How Black women coined the ‘say her name’ rallying cry before Biden’s State of the Union address
Marjorie Taylor Greene wore a T-shirt to Thursday night’s State of the Union address with a seemingly simple message: Say her name.
The hard-line Republican congresswoman from Georgia, who was decked out in a red MAGA hat and other regalia, borrowed the phrase from Black racial justice activists who have drawn attention to the extrajudicial killings of Black women at the hands of police and vigilantes.
However, Greene used the rallying cry to successfully push President Joe Biden to name Laken Riley, a nursing student from Georgia whose death is now at the center of the U.S. immigration debate. An immigrant from Venezuela who entered the U.S. illegally has been arrested and charged with murder in Riley’s case.
Riley’s name is a rallying cry for Republicans who are critical of the president’s handling of the record wave of immigrants entering the country through the U.S.-Mexico border.
The origins of the rallying cry “Say Her Name” date back well before Greene donned the T-shirt.
The phrase was popularized in 2015 by civil rights activist, law professor and executive director of the African American Policy Institute Kimberlé Crenshaw, following the death of Sandra Bland. Bland, a 28-year-old black woman, was found dead in a Texas jail cell a few days after she was arrested during a traffic stop. Her family questioned the circumstances of her death and the validity of the traffic stop, and the following year she settled a wrongful death lawsuit with police.
Black women are statistically more likely than other women to witness and experience police violence, including death, which is also linked to increased psychological stress and several associated negative health consequences.
“Everywhere we see the appropriation of progressive and inclusive concepts in an effort to devalue, distort and suppress the movements they were created to support,” Crenshaw said in a statement to The Associated Press. “If most people only hear about these ideas from those who seek to repurpose and degrade them, our ability to speak truth to power is further limited.”
Greene’s appropriation of the phrase “undermines civil rights movements and pushes our democracy closer to the edge,” Crenshaw wrote in her statement. “The misuse of these concepts by others who seek to silence us must be challenged if we are to remain steadfast in our advocacy for a fully inclusive and shared future.”
Tamika Mallory, a racial justice advocate and author, said Laken Riley deserves justice, but in this case she doesn’t think conservatives are being sincere when they use #SayHerName. “If they were, they wouldn’t be using language that they claim they don’t support,” she said. “They demonize our language, they demonize our organizational style, but they co-opt the language when they feel it is a political tool.”
Crenshaw and others began using the phrase to draw attention to cases in which black women are victims of police brutality. In 2020, the hashtag #SayHerName brought increased public attention to the shooting of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman in Louisville, Kentucky, who was shot and killed in her home during a botched police raid.
The campaign was created to break the silence around Black women, girls and women whose lives have been taken by police, Crenshaw said.
“The list of women who died in fatal encounters with law enforcement and whose families continue to demand justice is long. Tanisha Anderson, Michelle Shirley, Sandra Bland, Miriam Carey, Michelle Cusseaux, Shelly Frey, Breonna Taylor, Korryn Gaines, Kayla Moore, Atatiana Jefferson and India Kager are just a few of the many names we lift up – women whose stories are otherwise too common remained untold. We must call out and resist this attempt to co-opt this campaign in the service of an extremist right-wing agenda.”
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Graham Lee Brewer is an Oklahoma City-based member of AP’s Race and Ethnicity team.