91桃色

In The Secrets of Silence, Shannon Malone Gonzalez investigates how the policing of black women is tied to the policing of their stories. Over a period of four years, Malone Gonzalez conducted intimate life-history interviews with black women about their encounters, listening to those who had never shared their stories before, had never even been asked to, or had tried repeatedly to speak to those around them to no avail. They all described the unspoken or whispered connections in the ways officers and communities socially control black women to put them 鈥渋n their place.鈥� Centering black women鈥檚 searches for recognition of their violent encounters with police and other people in their lives, Malone Gonzalez examines the pervasive and often invisible forms of everyday policing that render black women鈥檚 stories missing from official data, headlines, and community conversations.

Articulating what she calls 鈥渢he space between鈥� recognition of black women鈥檚 stories and their encounters, Malone Gonzalez shows that policing is as much about silence as it is about violence. Black women鈥檚 silenced stories, then, provide a way to name and critique the institutional and intimate forms of policing that break and bend black social relations into a complex web of social control. Drawing on abolition feminism and black knowledge traditions, she envisions storytelling鈥攁nd listening鈥攁s a way to reimagine, remember, and reconnect in solidarity and worldbuilding.