JINHA

NEWS CENTER – Ten women in the U.S. city of San Francisco blocked traffic in the city's Financial District yesterday with a naked protest, drawing on African women's protest traditions to call attention to the lives of black women killed by police.

The BlackOUT collective group carried photographs of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Rekia Boyd and other black women and girls killed by police with impunity at the San Francisco protest. After the recent African American Policy Forum report "Say Her Name" argued that black cis and trans women have gone "unnamed and thus under-protected in the face of their continued vulnerability to police violence," women have taken to the streets in 17 cities across the U.S. to honor the lives of these women and girls.

The women explained that the decision to expose their bodies was motivated by attention to black women's bodies only as commodified objects of consumption, but not as lives that matter when they are killed with impunity. “When it’s in the name of pop culture, and what’s expected in mainstream society, people applaud it, but when it’s in the name of peace and justice and liberation, they ignore it,” said Rose Berry of Black Youth Project 100, speaking to Buzzfeed. BlackOUT Collective noted that they wanted to resist a culture that "loves our bodies, but not us."

While white feminist activists like FEMEN have gotten widespread press recently for their naked protest, the protestors noted that naked protest is in fact a powerful way that women across Africa have resisted colonialism and neoliberalism for over a century. The San Francisco protestors' bodies bore slogans including "I fight to decrease infant mortality" and "I fight for my girls to love their bodies," echoing the banner behind them that read, quoting Assata Shakur, "it is our duty to fight."

Other protests including pouring libations for the slain women in Nashville and a memorial in Seattle in which protestors read women's names one by one. Protestors gathered in 17 cities, including at the Home Depot store in Emeryville, California where a security guard shot and killed 38-year-old Yuvette Henderson earlier this year. On social media, the hashtag #SayHerName has been used to share the stories and lives of these women.

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