aura

There has been no national outcry against the death of Aura Rosser at the hands of the Ann Arbor, Mich. Police Department. Writer Terrell Jermaine Starr wonders if black men’s lives matter more than black women’s.

There are no reliable numbers of how many black women and girls are killed by police, but none of their deaths have sparked collective national outcry. It is not that people don’t care about them. Local activists took to the streets of Chicago to protest the killing of unarmed Rekia Boyd. Detroiters demanded justice for 7-year-old Aiyana Jones after she died from a gunshot fired during a botched Special Response team operation at the home she was sleeping in at the time. But not a single national protest followed.

Shirley Beckley, who was born and raised in Ann Arbor, helped to organize the December march and is working with other activists in the city to raise money for Rosser’s three children. “I think it’s important that [Rosser’s story] go national because all of these killings of these men,” Beckley told AlterNet, “and now we have had a killing of this black woman.“

Where’s the outrage? It is almost as if the collective consciousness figured that their lives weren’t important enough to cover.

Kirsten West Savali explains in Dame Magazine that, too often, black people become black men by default. She quoted Treva B. Lindsey, an assistant professor of women’s studies at Ohio State University, who said that such a gender-exclusive narrative tends to dominate conversations of violence against black people.

Read more at Alternet.

Photo: Selfie of Aura Rosser