Killing My Spirit, Renewing My Soul: Black Female Professors’ Critical Reflections on Spirit Killings While Teaching

In 2016, during a traffic stop in Cobb County, Atlanta, Georgia, dashcam video showed a police lieutenant informing a female passenger, “We only kill black people.” Public outcry against the officer’s remarks ultimately led to his resignation and retirement to avoid disciplinary action. The horrendous mistreatment of black people and black bodies by law enforcement has led to grassroots organizing so that we will never forget to #SayHerName (Crenshaw et al. 2015). The #SayHerName movement has illuminated racial injustices that many black women and girls have long experienced since the institution of slavery and within our present-day Jim Crow system. For centuries, black girls have been characterized as Sapphires, adultified, and dangerous, or viewed as assailants (Epstein, Blake, and González 2017; Morris 2016; Townsend et al. 2010; Young 1994). The notion that “we only kill black people” simply reinforces the justification of black death. It also espouses the fabric of our American racial caste system (Alexander 2012) that continues to enslave black women in society and rationalizes the benign neglect of black girls in education. Before and after black girls transition through school, they are criminalized by the prison system and are 2.5 times more likely to be incarcerated than white females (Fasching-Varner et al. 2014). In addition, black women are often stereotyped as welfare queens, and white logic has placed them within a constant state of defeminization that is contrasted to the image