Opinion | Black women keep getting beaten in public. How should we respond?

As some of you might recall, earlier this year, I wrote about how some other residents and I intervened in a potentially dangerous situation in our apartment complex’s garage. A woman and her friend, who lived in the building, were being confronted by the first woman’s ex. He was refusing to let her leave and had used his car to block her from getting away. The woman’s friend told me the man had abused the woman before — so badly that she had ended up in the hospital.

That night, with the situation developing quickly, there was no way to know whether any of the parties were on drugs or intoxicated, or whether the man was armed. I made some quick calculations and decided to remain as a witness while keeping my distance from the man. I called the Dallas Police Department to report what was going on. I saw a male resident and looped him in, asking him to stay. We all tried to persuade the belligerent man to leave and the ex-girlfriend to keep her distance. Eventually, the situation resolved itself without violence. But it could have gone any number of ways.

Recently, the topic of defending women from male violence flooded my social media again, after a viral video surfaced out of Houston a few days ago.

Ro Bashe, a Somali immigrant, took to social media, showing off her injured face and claiming a man had hit her with a brick and then run away. Why had she allegedly been assaulted? Because, she said, she had refused to give him her phone number.

At the scene, she turns the camera on the men in the vicinity, screaming at them and asking why none had intervened on her behalf. “I want you to be a man and do something!” she yells. “You gonna let a man hit me in my face?”

The video sparked a discussion about intervention into abuse against Black women and the physical danger in which women find themselves when rejecting men in public. We could go on and on about women’s stories of street harassment, of being asked to perform niceness by male strangers:

The video also drew comparisons with the now-infamous Montgomery brawl from last month in Alabama, when Black men intervened on behalf of a Black security guard who was under attack by White men:

Ultimately, the whole ordeal revealed the intersection of racism and sexism — with some saying they found uncomfortable echoes between Black men’s reactions to the Houston video and the way White supremacists often respond to videos of violence against Black people:

This wasn’t the first video this summer to bring up these questions. In June, a video out of Chicago showed a man punching a Black woman in the face at a fast-food restaurant. The woman’s teenage son ended up shooting the man in the back, killing him. After the video was released, the police dropped murder charges against the mother and son.

In an ideal world, none of these confrontations would be happening in the first place. But here’s something I’m sure of: Situations such as these, or such as the confrontation at my (soon-to-be-former) apartment complex, will never stop happening until Black women in our society are seen as worthy of respect, protection and care.

We know that Black women face higher rates of domestic violence than any other group of women. Black women are also more likely to experience sexual harassment outside the domestic sphere, including at work. We also know that it’s unlikely men are going to stop harassing and assaulting women anytime soon.

These facts should not stop us from thinking about how to interrupt violence against women when we see it, in ways that ensure everyone gets home safely.

A number of men on social media have said they simply do not want to get hurt for stepping in to defend a woman, much less one they don’t know. And they are entitled to think that way.

But if that’s the case, then we all need to drop the pretense of the “protector” role that many men claim they play in society, in exchange for women’s love and submission.

It’s a problem to believe that “intervention” and “defense” must mean meeting violence with equal or greater violence. I would go so far as to say that involving the police, who arrive armed, is also a way of potentially introducing more violence into a situation (domestic violence calls are some of the most dangerous for police officers). I did consider this when calling the police during the altercation I witnessed. I remember thinking I didn’t want the man involved to see that I was on the phone; I called 911 while out of his sight. (In the end, I risked escalating the violence for nothing. The police didn’t show up in time to help.)

So if we, as women, can’t rely on men — or, in many cases, the police — to protect us, what recourse do we have? One thing I’ve become more convinced of over time is that we need other ways to think about defending ourselves and others. Violence, if necessary, proportionate and justified, should always be, in my opinion, the last resort. More people, and not just the police, need to be trained in de-escalation and evasion strategies.

I would love to hear your stories, thoughts and questions about interrupting violence and defending the vulnerable in public. We should all be our sisters’ keepers.

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