s Daughters and Let Us Breathe Collective clearly demonstrate that they do. This is not to say that black women do not also die from the immediate physical effects of police abuse. The pain of loss kills with heart attacks, strokes, depression and even anemia. The long-range trauma police brutality causes can be as deadly as a bullet. But these numbers do not reveal the slow death that black women experience. The death toll gives the impression that black men are the disproportionate victims of police killings. When we think of police lethality, we typically consider the immediate body count: The people that die from bullets and baton blows.
In the wake of the deaths of black people at the hands of the state – from the police to the prison system – the living are often weighted with a sadness that is too heavy to bear, and in the weeks and months following the initial death of a loved one, they become sick and many die prematurely. My research examines the ways that police violence kills black women slowly through trauma, pain and loss. I immediately recognized the correlation between her heart attack and her father’s death because I had seen it before.Īs an anthropologist who studies the impact of police violence on black communities in Brazil and the United States, I was familiar with many stories like Erica’s. When I heard the news of Erica Garner’s heart attack, a wave of familiar shock and pain ran through me. This latest loss emphasizes something we have known: Black women are dying from the trauma of police violence and this issue must be grappled with before more die. On Christmas Eve, Erica Garner suffered a massive heart attack which caused extensive brain damage. The sting of the premature death of 27-year-old Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner, is still fresh.
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