The murder of Black women is a global public health crisis that continues to receive minimal political urgency. Across continents Black women, including Black transgender women, are disproportionately vulnerable to gendered violence and murder yet our deaths are often treated as unremarkable. This indifference exposes a global structure that positions Black womanhood as existing outside the boundaries of social protection, empathy, and humanity itself.

We’re not only excluded from humanity's benefits, we are structurally positioned to enable others' inclusion while being constitutively denied our own. 

To be a Black woman in the world is to inhabit a category that the dominant grammar of humanity has never fully named. It is to exist at the intersection of race and gender without either axis offering adequate shelter.

This structural exclusion from gendered personhood has a direct and material relationship to the rates at which we’re killed and the rates at which those killings are investigated and prosecuted. If a woman is not fully recognised as a woman then the violence visited upon her does not trigger the same protective instincts or institutional response.

White femininity was historically constructed through ideals of purity, delicacy, innocence, and vulnerability, ideals that depended on our exclusion. We were imagined as hypersexual, aggressive, excessively strong and biologically suited for labour and violence. Black women were racialised as bodies rather than recognised as women deserving of care. We are often masculinised and denied vulnerability in public discourse.

Anti-Blackness distorts who is allowed to be seen as fully woman and fully grievable. In London, the murders and disappearances of Black women frequently receive less media attention. Public outrage is unevenly distributed and our names rarely become national symbols of collective mourning. Instead we disappear into statistics or criminalising narratives.

Some lives are publicly grievable whilst others remain socially abandoned.

The ungendering of Black women is a catastrophe.