The Boston Women’s Fund (BWF) supports community based organizations and grassroots initiatives run by women and girls in order to create a society based on gender, racial, economic, and social justice. To live our mission, we must take responsibility for both personal acts of injustice and any role we play in sustaining institutions that hold oppression in place. We understand that, as a nation built on the foundations of genocide and slavery, our public and private institutions are rife with racism and other biases that keep some in power at the expense of others.
Boston Women’s Fund supports the movement, Black Lives Matter, which shines a light on the deaths of African American young men at the hands of a racist criminal justice system.
The Black Lives Matter movement is succeeding in its effort to make the connection between racism and the shooting deaths of African American youth by white police officers. BWF notes that Women of Color are far from exempt from the racist injustices of our system. For example, Marissa Alexander, an African American woman from Florida was initially sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing a warning shot to prevent her husband from inflicting violence on her. No one was shot, much less killed. However, Marissa was jailed. While her sentence has been reduced, she did not walk free as George Zimmerman did under Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground,’ law when he shot and killed Treyvon Martin, an unarmed African American youth who was simply walking home from the store. George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder in the shooting death of Treyvon Martin, but has since been arrested for several other acts of violence.
When African American men are killed, it is largely African American women who are left to grieve and bury their sons, brothers, or husbands. How many women in communities of color must experience this rupture in their lives, before we hold authorities accountable for their actions? As Audre Lorde once proclaimed, “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can be become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” The Boston Women’s Fund admires Lesley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown, as she asks for calm while protesting in a peaceful manner – protesting in the hope that other mothers will not have to live her experience. We also commend Samaria Rice, mother of 12 year old Tamir Rice; Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner; and Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin as they lift up their voices and demand change instead of retaliation. They relive their pain in an effort to create justice for others. We hold them up. We support their calls for police review boards, systems of accountability to the people, the demilitarizing of the police, and transparent processes for dealing with police officers who use deadly force.
We support non-violent protest of racism in the criminal justice system, including the use of disruption tactics. We also support those organizations that challenge racism and institutionalized racism as their primary focus, such as Community Change. Boston Women’s Fund’s grantee organizations fight for gender equality, while addressing other forms of oppression like racism. Check out the great work of our grantee organizations here.
