The murder of Black women in the UK is a crisis that continues to receive minimal political urgency. We 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 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 and innocence, ideals that depended on our exclusion. We were imagined as aggressive, excessively strong and biologically suited for labour and violence. We are not recognised as women deserving of care. We are often masculinised and denied vulnerability in public discourse.

Anti-Blackness distorts who is seen as 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.