Abstract
Renisha McBride, who was killed by a white homeowner while seeking help after a car crash, made national headlines due to her murderer’s stand your ground defense failing to absolve him of manslaughter charges. This article argues that a key factor in McBride’s justice claims were the unknown characteristics of her encounter with the murderer that allowed family members to advocate on her behalf. Using the Black Feminist concept of unknowability, I look at how news media discourses about McBride’s unknown space and time prior to her encounter made her invisible while facilitating the continuous questioning of the events that night. Through an analysis of McBride’s negative portrayals in news media and court proceedings along with family members’ testimonies, I consider the ways unknowability affords Black women the ability to move from geographies of invisibility to visibility through a constant questioning of Black women’s relationship to space. I argue that unknowability allowed McBride to obtain some form of juridical justice.
Introduction
On the morning of 2 November 2013, a white homeowner called the Dearborn Heights Police Department to report that he had shot someone on his front porch. Emergency medical services arrived and removed an unidentified person from the scene. The homeowner was brought into the local police station for questioning and was later released that morning. No charges were filed. Local news coverage called the death an accident where a frightened homeowner fired their weapon at a person that stood in their doorway (Brand-Williams, 2013a). Dearborn Heights police, citing Michigan’s “Stand Your Ground Law,” found that the shooter had acted in self-defense. The person found was Renisha McBride. The shooter was left unnamed.
Renisha McBride, a 19-year-old Black teenager from Detroit, Michigan, made national news as her story of a tragic encounter was linked to the emerging Black Lives Matter movement. 1 Family members and local activists behind the hashtag #justiceforRenishaMcBride rallied for McBride at the Dearborn Heights City Hall demanding justice. Justice for Renisha McBride meant naming the shooter, charges being brought against him, and a conviction. Family members insisted that McBride was a victim in need of help after she crashed into a parked car. Residents who came to inspect the car crash witnessed McBride walk into the night. Three hours later, McBride knocked on a door for help and was shot. After a week of protests, the shooter was named as Theodore Wafer. Wafer, a 54-year-old white man from Dearborn Heights, Michigan, was charged with manslaughter and second-degree murder. In his trial, Wafer claimed that McBride presented herself as a terror and that his only recourse was to shoot at the “person or persons trying to enter his home” (Brand-Williams, 2013b). Wafer was convicted of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. He is serving a 17-year prison sentence in a Michigan state prison.
Following the deaths of Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin, when the Black Lives Matter movement was in its infancy, McBride's encounter was one of the first in recent memory to result in some form of juridical justice, as her murderer was charged and convicted of manslaughter. McBride launched a national conversation about the invisibility of antiblack violence against Black women, which was known but had rarely garnered the same media attention as their Black male counterparts (Cobb, 2013). McBride’s case highlighted that gender difference offered little variation in the outcome of antiblack violence and that Black men, women, and gender nonconforming individuals were all susceptible to harm. Yet, normative depictions of antiblack violence held that Black men were the visible recipients of antiblack violence, whereas violence against women and gender-nonconforming people was invisible. I argue that McBride’s justice was tied to news media and court proceedings attempts to make her invisible, which allowed family members to counter negative stereotypes that blamed McBride for her death. This article theorizes McBride’s experiences being made invisible through unknowability, a Black feminist epistemic analytic, which limited her murderer’s claims of innocence and allowed McBride’s family to advocate on her behalf.
Unknowability – a type of disappearance that creates an ongoing questioning about the circumstances of those who go missing – posits that Black women are systematically rendered invisible in society which creates an epistemic gap that cannot be filled. Kristi Dotson (2011) (see also Dotson and Whyte, 2013) formalizes unknowability as a praxis based in an inability to delink Black women from antiblack violence. It emerges from a failure within scholarship to write about Black women without foregrounding antiblack violence as the mediator of their experiences (Hartman, 2008; Sharpe, 2016; Weheliye, 2014). As a result, scholars turn to unknowability to conceptualize Black women’s relationship to antiblack violence attempting to understand and exceed the repetition of violence in scholarship through what is unknown about Black women. Dotson states that, “the nature of unknowability [is] the scaffolding of disappearing so that the very disappearing is itself disappeared and protected from detection, that may make invisibility frames such a lasting inquiry” (2017: 426). Therefore, on one hand, unknowability highlights the ways Black women are marginalized and made invisible within spaces. On the other hand, unknowability is a form of epistemic failure where scholars, limited in recovering Black women whole from spaces of invisibility, pursue a different set of questions and considerations based out of what they cannot know. Unknowability holds that Black women’s relationships are “structurally detectible, but untenable,” which leads to Black Feminists and Geographers using the unknown to understand Black women relationships to power and geographies (Dotson, 2017: 421).
Black Feminists and Black Geographic scholarship have sought to make visible Black women’s contributions to geographies by investigating their meaning making and place making practices from within spaces of domination. Central to this work has been articulating Black women’s situated knowledge from the experiences of Black women’s invisibility within slavery, plantations, post-emancipation, and households. Scholars have theorized that Black women’s contributions to spaces are central to the production of geographies, even if they are missing from archives, ethnographies, or other accounts of what took place (Hartman, 1997; Hill Collins, 2009; McKittrick, 2006; Spillers, 1980). Unknowability pushes Black feminist and geographic inquiry further by establishing that the material fact of invisibility creates epistemic “dead ends” where there are things that will never be known about Black women due to the overproduction of antiblackness within scholarship. Through Dotson (2017), we understand that “unknowability is not the same as not knowing” (426). Unknowability can be thought of as a framework from which scholarly inquiry begins.
McBride’s experiences as they are depicted in court proceedings and media portrayals demonstrate the ways that unknowability functions to displace her from her encounter to create a space where the unknown proliferates. I argue that not knowing allowed McBride’s family members to continually question the circumstances of the events that night during a two-week period between McBride’s death and the naming of her murder where family members and advocates held a vigil at the Dearborn Heights City Hall and Police Station demanding that charges be brought forth. The uncertainty that unknowability produces is materially found within McBride’s relationship to the space and time of the encounter with Wafer, which creates a “epistemic dilemma” that family and community members use on behalf of McBride’s justice, limiting the ability of McBride’s murderer to claim innocence. Therefore, McBride’s encounter offers an example of the ways unknowability functions as a tool to understand her marginalization, while also allowing people to challenge negative portrayals of McBride’s character from the space of not knowing what happened.
By examining the McBride/Wafer encounter and the ways that her unknowability was constructed in news media and her murderer’s trial, we can better understand how Black women are forcefully removed from spaces and how these spaces are epistemic “dead ends” that open more questions beyond the fact of violence. To do this, I first establish the connections between antiblackness, gender, and unknowability to situate Black feminist interventions within Geography. Second, I articulate the ways that unknowability emerges from within McBride’s experiences through a discourse analysis of news media and McBride’s murderer’s court proceedings that seek to portray McBride’s intent prior to, during, and after her encounter. Here, I use narrative depictions of McBride’s intent as a site of analysis to work through the ways that unknowability is produced through antiblack retellings of McBride’s encounter. In addition, I show how unknowability prompts family members to continuously question McBride’s encounter with Wafer. Third, I contextualize Black women's geographies within the sub-discipline of missing geographies to illustrate how the Black women’s invisibility is a source to interrogate new spatial relationships. Finally, I end with a consideration of the role of unknowability for Black women geographies through an embrace of the call for “an other” Geography (Oswin, 2020).
Unknowability as a spatial analytic
Unknowability illustrates the ways in which Black women are disappeared from geographies. While the material fact of disappearance has been long documented by Black Feminist and Geographers, unknowability highlights the ways knowledge production is imbricated in antiblack violence and how not knowing creates a deeper engagement with said violence. Unknowability allows us to understand the ways McBride’s experiences around invisibility were premised on the ways knowledge about her encounter was mobilized against her. Additionally, it was through not knowing the full details of McBride’s encounter that allowed McBride’s family to advocate on her behalf. Through Dotson’s (2017) use of unknowability, I find three ways that unknowability can be expanded as a spatial epistemic analytic.
First, Dotson (2017) elaborates that unknowability is not as simple as something being made invisible or not known, but that it is “a condition of both being targeted and disappeared” (422). Unknowability targets Black women through the creation of “negative socio-epistemic spaces” where certain epistemic practices are promoted that diminish any understanding of Black women’s relationship to space that is not in favor of their subjugation. Black geographers have understood the implications of negative socio-epistemic space as promoting bio-geographic determinations where Black people’s articulations and positions within geographies “disappear to the margins or to the realm of the unknowable” (McKittrick and Woods, 2007: 7). Space is imbricated in negative socio-epistemic space in that the tools to understand spatial production view Black communities, in particular Black women, as static and fixed, occupying only the margins of spaces. As a result, Black Geographers have sought to articulate alternative epistemic practices that evade or do not rely on dominant epistemic frameworks. Exemplifying this intervention has been scholarship that envisions the environment to be a co-conspirator in marooned Black communities attempts at freedom (Winston, 2021; Wright, 2020). In recognition of negative socio-epistemic space, unknowability points to the ways that traditional geographic thought are imbricated in epistemic practices that fundamentally cannot understand Black women’s contributions to geographies.
Second, unknowability establishes that Black women’s relationships to spaces are irrelevant. Dotson’s (2017) theory of unknowability suggests that the inability to know or understand Black women’s spatial relationships is a problem of “epistemic confidence,” where Black women are not “believed in” and their positionalities “are difficult to foreground” (424). The material mapping of Black women to the back porches, backrooms, or kitchens has made it difficult understanding their relationships outside of these spatial frameworks. Black feminists have worked to dismantle the gendered antiblack stereotypes and logics that Black women carry in unknown spaces where sexual, economic, and emotional labor proliferate. Yet, Black women are not trusted as arbiters of their own experiences. Patricia Hill Collins (2009), in understanding how doubt is materially built into Black women’s experiences, states that “restricting Black women’s literacy, then claiming that we (Black women) lack the facts for sound judgement, relegates African American to the inferior side the fact/opinion binary” (79). Thus, the grounds for critical engagement are not available to Black women given their inferior status. As a result, Black feminists have worked to create new epistemic fields of engagement that do not rely on traditional frames that can capture Black women’s contributions. Hartman (2008) states that the intent […] is not to give voice to the slave (Black women), but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death – social and corporeal death – and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance. (12)
Third, unknowability illuminates the ways that Black women are systematically made invisible to support dominant subject formations. Dotson (2011) refers to this as “epistemic backgrounding,” where Black women are “regulated as a means for framing some other domain without ever becoming the point of inquiry” (424). Central to this formulation are Black women’s use as “vestibules” to inform subject and identity formation for other groups within spaces (Spillers, 1980). For example, Black women are known to the world through grammars or stereotypes that bind them to normative relationships. Stereotypes, such as Mammie and Sapphire to Welfare Queen and Matriarch, carry not only a discursive grammar but also a geographic understanding that essentializes Black women to the back of spaces and make them invisible in service of others (Collins, 2009). Black geographers, in particular the work of McKittrick (2011), have sought to understand the contours of Black women’s subjugation as it serves dominant spatial orders. For example, within the logic of the afterlife of slavery, the plantation as a spatial order extends beyond the space and time of the antebellum period impacting Black women. Similarly, the same processes that rendered Black women to the back of houses on plantations can be found within our current moment, as Black women are made invisible within the margins of spaces to support whiteness, heteropatriarchy, and other dominant spatial practices.
Unknowability posits that what is not known are unique sites of knowledge production that begin from the failure of trying to recover what has been lost. McKittrick and Woods (2007) take Black geographies as an intervention that illuminates that Black people’s spatial concerns are essentialized outside of normative space. The outside of normative space is where knowledge produced about Black people must begin. However, the outside of normative space is largely imperceptible given that the methods used to understand space are unable to depict Black life outside of narrow antiblack frameworks. This tension between understanding Black worlds outside of violence and the lack of tools to do so prompts Woods (2002) to question whether scholars are even capable of understanding Black life. Woods states that “the same tools that symbolize hope in the hands of the surgeon symbolize necrophilia in the hands of the coroner” (63). What emerges through Woods is a consideration of whether the same methods used to understand Black subjection can be used to understand Black people beyond domination. I argue that unknowability allows scholars to consider Black subjugation in ways that domination is not the sole focus. Therefore, unknowability allows Black geographies to function as an intervention that calls into question the very basis of academic inquiry, which is, can Black lives be fully understood? Are Black lives knowable? Centering what we do not know is fundamental to unknowability being a productive site of inquiry. As such, how does what we do not know and cannot know about Black women create another set of questions and scholarly engagements?
To materialize unknowability as an alternative framework based on not knowing, Black feminists use the dyadic framework of invisibility and visibility (Crenshaw, 1991; Dotson, 2017; Hartman, 2018; McKittrick, 2014; Spillers, 19870). This framework underscores that scholarship must reckon with the conditions presented when Black women are brought from invisibility to visibility. The task, which is at the heart of this article, is to honor the victims of antiblack violence while also limiting the ways epistemic violence is examined and proliferated throughout scholarship. Unknowability considers what is not known and cannot be known as a way of protecting the objectification of Black women in a way where the artifact of a person is preserved with minimal alteration. Therefore, the referent being used in scholarship is the experience of a person undergoing violence and not the person themselves. This allows for an abstraction to take place between antiblack violence and the person, which limits the “pornotroping” of Black women (Spillers, 1980; Weheliye, 2014). Weheliye (2008) building from Spillers (1980) describes pornotroping as “the process through which slaves are transformed into flesh” (71). Rather than seeking to recover or redeem the lives of the enslaved who have been reduced to bare life, Hartman (2008) suggests to labor instead “to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible” (11). While Hartman engages alternative narrative construction as the means of understanding a fuller picture of enslaved people’s lives, what develops are new forms of academic inquiry that seek an outside to disciplinary constrictions, which demand a certain way of knowing about the object at hand. Black Geographers have undergone a similar break with disciplinarity by considering different conceptions of the environment, alternative sexual intimacies, and alternative modes of spatial engagement rather than a sole engagement on Black people. McKittrick’s (2021) “Dear Science” culminates this body of work by centering Black life as an onto-epistemic category in and of itself that evades epistemic antiblack violence within dominant scholarship. I argue that unknowability, as a reflection of not knowing, creates a space of constraint inquiry which leads to alternative ways of envisioning scholarship.
I use the heartbreaking story of McBride to demonstrate how she was made invisible and marginalized within news media and her murderer’s court proceeding. To do this, I perform a content analysis of print news media and court transcriptions, which I read thematically to establish the ways unknowability is produced through spatial narratives that makes McBride into an antagonist the night of her encounter.
McBride’s encounter: Social spatial construction of unknowability
Renisha McBride’s claims to victimhood and juridical justice depend on whether she was perceived as a threat the night of the encounter. Without witnesses, unknowability becomes the framework through which to inquire about the events that transpired that night. For news media and defense attorneys, unknowability displaces McBride’s victimhood in favor of narratives that blame her for the encounter. For activists and family members fighting on behalf of McBride, unknowability allows advocates to question the events that night and challenge improper place-based narratives in media and court proceedings. The following sections show the ways that unknowability is developed and sustained through Renisha McBride’s encounter. This section focuses on the ways narrative is used to displace McBride’s experiences to the margins of spaces.
Unknowability: Out of place
Unknowability as a spatial analytic uses the narrative framework of “out of place” as a tool to erase and make invisible McBride’s relationship to place. For McBride, news media coverage of her encounter focused on her physical body being out of place in the first ring suburb of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, which contributed to McBride occupying a “negative socio epistemic” space in relation to the events that night. On 4 November 2013, two days after McBride’s death, the local Detroit Fox News affiliate WJBK ran the first story about McBride’s encounter entitled: “Teenager’s body found dumped in Dearborn Heights” (Wimbley, 2013). Randy Wimbley, an investigative reporter, described McBride as a victim of a violent crime who was left in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. Wimbley cited a lack of evidence as to why McBride was there and noted that “Renisha was driving a white Ford Taurus when she left home Friday. No one knows where she was going” (emphasis mine). The title of the report and Wimbley’s statements questioning why McBride was in Dearborn heights establish McBride as out of place at the time of death. Out of place is central to normalizing gendered antiblack violence as this gives causation to the routine violence against Black gender and sexual minorities within Detroit, Michigan. With several high-profile deaths among Black women and transwomen, being out of place is a narrative device used to justify their deaths given that what we can know about the circumstances of the events is limited. The narrative of being out of place frames that the person in question was doing something in a place that they should not have been. Hence, no evidence is needed. McBride is removed from any prior relationship to the area.
The initial news report of a Black woman out of place was updated the following day to introduce negligence as a key aspect of the encounter. A WJBK story the following night entitled “Police: Death of woman, 19, in Dearborn Heights possible self-defense gone wrong” (Staff, 2013) provided a general narrative of the encounter that begins with the scenario that McBride knocked on the door of her murderer, which started the sequence of events that led to her death. An interview with a neighbor was used as evidence to support the idea that McBride was out of place. The neighbor described an exchange that took place between them and local police after the encounter, where the neighbor, after talking to police, stated that “[McBride] tried to get into his house or seems like force … and he [McBride’s murderer] got scared and shot the person” (Staff, 2013). The use of the neighbor’s account of the events that night frames McBride as an antagonist, which further distances McBride from any prior reason to be at the place of her encounter.
Being out of place during her encounter allows McBride’s relationship to Black womanhood to be used against her. The news story above identified McBride as a woman, instead of as a teenager, who was in a place that she should not be. The change in McBride’s age descriptors highlights the ways that the reporters constructed a narrative about a negligent adult woman out of place. Jayna Brown (2008) noted that to be viewed as a teenager or child was to hold “the embodiment of innocence and purity …” (45) Viewing McBride as a woman, rather than a teenager, allowed for the corporeal and relational aspects of antiblack violence to displace her from being a teenager and the protections that (white) womanhood affords as it is tied to place. Therefore, McBride, as a Black woman, was out of place due to her knocking on a door that she had no connection to.
Unknowability: McBride’s voice
Given a lack of eyewitnesses, unknowability is productive in creating a narrative where McBride’s statements about wanting to go home are made a non-factor due to her intoxication and car crash earlier that morning. Her case is similar to other antiblack encounters involving a lack of eyewitnesses. For example, Michael Brown’s justice, in the form of charges being brought against his killer, hinged on whether Brown was perceived to be a threat. Without witnesses to verify the officer’s claims, Brown’s justice depended on whether he was surrendering with his hands up or if he was attacking the officer. Although autopsy reports showed trauma to his hands, this evidence was downplayed as Brown lost credibility due to his involvement in an alleged attempted robbery prior to the encounter. The alleged robbery caused Brown to lose epistemic confidence, which mutes any discussion of whether Brown was surrendering to the officer.
For McBride, epistemic confidence is lost due to her being intoxicated at the time of her accident and walking away from the scene of the car crash. A news report provided detail about McBride’s presence at the scene of a car cash before she walked into the night. McBride’s presence was verified prior to encounter from residents that came to her aid. Carmen Beasley, a resident who was at the scene of the car crash, pleaded with McBride to stay at the scene. Beasley recalled speaking to McBride stating, “I told her she was injured, and she kept saying, ‘I have to go home. I just need to go home’” (Brand-Williams, 2013d). McBride’s willingness to leave the scene of the car crash creates a narrative that centers her negligence, which is verified through eyewitness accounts. Additionally, eyewitness testimony and a toxicology report were central to a 15 November article from the Detroit News entitled, “McBride drunk; ruling on charges expected” (Brand-Williams, 2013c). The article established a cause for the encounter that night. After establishing that McBride was involved in a car crash, the toxicology results showed elevated blood-alcohol levels. McBride was seen as disoriented without the ability to adequately respond to her predicament. McBride, according to her detractors, is to blame for the events that took place. The narrative of McBride as negligent prior to her encounter is furthered through news media focus on her intoxication, which was linked to the visible car crash site. Therefore, McBride’s need for help was obscured in favor of narratives that focus on her visible physical impairment. This allowed for her detractors to question whether she presented herself as a threat based on her blood alcohol levels.
News media and court proceedings overlooked the fact that McBride was heard the night of the encounter saying that she wanted to go home. Residents responded and engaged McBride before she walked away into the night. However, McBride’s encounter along with the car crash and intoxication overshadowed any understanding of McBride’s voice that night, which created doubt in McBride’s ability to be seen as a victim. Without witnesses to verify where McBride was during the time leading up to the encounter with her murderer, news media is left to speculate if her intoxication or car crash were key factors in the encounter, which downplayed her own voice as she was seeking help. This lessens the severity of her murderer’s actions and mutes McBride’s ability to speak for herself.
Unknowability: Limited time to react
Central to unknowability are the ways that the time of engagement during the encounter are used to promote McBride’s murderer’s innocence. His claims of innocence were premised on the limited amount of time he had to react, which is an attempt to limit what can be known about the encounter. As Mahadeo (2019) points out, time is central to antiblackness and “illustrate[s] how the relationship between whiteness and time is subtractive for racialized people but additive and profile for whites (187).” Therefore, the timeframe of encounter is central to reproducing racial hierarchies. Similar to Harvey’s (1990) scholarship on capital accumulation in geographic location, the annihilation of the time during antiblack encounters is crucial.
Returning to Michael Brown’s encounter, a limited amount of time was used to subscribe fault to Michael Brown and exonerate his killer Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. News media pin the duration of the encounter at 90 seconds. The 90 seconds was used to justify the actions of Darren Wilson and establish a field of engagement where Wilson needed to react quickly, especially with the narrative that Brown was involved in a robbery at a corner store 10 minutes earlier. Darren Wilson’s use of antiblack violence was justified through shrinking the duration of encounter. Monice Davey (2014), writing for the New York Times, used unknowability to frame limitations in understanding Brown’s actions during the 90 seconds of engagement through a series of questions: Were Mr. Brown’s hands raised in the air in a motion of surrender when he was shot, as some witnesses have said? Was officer Wilson physically harmed in a struggle with Mr. Brown, as he has told the authorities? Did Officer Wilson view Mr. Brown as a suspect in a theft that had just occurred at a store?
The trial of Theodore Wafer hinged on whether McBride presented herself as a threat at his door. Theodore Wafer’s defense argued that McBride was intoxicated and crashed into a parked car which created a continual process of negligence, one that she carried when she knocked on his door that night. Wafer’s defense used McBride car accident and her decision to leave the scene into the unknown three hours of time prior to the encounter to claim that McBride was an unknown terror knocking at his door. To quote his defense: “I think anyone of us would feel terror. In terror he did not know it was a 19-year-old who got in a car crash at 1:00am. He didn’t know that. What he knew is somebody’s trying to get in” (People of the State of Michigan v. Theodore Paul Wafer, 2017: 80). The narrative of Wafer being afraid was premised on the unknown intentions of McBride when she knocked on his door. This narrative was built through news media reports and Wafer’s own testimony stating that out of fear he killed someone in self-defense, and he was “horrified that he just killed someone” (135). Therefore, the unknown time between car accident and encounter was used to make McBride into a terror that forced Wafer to act in self dense with little time to react.
The prosecution countered this argument with McBride’s own victimization narrative based on not knowing what happened prior to their encounter. Not knowing allowed the prosecution to state that regardless of impairment, McBride needed help at the time of the encounter and that “she may have been boisterous, may have been loud (and) noisy, but there was no evidence that she attempted to break into Wafer’s house” (People of the State of Michigan v. Theodore Paul Wafer, 2017: 116). Here, the prosecution countered the defense’s position that McBride was a threat. Wafer’s defense was unable to establish that Wafer should be afforded protections within Michigan’s “Stand Your Ground Law”. Therefore, “Mr. Wafer was left without the statutory protection that the legislature intended to give a homeowner under attack against the prosecutor’s arguments that Ms. McBride, being young, shorter, female and possibly having a closed head injury, unbeknownst to the defendant, could not be deemed a sufficient threat to him to justify the use of force” (36). Wafer was unable to use the defense strategy that he has a limited time to react to a treat in his defense claims. The defense’s attempts to narrow the time of the engagement between McBride and Wafer were not effective given that McBride’s actions prior to the encounter – car accident and walking into the night – were the reason she knocked on his door in the first place. Thus, the prosecution effectively showed that McBride was not a threat, given that her desire to go home prior to the encounter outweighed the limited time frame of engagement.
What emerges from McBride’s experiences is that unknowability is both a framework to marginalize Black women but also a tool to call into question what is not known. This article argues that what allowed McBride to receive some form of juridical justice was that the time and space of the encounter could never be resolved, within media and court proceedings. Therefore, McBride’s unknown experience of time between car crash and encounter created an everlasting site of inquiry about the encounter, which news media highlighted in the following statement, “what happened to McBride during the ensuing hours between the crash and the shooter is unclear” (Brand-Williams, 2013c). The admission that McBride’s experiences leading up to her encounter with Wafer were unclear created an epistemic gap that allowed people to fight for charges and a conviction to be brought against Wafer.
Unknowability and missing: Addressing epistemic dead-ends
Harriet Jacobs, writing under the pseudonym Linda Brent (Jacobs and Child, 2014) in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, detailed her seven-year confinement in an attic crawl space prior to escaping for freedom. Her self-imposed quarantine was in response to the ongoing physical, emotional, and sexual violence she endured on the plantation. Jacobs went into the “last place” her master and others thought of to create the fiction that she had escaped to the North (McKittrick, 2006). The long duration of Jacobs’ confinement was, in part, due to her wanting to make sure her children were safe and to tend to relationships she had with people on the plantation. Scholars have theorized how Jacobs – from the “loophole of retreat” of the attic crawl space – was in a unique position to witness the ongoing production of the plantation (McKittrick, 2006), take part in a limited form of agency (Hartman, 1997), and develop a common sense that allowed her to reflect on her confinement in her autobiography years later (Drake, 1997). I turn to Jacobs to understand the ways her own manifestation of unknowability – through her loophole of retreat – created an epistemic site of failure that evaded the all-knowing surveillance of the plantation, which allowed for others to take part in her eventual freedom.
Jacobs’ confinement was an epistemic site of unknowing that was built from within the plantation space of domination. The space, which was nothing more than an attic crawl space, allowed Jacobs to be absent from the conditions of her enslavement. Overtime, as her relationship to the plantation was interrupted by her absence, her unknown whereabouts allowed both her family members and enslaver to continuously speculate on her disappearance using the unknown to create fictions. In a chapter titled “The Loophole of Retreat,” Jacobs wrote about her master’s endeavors to find her, which includes multiple trips to New York City to search for her. Her master’s repetitive searching was corroborated by her family members, in particular her children, who not only believed her to be absent but also speculated on her everlasting wanderings that left everyone inquiring about her whereabouts. When asked by Dr. Flint, her owner, about her whereabouts, Jacobs’ son stated,
Dr. Flint, I don't know where my mother is. I guess she's in New York; and when you go there again, I wish you'd ask her to come home, for I want to see her; but if you put her in jail, or tell her you'll cut her head off, I'll tell her to go right back. (Jacobs and Child, 2014)
Jacobs’ actions allowed family members to unknowingly contribute to her absence on the plantation. She impacted the plantation space without being present. Therefore, if to be known within the plantation was to be tied to visible space under the watchful eye of masters, laborers, and family members, then being missing from those spaces, as a function of unknowability, altered the routine surveillance of the plantation.
The distinction between being forcefully made invisible and Jacobs’ own self confinement is important. However, what links McBride’s and Jacobs’ stories are their relationships to people that use unknowability as a frame to advocate for McBride’s justice or corroborate in Jacobs’ absence. What gives unknowability meaning are the relationships that seek to address the absence of those who are missing. For both McBride and Jacobs, not knowing created a lasting inquiry where people could advocate on their behalf, regardless of whether they were present. As such, unknowability is an “indelible relational[ity]” that allows for continuous inquiry based on relationships developed prior to someone being absent (Parr and Fyfe, 2013). This article argues that unknowability, as an epistemic practice of not knowing, creates an everlasting relationality that becomes the substance for sustained relationships with people that are absent or rendered invisible. Relationships sustained through unknowability can be thought of as a missing geography.
Missing geographies highlight the ways in which space is created through the absent/present relations people have with one another. Missing finds meaning as people respond to absence through searching, reporting, or reconstructing the lives of those who are not present in their lives. Hester Parr and Nicholas Fyfe (2013) illuminate that “missing might thus be best deemed ‘a situation’ rather than a state-of-being or an act or a person […], a contextual label for what happens during/for and in unexpected human absence” (618). Missing is a non-normative relationship to the unknown where the continual search to find that which is absent becomes the relationship itself. Unknowability, as an epistemic site, gives structure to missing geographies in that it is the continuous inquiry from the site of not knowing that propels different ways of knowing and relationships to those who are missing. The unknown circumstances of McBride’s encounter create a site for family members to argue against mainstream narratives that blame McBride for her encounter.
Unknowability enables McBride’s family to advocate on her behalf by challenging negative narratives based on their relationships to her. Melissa Wright, in her (2011) article on femicide and missing women in Mexico, highlights a coalition of parents and supporters that challenge “the discourse of the public woman and the violent gendering of space that justified the murders as evidence of a normal life, by personalizing the victims and introducing them to the public as daughters” (715). The strategy involves parents and supporters narrating their personal relationships to missing loved ones which disrupts the normalization of femicide. Therefore, by bringing those absent into the present, the unknown whereabouts of their daughters allowed them to counter the normalization of women missing in Mexico and challenge gender-based violence. McBride’s family’s fight to name Wafer and bring charges against him were premised on their own relationship to McBride, where they could not imagine her to be antagonist to the events of the encounter. This allowed family members to “jeopardize the status of” her encounter to “displace the received or authorized account” (Hartman, 2008: 11). Missing, as addressing what was not known, allowed family members to speak against the official account of the events that blamed McBride for her own murder.
Buried within media coverage which sought to force McBride’s invisibility, there were moments where family members questioned antiblack violence through their relationship to McBride. Similar to Jacobs, McBride’s unknowability allowed for family members to collectively work together to continuously question the events that took place the night of her encounter, which challenged negative depictions of McBride by centering their own relationships with her. Behind simple yet powerful statements, McBride's aunt and mother stated, “Renisha wasn’t a drug dealer” or “a violent person. She wouldn’t harm a fly” (Detroit News, 2014). McBride’s family insisted that she was “in need” prior to encounter. Family members’ insistence of McBride’s victimhood countered antiblack narratives used to naturalize violence. As such, McBride’s encounter was outside of what family members expected McBride’s relationship to them to be. Unknowability allowed for family members to consider McBride as missing, existing outside of her expected geographies, but still in relationship to the people that loved her.
In this analysis, unknowability allowed McBride’s family to continually question the circumstances surrounding her encounter. If narrative and violence bind Black women to antiblackness and render them invisible, unknowability confounds such processes by allowing epistemic gaps around not knowing to emerge. These epistemic gaps are spaces from where people can build and sustain relationships when a person is absent. McBride’s family are able to sustain their relationship to her by advocating for her justice, although she is gone. This allows her family to challenge news media and court proceedings narratives that diminish McBride’s claims of victimhood. Not knowing about the space and time leading up to the McBride’s encounter allowed family members to fill these gaps with their relationships to her. For Black feminist and geographers, missing allows scholars to have a relationship based in the continual inquiry that unknowability frameworks present.
In search of our mother’s garden
We have always known. We have known and have known better and have done worse. We have known the choking pain of silence. We have known denial and fear and we have not believed in each other. We have known and we have laughed to distract our knowing. Drank to dampen our knowing. Eaten to muffle our knowing. Starved to shake off our knowing. Worked to unlearn what we know. But we have always known. – Alexis Pauline Gumbs, We Have Always Known: Embodying Community Accountability (Gumbs, 2012)
The present article takes unknowability as an epistemic practice that illuminates the ways in which systems of oppression relegate Black women to the margins of spaces, while also providing a lens through which to question the basis of how we come to understand Black women in epistemic practices. Black feminists have understood systems of oppression and the ways Black women navigate those systems through the paradigm of invisibility and visibility. From spaces of invisibility, Black women are central to geographic processes as their relationships to space are necessary for spatial production. Additionally, Black women being rendered invisible questions the basis of academic inquiry, opening new questions around how scholarship comes to know Black women as they seek to move them into visibility frameworks. Unknowability allows for a deeper reflection of the ways unknown spaces are central to what we can and cannot know about Black women. This article focuses on unknowability and considers how not knowing allows people to work through epistemic dead ends by questioning the grounds by which we come to understand Black women’s marginalization.
Alice Walker (2004) works with unknowability as she considers the ways Black women under slavery nurtured creative practices. Walker frames her approach through the metaphor of gardens, which she theorizes as a visible space that conceals unknown practices of Black women’s worldmaking. Walker’s approach reframes the question of how Black women evade harm, thinking through Black women’s relationship to creative practices under systems of oppression. Rather than looking to Black women’s resistance to oppression, she looks for what is unknown about Black women in the spaces where they made meaningful impacts on the world. This can be the plot garden, poetry, dance, singing, or other creative practices. Not knowing how these practices coexisted alongside the brutality of slavery allows Walker to consider the foundations of how we approach understanding Black women. Through Walker, this article asks: how does what we do not know about Black women impact how we come to understand them? This question is central to the “an other” geography intervention within the discipline, where scholars reflect on their own complicity around reproducing violence through scholarship on marginalized communities and how we need ways of working with and understanding violence without contributing to the same violence ourselves (Derickson, 2017; Eaves, 2020; Oswin, 2020; Woods, 2002).
My contribution to “an other” geography is unknowability, which seeks to understand how Black women are made invisible but stops short at claiming that we know everything about Black women. Attempts to clearly define Black women in relation to their oppression does more harm than good in explaining what we know about gender and race. Therefore, unknowability can be used as a spatial analytic to understand Black women’s relationship to geography and establish research agendas that generate new tools to understand Black women’s positions. Crucial is understanding that there is a need for new methodologies, theories, and epistemic tools that start from the limits of what we do not know about Black women. I argue that working from what we do not know about Black women is crucial.
Understanding Black women’s geographies requires attending to what we do not know about them, which can be found in conventional approaches to academic scholarship. This means understanding that Black women are the targets of oppression and that there needs to be a different understanding of scholarship in order to listen to Black women as creators of their own worlds. To this, Hartman (2018) uses the term unruly as an unknowable analytic to understand the unknown potential of Black women. Unruly speaks to Black women’s “intimate association[s] and unregulated assembly [which] threatened the public good by transgressing the color line and eschewing the dominant mores” (475). Hartman’s use of unruly extends beyond scholarship and demands that researchers ask themselves if they have the tools to not only examine unruliness within Black women but if they are willing to be unruly themselves.
It is from the space of not knowing about McBride encounter that I argue family members are able to continually advocate on her behalf. Although defense attorneys and news media questioned McBride’s physical state at the time of her encounter using unknowability as a frame, she was seeking help at the time of her death. Yet, through the questioning that unknowability affords, McBride seeking help was diminished in favor of the innocence that her murder believed he carried. While it is important to call attention to the ways McBride experience were made to benefit her murderer, solely focusing on this loses sight of the fact people advocated on her behalf regardless of the defamation to her character. I want to highlight the persistence of the people who fought for her through the relationships they had to her even when she was gone. With little knowledge of what took place during her encounter, this allows her relationships to loved ones to advance her claims of victimhood, which were literally mapped into existence (McKittrick and Woods, 2007). Therefore, any attempt to understand Black women’s geographies must contend with what is not perceptible and instead carry the faith that Black women are more than the violence they endure, which comes only from the “indelible relationships” one has with them.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
