#SayHerName at OU: Where Crafting and Activism Meet
By: Brook Endale
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Ohio University Students and faculty used quilting to start a dialogue about how police violence towards black women is often overlooked.
The Women’s Center, the Office for Multicultural Student Access and Retention, the LGBTQ Center, Ebony Minds, and Unified Sisters joined together to host the #SayHerName Quilt Project held in the Multicultural Center Tuesday night.
#SayHerName is a social movement started as a complement to the Black Lives Matter Movement.
Activists noticed the general perception was that mostly black men suffered from police brutality, but that was not the case. Black women were also victims of police brutality, but suffered in different ways.
A recorded TED Talk by Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the founders of the movement, was presented at the event. She said being both black and a woman present greater challenges in the face of oppression.
In the TED Talk, Crenshaw said that being both a female and a minority means you’re likely to get hit by discrimination on both fronts. Crenshaw said that gender and race bias are real and the two can combine to create even more harm, making it important to pay attention to the unique struggles black women face.
The aim of the event was to use crafting to discuss her message of intersectionality.
Intersectionality looks at systems of oppression to analyze how class, race, sexual orientation, disability and gender can coexist to present added challenges.
One example offered during the event was the compounded challenges faced by black women giving birth while in prison. Often, black women report being shackled to their hospital beds while in labor.
Transwomen are often placed in male prisons and report being sexually assaulted by fellow prisoners.
Geneva Murray, the director of the Women’s Center, helped organize the event. She said she believed it was important to bring the message of #SayHerName to Ohio University.
Murray said when organizers decided to host the #SayHerName event, they looked at how activists used crafting to spread their message.
“We were looking at it in terms of other craftivism movements and how people were using crafts to build empathy,” she said. “Craft can be used as a means to feel and understand the emotional responses we have to some of these issues.”
Posters depicting first-hand accounts of black women and transwomen of color were on display illustrating the abuses they faced at the hands of police and guards while in prison.
Attendees were asked to read the accounts before they began working on the quilt.
Each attendee was able to craft a message with the name of a victim of police brutality to be added to the quilt.
This is the third #SayHerName event the Women’s Center has sponsored.