Our analysis of Jane Crow is key---attunements to the violence that marginalizes Black women is necessary to prevent misogynistic Afrofuturist imaginations.

The resurgent racial justice movement in the United States has developed a clear frame to understand the police killings of Black men and boys, theorizing the ways in which they are systematically criminalized and feared across disparate class backgrounds and irrespective of circumstance. Yet Black women who are profiled, beaten, sexually assaulted, and killed by law enforcement officials are conspicuously absent from this frame even when their experiences are identical. When their experiences with police violence are distinct—uniquely informed by race, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation—Black women remain invisible.Despite their marginalization in contemporary efforts to challenge anti-Black racism and police brutality, Black women and girls continue to lose their lives to racially motivated violence. The nation has been left reeling in the wake of the June 17th shooting in which a white gunman murdered nine Black parishioners at a historically Black church in Charleston in an explicit act of racial terror. Six of the nine people killed were women—the oldest, Susie Jackson, was an 87-year-old grandmother—demonstrating clearly that Black women also face the lethal risk of white supremacist violence.