The New Jersey 4, Megan Williams, and Dunbar Village.

I missed the “Blogging for Justice” deadline, but now seems as good a time as any to post about this. Brownfemipower has a post about these issues, and how the blogosphere has handled them. Afrospear covers Megan Williams and Dunbar Village, and brownfemipower has links to multiple posts about the New Jersey 4.

The New Jersey 4 were arrested for defending themselves from physical assault and battery. Read the story. These women were harassed and violently attacked - their attacker attempted to kill one. Despite the fact that they fought back in self-defense, four were convicted and sentenced for defending themselves. The message here is that if you’re lesbian and black, you have to just have to passively accept whatever violence comes your way. Being a black woman is probably enough.

Megan Williams was kidnapped for more than a week, tortured, beaten, forced to eat rat, dog and human feces, and raped by six white men and women in West Virgina. They kept her in a shed and taunted her with racial slurs. While the six people could face life sentences in prison, Megan’s family wants to prosecute this as a hate crime - something that the authorities have stopped short of doing.

In the Dunbar Village case, four boys and a man broke into a woman’s home, robbed her, and gang-raped her and her son. More information here. 

Please follow these links - I just can’t go into enough detail here to explain everything without just quoting these other sites entirely. Each of these cases is an example of extreme violence against women of color, and it’s important that people know this is going on, and know to do something about it.