All women and girls on this planet face the threat, if not the reality, of male violence—but for black women and girls in the United States and so many other countries, personalized violence at the hands of boyfriends, husbands, exes, male relatives, and male strangers hunting for sex isn’t the only kind to worry about. Black women and girls are also the targets of male institutions: the cops, the government, the public school system, the military, and the medical system. At the intersection of their sex and their race lies a particular vulnerability to the powerful white men who control society at large. White men with power—and most of the people with power in the U.S. are white men—rape, brutalize, and kill black women and girls with legal impunity. Male violence is used to enforce white supremacy on a systemic scale, just as male violence has been used to enforce male supremacy in every society on earth for thousands of years. To understand and address the black female condition in America and much of the world, we have to acknowledge that male violence is different and greater for them than it is for white women. And if we as radical and lesbian feminists are serious about calling out male violence in our patriarchal societies, we must protest the white supremacist social hierarchy, because this hierarchy is the motive for much of the male violence black women and girls experience throughout their lives.

There has never been a time in the United States where black female existence has been free of violence. I’m sure the same can be said of all other white majority nations and the other countries included in the African diaspora. Racism is an inherently violent prejudice. Slavery and colonialism are inherently violent, and it was these violent practices that brought the first black women and girls to the United States, western Europe, the Caribbean, Central and South America, etc. Even on the African continent, black women and girls have suffered white male violence in their own homelands for centuries. In the United States, slavery became the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, which then became the post-integration era of continued police brutality and unfair imprisonment of black Americans we’re living in today. Throughout the United States’ entire history, the white government and white institutions have violently persecuted black women and girls, echoing the more personal white violence performed by white civilians on a larger scale. So much of the black woman’s suffering is couched in this state violence that if feminists only took issue with the male violence of heterosexual relationships and families, we would be missing half the picture of black female oppression. If the black woman and the black girl could be safe from male violence in their own homes, in their families, in their heterosexual relations and communities, it still wouldn’t be enough. They would continue to face danger in the streets: rape and murder at the hands of cops who escape legal punishment, medical abuse and violence in hospitals and mental institutions, violence at the hands of pimps and johns in the prostitution and sex trafficking industries, male violence from authority figures in schools and prisons, etc.

The white woman has always had compelling reasons to deny that the black woman experiences a unique kind of violence at the hands of white men. White male violence protects the system that benefits white women and girls on the racial axis of privilege. To be a true radical feminist as a white woman, you must become a race traitor, turning your back on and fighting the white men you’re personally connected to and those in power who preserve your social and economic advantage over the black woman. White women who are truly radical feminists will vote against white supremacist politicians and policies that would benefit white women as white citizens, protect and defend black women and girls from persecution in schools and the workplace and the streets, and help put their own white sons, lovers, husbands, fathers, brothers, and male friends in prison if it means punishing a black woman or girl’s rapist, attacker, or murderer. It is only because most white women have always been unwilling to show this kind of feminist loyalty to black women that state violence has continued without interruption against black women and girls.  White women have been complicit in anti-black racism all along, and part of feminist consciousness raising is deprogramming our own racism in order to better love and support black women and all other non-white women. At the end of the day, state systems are made of individual people—predominantly white men. These white men have wives, mothers, daughters, girlfriends, and even white female colleagues who prop them up. Women can’t change men, but we can reject them, resist them, act against them. If non-black women wanted to stop state violence against black women and girls, we could, just as we could end patriarchy if most of us chose separatism instead of cooperation with men. We underestimate the collective power women have to influence male behavior and male systems through simply refusing to reward and support men in our personal lives and also in our workplaces. The female sex makes up a little more than half the population; if a majority of women in the U.S. united against racist state violence through live protests, economic boycotts, and abandoning racist white men in our social lives, we could affect real change. Taking this kind of action requires us to genuinely care about black women and girls the way we care about ourselves. The suffering and deaths of innocent black women and girls should enrage all women in society and incite our compassion and our desire to find a permanent solution. If we feel that compassion and rage as much as we would for ourselves, there will be no limit to how far we’re willing to go in our campaign against racist state violence against black women and girls.

Feminism is meant to liberate all females from all forms of male violence and oppression. We tend to focus predominantly on interpersonal violence between women and the men they know because it accounts for the overwhelming majority of violence against women in our society, but we can’t forget the women and girls who are victims of the male state, who are terrorized by police and the military and other government and public institutions. The male state is simply a reflection of what individual men believe and desire to do. State violence is racist because individual men are racist, and as long as racist men hold power at the state level, black women and girls will continue to be unjustly targeted and brutalized along with black men and boys. While we as feminists may not be able to transform racist males into anti-racists, we can ourselves live anti-racist lives and do our best to support and protect black women and girls in every context. We can put the safety and well-being of these women and girls over any beneficial relationship we may have with a man who is part of the problem.