'Policing While Black: A Black Feminist Autoethnography about Hate Crime Work'

Despite substantial developments, collective responses to the policing of hate crimes-acts motivated by hate or prejudice towards an individual’s race, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, transgender identity, or disability have been affected by tremendous operational changes and a disconnect between scholarship, policy, and practice. The relationship between different domains within hate spheres – is a phrase coined to describe the interconnecting association of overlapping spheres of hate crime activity is employed in this project. Examining the use of hate spheres can help us explore the fractured connections between academia, policy, people, and practice in hate crime. Therefore, this project uses Black Feminst Criminology (BFC) as an exploratory technique to examine how Black women examine and respond to hate crime. BFC is grounded in Black Feminist thought and critical race feminist theories (CRFT). Therefore, Flavin (1998) asserted an BFC that focuses on the specific experiences of Black individuals in crime-processing systems (Potter, 2006:106). And Critical Race feminist theory (CRFT) is like Black Feminist theory in that it also ‘considers women of colour as individuals with multiple intersecting identities where one does not eclipse another’ (Potter, 2006:111). The author uses the techniques such as Black feminist autoethnographic vignettes as tool, as a method and methodology to understand Black women’s experiences of oppression and survivability in hate crime policing. This is an examination of a Black woman’s experience in a hate crime policing. Conceptually, fusing Black feminist autoethnographic vignettes (BFA) and an outsider-within perspective is significant. An outsider-within perspective, Collins (1998:5) asserts is as a tool ‘that offers new perspectives of oppression and are, therefore riddled with contradictions’. Using ‘Black Feminist autoethnography’ (BFA) and an outsider-within lens is ‘a means for Black Female academics to critically narrate the pride and pain of Black womanhood’ (Griffin, 2012: 138). Thus, the authors experiences will be explored within hate crime policing work. Moreover, Collins (2000:257) asserts that centring our ‘lived experience as a criterion of meaning is one of the central tenets of Black Feminism’. Additionally, ‘Black women researchers can offer information about Black women that others cannot’ (Boylorn, 2013b:3). It is a unique vantage point, an exploration across hate spheres. Furthermore, studying ‘Black women as a subculture or the communities in which they live, Black women researchers can offer a privileged standpoint for collecting, analysing the raw data of Black women’s lives’ (Boylorn, 2013b:3). The knowledge gained from the lived experience of Black women for Black women is vital for their survival. A Black feminist consciousness is employed throughout this piece as a way of understanding racism and sexism in the lives of Black women. I contend that adopting a Black feminist critical consciousness, centring the intersecting experiences of Black women, helps to form strategies for Black women to thrive. Black feminist thought offers ‘Black women a view of themselves through interpretative frameworks, epistemological approaches, and empowerment’ (Collins, 2009). The author seeks to explore her personal experiences via vignettes as a Black women located in the hate crime field. These stories offer commentary and suggestions of how we change hate crime policing, effecting social justice for all people of difference. Consequently, the author suggests a widening of the hate spheres, reimagining a world without the need for hate crime policing. The approach of widening the hate domains must include autoethnographic testimony and the voices of practitioners and victims. Black women practitioners voices are often ignored. Fusing ‘intersectional mindfulness’ (Griffin, 2012) with notions of emancipation methods such as abolition feminism, postcoloniality and transformative justice as ‘liberatory approaches to violence that seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation, punishment, or state or systemic violence, including incarceration or policing’ (Carruthers, 2018:10) is essential within hate spheres. Conversely, hate crime work is complicated. The responses and solutions ought to be multifaceted, evidence based and community derived. For practitioners, ‘it is a site of contradiction’ (Boom, 2019). Also, some of the demands in responding to hate crime include courage, emotional work/stamina, extensive knowledge of difference and identity and understandings of racism, gendered racism, misogynoir, homophobia, transphobia, and institutional memories. Whilst advocating for social change and justice. Informed by scholarly knowledge, the experiences of the author, victims, and practitioners converge via a structured vignette analysis. Therefore, creating new Black feminist criminological perspectives, away from individualistic analyses of hate crime to a unification of feminist and abolitionist approaches, academic scholarship, policy formation, and everyday lived experiences within the hate spheres.