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politics. on "washington journal the" it's our annual authors week. we are joint by kimberle crenshaw. she is known for her work on critical race theory and cofounder of the american -- the african-american policies forum and her book is #say her name. guest: good morning. host: five days after 2014, michelle clouseau was killed in phoenix arizona, who is she? >> she was the daughter of a friend garrett. she was a sister of a brother who also. been killed her mother at that time was away from the home, actually petitioning california to release the young man who had killed her brother.

there was a lot of compassion there for this young man. she went into the mental health crisis while her mother was away. the police were called. she did not want to let them in. she was fine. the neighbors heard that there was a commotion and called fran on the phone and said the police were here and she was begging the police to allow her to intervene and calm down michelle. the police instead decided to break down her door and within a minute of confronting michelle, she was shot through the heart. she didn't say anything. the officer who shot her said the look on her face led him to believe he and several other officers that accompanied him were at risk of losing their lives. michelle died within days of michael brown but there was no protest about her, there was no coverage until fran garrett

decided to take her coffin to city hall. that garnered media coverage. that garnered the attention of people to finally see that anti-black police violence is something that is experienced by people across genders. that's when we saw michelle couseau's name and we decided to include her on our banner of black women who were killed by police. host: why are paper more familiar with michael brown -- >> rather than percy dupra. this is the reason for the book. anti-black police violence is largely seen as a problem that affects men and boys which it does, disproportionately so. that is a fact. it's also a fact that women and girls also experience police

violence and they do so disproportionately. black women are 10% of the population. they are 1/5 of women who are killed. they are the only race and gender group in which the majority who are killed are unarmed when they're killed by the police. this is a reality that falls under the existing framework we have to capture. when we imagine a problem impacting a particular group or race/gender group, we don't imagine other people being similarly affected. it's hard for us to remember the stories. it's hard for the media to figure out what the storyline is. it's not one of those situations where you start the story, a black person is in a car and they are followed and it ends with some kind of police violence. you don't have the beginnings of the story that began with somebody calls 911. we don't finish that story with

-- and the police come and they see a person having a mental health crisis and they draw their gun. we don't have that is much. consequently, many of these stories end up with black women being killed start in a way people don't recognize. that's why we started to do#say her name. that way people would learn the stories and be prepared to support their demands for justice. host: in this hour, we are talking with kimberly crenshaw and the book is #say her name. she is a ucla school of law professor, columbia law school professor as well joining us for this conversation and you can join us as well. the phone lines are split as usual by regions in this country. eastern or central time zones it's (202) 748-8000, mountain or pacific region, (202) 748-8001. one quote from your book --

it was a plea that started nine years ago with this effort. is there equality today? guest: no, there is not the quality across the board in this issue. it's an imperative that as we agitate for police reforms, as we think and talk about some of the consequences of police violence, that we make sure that black women and girls are also included in that. some of the struggle as i said earlier is conceptual. this is the ninth anniversary of#say her name. we started it when we went to the eric gardner margin washington, d.c.. tens of thousands of people were at this march. we were outraged as well that the person who killed eric

garner was not prosecuted, but like everyone else, went there to lift up the names of other black people who were killed by the police. we had a banner that had the names of many black women who were killed by the police. some people were supportive and gave us the thumbs up and some people were shocked because they didn't know any of these names. they didn't know it was a problem that impacted black women. there were a few who were upset that we were enter loping, i guess would be the thought, that this is not a black women's problem as well, it's black men and only black men. that is what made us know that we needed to say these names. for the most part, if you don't have stories to broaden your conceptualization of what a problem is, then you would see those coming in to say we have

to say to misha anderson, india kaga. people wonder why we say them but if you don't know the story, you really aren't able to advocate for the kind of inclusions that we need. host: one chapter in your book that viewers will know the name is breonna taylor. why was that story different and why did it seem to reach all of america? guest: i will add sandra bland to that. the two black people or women that most people recognize are those names. each of those moments are -- our hope was that that would be the anger to recognize the fact. what happened to briand a, what happened to sandra happens to more than just those two black women. there are many other stories but they are stories that didn't really capture the media's attention.

one of the reasons that breonna taylor's name is known is because after breonna taylor was killed, the country woke up to a picture of a black man being killed. breonna taylor's name was not part of the media for another month and a half. it was the recognition that police brutality is still a problem and then breonna taylor's name got integrated into the broader movement that 2020 is known for. other black women have been killed since then and the ability to incorporate that recognition, we haven't seen the shift that one would've hope would've happened after breonna taylor. guest: how do you track the number black women killed by police? host: that's a challenging thing. we have a chapter in the book

that talks about the fact that there is no systematic way to track a many people are killed by the police across the board. that's number one. number two, those trackers that are there often don't differentiate by race and by gender. there are some things that are on race and some things that give data by gender but to look at the intersection is a different challenge and that's what intersectionality is all about. some things happen to people because of race and gender and we don't have the conceptual tools to be able to track that. many of these tragedies are going to fall through the cracks. we have a mixed message. we use the data that are available but we also scour the internet, we scour the newspapers. sometimes family members write us and say you don't have this story. we include the story and we say

this is a partial list. we have 190 as of the publication of the book, now 220. we think this is an undercount but we think it's important to begin that process of more effective collection of data. host: the book again is #say her name. we've been talking about chapters in your book. explain with the african-american policy forum is and how long it's been around. guest: it has been around, we are heading toward 30 years soon. it was founded in the aftermath of the clarence thomas/anita hill hearing when it became clear that our history of understanding racism and sexism is not a robust history. we don't really know the stories about how african-american women have contested, how they fought

against the ways that anti-black racism has played out in their lives. you had this monumental hearing with african-american women talking about sexual harassment and a lot of people thinking that's not a black woman's issue when in fact, black women were the initial plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases. this was an example of what happens when our history and understanding about racism and sexism are mutually exclusive, the two don't come together in the public imagination. so someone like anita hill is literally illegible. people can't understand what she is talking about and they don't identify the struggle she represents as something that black women have had to deal with since we arrived on the shores. the organization was created to bring race and gender analysis, history, law, advocacy, human

rights together under one umbrella. we have done work like addressing sexual harassment, violence against women and girls of color, affirmative action, various places. if you have to have an intersectional understanding of social inequality in order to effectively address it. host: a monumental hearing with the clarence thomas hearings and you assisted on the legal team for anita hill. how did you come to be involved in that? guest: at the time that anita hill came forward, there was just a handful of african-american women who were law professors. most of us knew of each other but we didn't know each other personally. i've become acquainted with anita hill as a law professor and as soon i saw that it was in fact anita who the news reports were talking about, i immediately called her up.

at that time, i was working on my second article on intersectionality called mapping the margins in that article was about how sexual violence and harassment against african-american women was an underreported, underappreciated reality in lives. when african-american women come forward and talk about these experiences, they are likely to suffer under a whole range of allegations that reflect stereotypes, sexual stereotypes about black women. i was concerned that this was going to happen and of course wanted to support her in any way possible. within 24 hours, i was on a plane to washington, d.c. and pretty much everything that one could have predicted about how black women have been stereotyped happened to anita hill, from challenges to her veracity, efforts to allege that

she was sexually deviant in some way, that she was jealous, almost textbook examples. the problem was that those who were running the judiciary committee were apparently unaware of the stereotypes and were unaware of the way women in general weren't put on trial and black women in particular so it was a textbook example of what happens when we don't imagine african-american women as the women who are experiencing sex discrimination. host: let's go to some calls. if you want to join the conversation, the phone lines are regional, (202) 748-8000 if you are in the eastern or central time zone and (202) 748-8001 if you are in the mountain or pacific time zones. the book is #say her name and it came out this summer. kimberly crenshaw is the author from cornell university and

graduated from harvard law school and is the founder of the african-american policy forum and with us for the next 45 minutes. michael in florida, broward county is a first. caller: yes, good morning. i wanted to give kimberly a bump for her actions and -- and coordinating an de-colonize our culture. this book is just one piece of an effort she's done over multiple books. that's where the interest is, racism, sexism, classism multiple things and how they come together. the way to decolonize their institutions education, health care, housing, capitalism itself , policing which is what this book is about, if they could decon align eyes it -- if they could decolonize all of that,

whether she does it now or later, she will squeak and squeal because simply grasped deeply that education, capitalism, health care, policing have zero to do with competition, zero. students for example are not greyhounds are racetrack. if you understand where this came from, herbert spencer founded our education to come up with eugenics and founded our modern libertarians perspectives of limited government, he saw students as a means of improving, using science, the new science of evolution. this is the 19 sit -- the 1860's before the civil war. host: that's michael in florida. what do you want to pick up on? guest: this is interesting. i completely agree that there

are foundations to the way we have traditionally thought about education. it's rooted in efforts to naturalize inequalities as a reflection of the inherent differences between people. my specialization is the way that those ideas have percolated up through the law. plessy versus ferguson is the legal case that constitutionalize segregation. it was decided at a time in which most of the academy, most of the sciences believed in the idea there were natural differences between races, that african-americans were inherently different and inferior and to treat them as though they were the same, namely to strike down segregation was to give them something that they didn't deserve. when you have baselines that are

predicated in the idea of inherent differences and inequalities between the races, no amount of inequality in society, no amount of accommodation of that inequality is seen as illegitimate and unconstitutional. we are challenged today to attack and address some of the ways in which science is using contemporary society to say there are inherent differences between races and therefore inequality is just there. that is a lot of what critical race theory is about, challenging these baselines, challenging other ways their institutions tell us stories that make us think that racial inequality is just there and its natural we can't do anything about it. a lot of times, it's based on specious ideas of science with the test of time. everything people thought about the 19th century, in the 19th

century has turned out not to be true. much about what we think about inequality today and what's in -- and what makes it make sense in a century will be recognized as just not true from standardized tests to the idea that colorblindness treats people equally. that's an ideology but it's not a fact. host: denise hawkins, rochester, new york, age 18. age 93 in texas. 2021, age eight, what should we know about them? guest: we should know one thing a particular, that there is no protection against being killed by the police that we typically associate with innocence whether you're a child or you are a great grandmother. you are vulnerable to be killed. you are sleeping or awake or you're driving a car, a block

from here with a baby strapped in the backseat of the car, whether your family has called for help or whether you happen to be riding in a car with the father of your child and that person is a person of interest to a swat team. the traditional kind of things we think, mothers should be safe, children who are with their mothers should be safe, none of these things have proven to protect african-american people, african-american women and african-american children. in the book, we feature nine people, half of those women were killed in the presence of family, either parents, brothers or actually children. the idea that these women are a threat to the well-being of police officers, we tell that

story so people can think critically about is it really the case that a woman who is having a mental health episode and didn't want to be stuffed in the backseat of a police car was a threat to the police officers that required her to be killed? if we start telling these stories, we can help to create some distance between the typical narrative that we had to do it and the reality that you probably didn't have to do it. you could do it and you did do it and there is a difference between those two things. host: jamal, virginia beach, virginia. caller: good morning back. thanks for having me on. i wanted to say to this remarkable woman you have on, keep up the fight, be a hard charger and this is coming from a marine. be a hard charger in all your efforts.

don't be deterred or swayed to do anything different because what you're doing needs to be done and the only reason it doesn't happen a lot is because it's uncomfortable to talk about it but we talk about children being assassinated at schools and whatnot. keep these efforts going. i am very proud of you and thank you again for having me on. guest: well, thank you very much for that. obviously, these are not conversations that people want to have. frankly, given the fact that over the last year or two, we've heard a lot about children and the need to protect them from ideas rather than protect them from bullets. some of those bullets we might be concerned about actually come from the police. they come from moments when their mothers are being

apprehended or engaged. this work is always difficult, always challenging. i am perfectly prepared to have debates about what the work is really about. what we've seen over the last couple of years his specious arguments about intersectionality, about sexual racism, about education that really aren't preparing the american public or informing them about with the actual debates really are. host: what would be the policy objective that would make a difference in the say her name movement? guest: one of the things we make clear about our campaign is that we advance what the mothers and the sisters of women killed by the police are saying would make a difference in their lives. we don't go in with a

pre-committed set of ideas. we asked what makes a difference for them. one important issue that rhonda dormeasm, the mother of corine gaines is advocating is that we rethink qualified immunity. host: remind folks what that is. guest: it's basically a doctrine that protects police officers when they might be found guilty of violating constitutional rights based on some doctrinal toys just choices courts have made to basically say in effect that if the constitutional violation that has occurred is not one that has clearly happened before and clear rules have been developed that you can't therefore hold a police officer accountable, there are other aspects but it basically makes it very hard to hold police officers accountable.

in the current case, the jury found that the officer who shot and killed karin gaines did violate her constitutional rights and issued a judgment on her behalf, 30 plus million dollars. that was a largely white jury that looked at that case very closely and came to that conclusion. the judge overturned the case on the base of qualified immunity. this was a hot thing in the qualified immunity case argument could have been made before went to the jury. the speculation is that perhaps they didn't anticipate that a jury would say you have done wrong and the child who was hurt in this shooting also deserves a

judgment. qualified immunity gets in the way of holding police officers accountable. it's one of the main things that many people who are arguing for reforms have argued about. there are other things as well. police officers often don't have to say what happened. many times, they have a 48 hour hold which many of the mothers think the time is used to get their stories together rather than -- host: a hold on information? guest: information about what happened. this is sometimes the result of union negotiations protecting the police officers so they don't have to often say what happened until 48 hours. there have been efforts to get drug testing of police officers. certainly the victims are drug tested so shouldn't the police officers be? there are protections against that. more fundamentally, there is the

fact that some of the mothers actually are forced to pay for things that are unthinkable. for example, india kaagr was killed by virginia beach police when the police officers open fire on her in the car with her son because they were trailing the father of her son was also in the car. they knew she was there and they knew a baby was there. nonetheless, they opened fire on the car. after all was said and done, gina best, her mother, was sent to bill for the disposal of her daughter's car that they killed her in. it's that level of shocking inhumanity that the mothers tell us about and these are some of the things they want people to know. host: let's go to fairfax,

california. caller: good morning. i know you are fine and you are great. i'm calling because i love "washington journal" for one thing, most of it and i love kimberly and i wanted to say that here in antioch, california, we had a case about the police man sending racist text messages to one another. it's been exposed but the messages have not been published. the people who were involved, there is a protest there and i went with my friend leah and we are not people of color although she has five kids that are mixed race. we were very welcomed there. they had a sign with the names of all the people who have been murdered by the police. i was holding that sign.

i was honored to do so. anyway, i wanted to give a quick example of what happened in my neighborhood in san rafael, california. i had a friend named darius hewer and he was a young black guy who was blind and he had no money and no place to live. i had him in my important and before i knew it, i have the san rafael police basically pounding down my door and sticking their foot in my door. i could not get rid of them. they came in and he eventually said i'm leaving and then i said well i'm leaving, too and we both left. they had no charges of any kind. it's outrageous i guess what the police can get away with sometimes. somebody in san jose, another policeman had been quoted as saying he doesn't like black people. he wrote that somewhere in a

text or something. i think this is a huge problem. host: she brings up a couple of issues. guest: first of all, thank you for being in california. antioch has been the scene of a lot of things and that's the most recent thing. antioch was also the scene of a problem that happened a couple of years ago when african-american women were able to rent homes in fairly middle-class neighborhoods during a time when the housing crisis produced an opportunity for those who had government support section eight support to rent these homes. it was such an outrage to members of the neighborhoods that they were renting that they were able to come together and

harass them with some support by the police. these families were harassed and given tickets for not bringing their garbage in when police were called for domestic violence, sometimes they would go through the process of trying to determine who else was in the home. it was just general harassment. it all goes to show that many times, some of the things that happened reflect an attitude that african-american people have to be disciplined and contained. we have to maintain a tight leash on them and the attitudes that are behind that are not hard to find. back when rodney king was beaten, a lot of the text

messages actually said he is a gorilla. they express the attitude of anti-blackness that then becomes the backdrop of the actual bad treatment. there is that dimension of hostility. here's the point -- it's not just prejudice or the bad apples we have to worry about. it's the way the law helps facilitate the interactions that often lead to the kind of abuse we are talking about. the fourth amendment law allows police broad discretion to initiate contact and many times, it speak because of the overexposure of black bodies to this contact that then turns ordinary traffic stops into something that might be fatal or that turns noise disturbances into something that might be

fatal or is a case we just heard where it's incongruent. there is a black man and a white person's neighborhood or home or apartment that becomes the predicate for initiating some type of police activity. sometimes that police activity ends up in a fatality. you have to go all the way back to the laws that allow those engagements to happen in the first place. you need to understand that in light of the prejudicial attitudes we know some officers have. host: it's our annual authors week series. #today it's say her name, black women's stories. james has been waiting in monroe, louisiana, good morning. caller: yes, i have a question for your network. i'm curious to know that you have almost every day, somebody

promoting a book and i'm curious to know, are you getting paid for that? host: it's our authors week series and we invite authors on different topics, different political viewpoints. we've done this every year for several years. i'm short on time so do you have a question on this topic? guest: my question is, who fact-checks, do you fact-check all these books and everything people put on? they can say anything. do you believe everything that's written? host: do you want to go through your book writing? guest: sure. i have a research team. we've spent five years collecting the names and stories of the women who appear in the book. more broadly, the nine people who are featured, we have been

with them pretty much since 2000 15-2016. much of the content in the book is talking about their loved ones. one of the important things we wanted to do in the book was humanize these women's. we don't want them to be known for the worst thing that ever happened to them. we want them to be known for the lives that should have been, what they wanted to become, who they were. one of the things we do with our mothers is we bring them together live in our focus groups. we talk to them out the lives of their daughters and sometimes we just have them tell a joke that your daughters might have told in the way they would speak. have a conversation hem. pick up the phone and that's

what was their superpower? in doing that, it allowed them to spendime with the memories of their daughters outside of the horrific thing that happened to them. it also gave us texture and nuance as to who these daughters number one, it allowed us allow them to speak in their own words about their daugh that is what appears in the book. it also allowed us to write a play. we've written a play called #say your name, the life that should've been. we imagine the daughters together where they are in a way that mirrors the fact that these mothers are together in their being together as they tell is one of the most transformative and healing things for them is many of them think they are the only mother of a daughter that's been killed. they think it's an exceptional thing.

, did might daughter bring it on themselves so their ability to be together is what we want to chronicle in the book. the book is more than just a policy brief. it basically shows how you bear witness, what happens when you bear witness and how the mothers and other family members are able to advocate for justice because they are part now of a community. host: tuscaloosa, alabama, you're on with kimberly crenshaw. caller: hello. good morning. i wanted to ask about natasha mckenna, young black woman and she was brought out of her jill's handcuffed and leg ironed and five police officers put her on the ground. when she first came out of the jail cell, she said you promise

you won't kill me. they proceeded to put her on the ground naked, pin her down, tased her until she was almost lifeless. eventually, she died. is she in your book? if you look at the george floyd brutality, this is 5-10 times more brutal than george floyd. four of these police officers were dressed in white uniforms similar to ku klux klan. host: let's go to that story for a second. guest: i'm so glad you raised her. yes, she is in the book. the natasha mckenna story, first of all, it's horrendous. it's painful. she was a person who is being held also because she was having

a mental health crisis. she was held naked in the jill soap. there is a video of her being brought out as your caller says, with five officers in hazmat attire. as they opened the door, her last words were, you promise not to kill me. they brought her out. she is in chains. and they bring her out and she is being pulled in is pulling back. they proceed to force her into a chair, a restraining chair. they put a hood over her and then they tasered her i think three times. in the process of this, one of her fingers was missing.

she was unconscious by the time they put her in the ambulance. she died from that as your caller said. there was no protest. her name was not a name many people knew. this did not begin a movement against the mistreatment of people who are incarcerated because of mental health issues. we talk about natasha mckenna and we raise it as -- why isn't this a case that everybody knows? it's not because we don't have video of it because we do. it's not because she was a danger to five police officers because she wasn't. it is partly because we don't know what to do with this case. it doesn't fall within any of the typical kind of framework that we have had. andrea ritchie and i several years ago wrote a report that

said we are going to start creating some of the framework so people can recognize these because they are there. you just have to be able to see them and if you don't have a framework, and you will not be able to see that. host: when you say we are not seeing this, the naacp is at the front of a lot of these protests once these things happen. the black lives matter movement, what's your relationship like with those groups? are they picking up on the #say her name movement? guest: after breonna taylor, there is much more awareness. they start saying the names. we will hear breonna taylor in earlier we start to hear sandra bland. sandra bland lost her life after a traffic stop in which she basically said why do web to put

out my cigarette. this came about six months after we started so there is a greater awareness that we have to say some of the names of the women as well. it's a long slog because we have thought about violence particularly police violence through a pretty recognizable narrative. it's african-american men being accosted. we thought about it through the paradigm of lynching, clearly. we haven't historically recognize the black women have also been disciplined by the police. host: what to do think of president obama's my brother's keeper initiative? guest: i am on record as a critic of its narrow parameters. my brother's keeper as some of

your listeners might remember was a response to trayvon martin being killed by someone who is not a police officer but acted as though he was. our overall point was that trayvon martin was not vulnerable because he didn't have a role model, he was not vulnerable because his father wasn't in his life. his father was in his life. the framework of my brother's keeper more or less responded to the vulnerability of trayvon martin and so these kinds of issues would fix the problem. that didn't fix the problem. these were structural problems, problems of seeing african-american people as dangerous. this was a criminal justice system problem and it was also the fact that black girls are also subject to this kind of discipline and we need to be concerned about them. one of our reports, black girls

matter, found that black girls, the disparity in the in school discipline they experience in terms of suspension and expulsion is greater between them in white girls than the disparity between black boys and white boys. race makes a bigger difference in how girls behavior will be interpreted and what kinds of consequences come out of that. that is the kind of disparity we don't talk about when we think about racism primarily in terms of how it impacts our brothers and sons. the point of all of this work is not to say that we don't need these kind of programs. is to say they need to be broadly gender inclusive. host: lots of calls for you, tennessee, you are on. caller: good morning. yes, first of all, it's tragic

when anybody gets killed. this lady is trying to portray that policeman get out here and wake up. they want to go out in the black community and do prejudicial things. but that's not true. you can look at those statistics and it shows you that's not true. i watch these programs on tv of the police department and here's the thing, if the police department tells you to sit down, you need to sit down. i don't care if you have a mental problem or what. they are in charge, they are investing a crime. when you buck up against them, they will do their job. this lady needs to be more concerned about black on black crime where they are shooting people randomly in these metropolitan areas. host: you bring up a lot of

topics so our police inherently racist? guest: i appreciate this call. i think it reveals many of the dynamics that are at issue. first of all, i don't care if you have a mental disability or not, you need to do what they tell you. that is precisely the attitude of the police officers. that is white disability is one of the most significant risk factors in losing your life. the assumption is that you are just choosing not to comply. there is the old saying that you hammer everything that looks like a nail. to a police, every moment of failure to comply looks like an excuse or justification for force. that's why tanisha anderson is no longer with us.

there is a whole list of people i could name. the second thing that is an echo in that comment is the idea that the police are there to enforce order and anything that can be interpreted as refusing to comply, whether it's what you say, the look on your face, the refusal to say who you are when you don't have to constitutionally, all that justifies coercion and force. that is unique in american policing. one of the reasons that we have that attitude is american policing came from slave patrols. the idea was we tell you what to do, our control over you is absolute and any time " youbuck"

the system, that is a justification and requires this kind of coercive response. that's not inherent to policing. it's inherent to american policing. it's the piece of american policing that makes sense if we understand initially where it came from and how it is racialized. it's been a grounding dimension of american policing. you heard it and that comment. host: he also said you should focus on black on black violence guest: it's what everybody wants to resist the idea that violence is real. they say you kill each other. most violence is interracial. it's the same with white violence. i really hear when people are talking about you need to get tough on crime. people say you need to focus on white on white crime.

i rarely hear even the reality that mass shootings are mostly white on white issues. that is an ideological race card. you don't have the ability to talk about what we do as long as you do it to yourselves. we know that's selective and we know it doesn't really tell us what needs to be addressed. we know that violence is a particular problem in a democracy we all should concerned about. host: back to california, kimberly in sacramento. caller: good morning. i cannot thank you from the bottom my heart for writing this book. i'm an activist and i've had the pleasure of sitting in the room with many of these mothers and grandmothers. whenrandmother had a program and i was invited to it. it helped change my life and it's ng. stening to the daughter'sand

voices when police violence attacks the ity harshly , it's like changing and it's part of history and thank you for writing the book. host: how did you get involved in this issue? caller: i live in oakland and i'm an activist. i met oster grants mother in the street. they were fighting for justice that they achieved with oscar grant. there is no justice because the only justice you can really get is the life of the child. you do it so we hope we change so that many more children don't die, black and brown. it hardens my heart that many women never get the justice that they so rightly deserve. the families are beautiful and i

thank you from the -- and i know they think you from about one of their hearts. so many people have come to this work through meeting uncle bobby and many of the mothers of people killed by the police. host: what about the folks the caller brought up? guest: oscar grant, anyone who saw the movie fruitvale station knows that story. he was killed by transit police while he was lying on the ground. his family has turned that tragedy into a foundation and organizing space for other families to also -- who also have experience police violence. not all families respond in that way. the families who are part of say her name want to be clear that

their daughters lost lives are not lost in vain. they want to be a source of support for other families who come into what they call the sisterhood of farrow. they want to address one thing that was taken away from them call the loss of the loss. as your caller said, there is no justice in the sense that the persons lost life cannot be given back. the fact that it happens, the fact that a life that should've been will no longer be lived, the fact that families now have a huge hole and children and mothers and mothers no longer with them, that loss can be addressed. that's what most of the work of #say her name is about. in doing that, the mothers together create a testament to

their daughters and sisters legacy. they find ways to ensure that the life that was lived continues to shape other lives in the future. host: pick up the book #say her name and they can read these stories at the african-american policy forum. time for a couple of more calls. you're on with kimberly crenshaw. caller: yes, good morning. i agree about certain things but one of the things i disagree with is the arrest of some these black women who are suspect -- were with suspected criminals. as a foundational black american myself, i grew up in the 80's and 90's and there was a huge crack egg -- crack epidemic in

black communities. when i was in an hbcu campus, that's historically black colleges and universities, there was a lot of drug dealers coming on campus. they were dating a lot of the women that were in the university at the time. this was huge in the 80's and 90's. a lot of black women, we had one in particular who was famous and she was very emblematic of this era. her name was kimberly smith. she went to hampton university. she was dating a drug dealer and came from -- president clinton gave her a pardon. she came from a very prestigious family and she was dating a drug dealer. host: can you get to the question? guest: the question is., caller: how can the actual perception that some of these things are just fictitious and

have no merit versus those things that have merit and warrant certain things the pooley -- the police do. guest: i'm also not entirely sure what the question is but i will save this -- gina best the mother of india kagar was in a car with a person of interest to happen is to be the father of her child. they were visiting his family. the problem with that framework that i think i'm hearing is well she wasn't innocent because she was with someone who was of interest. i want the caller to read the story of gina best and reflect on is it saying -- are you saying that because she was with the father of her child that the

police decision to disregard her life, the fact that she had done nothing wrong, the fact that her young son roman who now has a permanent disability because the police fired into that car, that that's ok? that's effectively what the attitude of some of these police officers are, collateral damage. women and children being collateral damage. i would even go further and say because he was of interest, it did not warrant that level of swot level violence for someone who is a person of interest. what seems to sometimes be going on is there is a sense that the only time we should be concerned is with mistaken identity or wrong place, wrong time. the level of coercion in the disregard about the consequences of that coercion, that attitude

is a long-standing attitude that has characterized policing, particularly policing in black communities. we have to be against all of it if we care about the sanctity of life and not try to cherry pick and take people out of our concern because they happen to be dating someone who was of interest or a home, that's effectively what happened with breonna taylor. the idea was she used to date someone who is in the drug trade so she is not innocent. this is not how policing -- policing should transpire, particularly when people are not guilty of it anything that warns this kind of deadly force used against them. host: for more on the stories, the book is "#say her name:

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