Andrea Ritchie > Quotes

“From the early 1900s to the late 1960s, Jim Crow segregation laws86 effectively replaced the slave codes and Black codes.”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“Ultimately, as Martha Escobar puts it, “(Im)migrant women’s violability is cemented through their assumed violation of the nation-state, constructing them as a public enemy who needs to be disciplined, and, in some cases, killed.”110”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“The command “Shut your mouth” stuck out for me, because it is symbolic of how our legal and political system views and expects people of color to behave: quietly. Sandra Bland asked why she was being arrested. Asserting her rights as a woman of color to a white male officer was seen as disruptive and met with an aggressive response. Wearing my traditional South Asian tunic, visibly an immigrant, my mere presence was disruptive as well.”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“aggressive police treatment of Black children is condoned, while Black parents are harshly criminalized for any actual or perceived harm to their children.”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“Invisible No More brings them all to the center, placing individual women’s stories into broader contexts, and identifying commonalities and distinctions between experiences of Black women and other women of color, and with those of Black men and men of color.”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“Historic representations of Black femininity coupled with contemporary memes—about “loud” Black girls who talk back to teachers, “ghetto” Black girls who fight in school hallways, and “ratchet” Black girls who chew dental dams like bubble gum in classrooms—have rendered Black girls subject to a public scrutiny that affects their ability to be properly situated in the racial justice and school-to-confinement narrative. They are rendered invisible or cast as deserving of mistreatment because of who they are misperceived to be.37”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“Reconstruction era, “Black codes” replaced slave codes. Like their predecessors, the Black codes controlled the movements of formerly enslaved Black people, severely restricted liberty in employment and conduct, and continued to empower state police forces and the white population at large to enforce them.”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“The lines of gender are drawn most literally between a false gender binary that tolerates no deviation in appearance, behavior, or expression from characteristics associated with the gender assigned at birth, leading to suspicion and presumptions of instability, criminality, fraud, and violence in police interactions with transgender and gender-nonconforming people, particularly of color.”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“In the words of Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza, “Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“Ultimately, broken windows policing isn’t about reducing crime; it’s about assuaging white fears, however irrational or racist, of poor and homeless people, Black people, people of color, and queer and gender-nonconforming people.”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“true safety for women of color requires an end to the “war on drugs,” broken windows policing, and the “war on terror”; the elimination of gender as a marker of access to public space, public benefits, and protections; the removal of police from schools, hospitals, public housing, and health-care settings; and the repeal of “mandatory arrest” and other policies that facilitate the criminalization of survivors of violence; and support rather than violence and criminalization for pregnant people and mothers of color.”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“In addition, “More frequent allegations of black female deviance [involved] their inclination to kill their own children.”82 These images fueled the arrest, incarceration, and lynching of Black women, and the constitution of Black women “as subjects outside of the protected category ‘woman.’”83”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“I’ve retired the term “police brutality.” It is meaningless, as violence is inherent to policing.”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“Police and military violence against Indigenous women and Black women, as well as sexual violence by police, remained invisible.”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“The imperative to disappear thus creates the context for violence against Indigenous women, producing controlling narratives framing them as inherently dangerous and violent, heartless, promiscuous, unclean, drunk and disorderly, “inherently rapeable,” incapable of feeling pain, and irresponsible.”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“reducing encounters between on-duty law enforcement and individuals with the most severe psychiatric diseases may represent the single most immediate, practical strategy for reducing fatal police shootings in the United States.”
― Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color