#SayHerName: Our Award-Winning Podcast Episode & More News From News Beat
Award-winning indie pod highlights state-sponsored violence against Black women and girls—and sends a message to corporate media.
Hi, everyone. We launched News Beat podcast four years ago to provide an independent, alternative voice to the mainstream media, which routinely fails to contextualize or even cover incredibly important social justice issues affecting marginalized and underrepresented communities. We do so through a unique, multi-award-winning blend of hard-hitting indie journalism and original hip hop.
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As for the exciting news: News Beat recently won the coveted ‘Best Podcast’ prize in the 2021 New York Press Club Journalism Awards! Yep, our indie pod triumphed over the biggest—and wealthiest—names in news. Among winners in other categories: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NBC News, CBS—you get the picture.
While we’re heartened by the recognition, we’re incredibly humbled that the winning episode is “#SayHerName: Confronting 400 Years of State Violence Against Black Women.”
Why We Covered This Topic
#SayHerName was truly devastating to report.
Amid the 2020 racial justice rebellions that gripped the country, we couldn’t help but notice the story of Black women and girls was largely missing from the narrative. While the abundance of coverage of George Floyd’s murder was warranted, accounts of Breonna Taylor, the Louisville woman killed by police in her own apartment, was minuscule by comparison. Not only was the media silence perplexing, but it took months for the public to learn the true circumstances around her death.
As we previously reported:
Floyd received eight times more mentions than Taylor between June 4 and June 29, according to the Internet Archive. Among the programs that referenced Taylor the most: the alternative news outlet Democracy Now!, the United Kingdom-based BBC, and C-SPAN, which mostly featured speeches by U.S. senators. Only one mainstream American outlet appeared in the top five: MSNBC.
In the same report, we highlighted how the police were less than transparent about how Taylor was killed:
Taylor was killed on March 13, and her death initially was framed in the context of seemingly mundane police raid interrupted by gunfire from someone inside her apartment. An early report made no mention of the cops shooting Taylor eight times after they stormed her apartment and woke her from her sleep.
As the racial justice protests took hold, we heard advocates arguing that Black women are similarly exposed to excessive police violence, yet are routinely forgotten or ignored.
In the face of near-absolute silence, they had one simple demand: #SayHerName.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
Starting with the transatlantic slave trade and continuing through today, violence against Black women has always been a tragic reality in this country.
The seminal #SayHerName report by the social justice think tank African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School examined more than three dozen cases of police brutality against Black women and girls. Those killed by police range in age, from 7 years old to 93, according to the report.
“The failure to highlight and demand accountability for the countless Black women killed by police over the past two decades, including Eleanor Bumpurs, Tyisha Miller, LaTanya Haggerty, Margaret Mitchell, Kayla Moore, and Tarika Wilson, to name just a few among scores, leaves Black women unnamed and thus underprotected in the face of their continued vulnerability to racialized police violence,” it reads.
This follows decades of increased criminalization of Black women in the United States.
A 2016 report by the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice found that women were the fastest-growing population of incarcerated people in the country between 1970 and 2014.
Separately, a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 found that similar to their male counterparts, Black women are “significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police.”
Who We Interviewed & What They Told Us
Our two guests on this episode were Michelle S. Jacobs, a professor of law at Levin College at the University of Florida, and Andrea Ritchie, author of “Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color” and co-author of the aforementioned #SayHerName report.
Michelle S. Jacobs
“There's never been a time in the entire United States history where Black women have not been violently assaulted both by the state as well as individuals.”
“The police...don't document when they're abusing Black men, so they're certainly not gonna document it when they're abusing Black women. Social scientists don't study it, because they're not interested in it.”
Andrea Ritchie
“I'm looking right now in my apartment at a poster that we made in 2015 with some colleagues that list 100 black women and girls killed by police. And there are 5-year-olds on this list.”
“Certainly state-sponsored violence against Black women has existed from the moment the first Black woman was dragged to these shores—Isabella was her name. or was the name that she was given by her captors in Jamestown. And from that moment forward, Black women have, and in the moments leading up to that, through kidnapping from the African continent through the Middle Passage, Black women have experienced all of the same forms of state-sponsored violence, state-sanctioned violence and state violence as Black men and Black people of all genders, and additionally have been subject to gender-specific forms of state violence, through certainly systematic and structural rape that propped up the institution of chattel slavery and allowed it to continue after the transatlantic slave trade was shut down.”
How You Can Listen to #SayHerName
Additional resources
NEWS BEAT TEAM
Producer / Audio Editor / Host: Michael "Manny Faces" Conforti
Producer / Editor-In-Chief: Christopher Twarowski
Producer / Managing Editor: Rashed Mian
Executive Producer: Jed Morey
News Beat is a Morey Creative Studios and Manny Faces Media production