Black Boys in Public, Black Women at Home: Spectacle, Intimacy, and the Psychic Terrors of Anti-Black Gendered Violence
- Shapel LaBorde
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
America does not merely have a violence problem. It has a racialized and gendered problem of whose lives are allowed to remain vulnerable, and whose deaths require Black women to do the labor of remembrance.What joins Black femicide and the public killing of Black boys and men is not sameness, but a shared racial-gendered order of abandonment in which Black bodies are made vulnerable through bioepistemic epidermalization and exclusion from the Western bourgeois conception of Man.
I am a Black woman gripped and stretch by grief. I want to preface that I am not going to flatten two current social phenomenons into one thing and I am going to offer a critical lens, an entrypoint of possible collective meditation and critical analysis, that while these phenomenas may be different, they are interconnected. I attended the vigil for Jaden Pierre yesterday evening with my daughter.
I cannot stop thinking about a recent post naming Black women killed by intimate partners. The emotional and intellectual lift Black women have been doing to ensure that these women are holistically named, has been angering and something I am obssessed with. In America we have always had a Race problem and a Gender problem. Because even in death, Black women are too often denied fullness. Their lives get reduced to an incident. Just a misshappened and dehumanized body. A cautionary tale and a mere hashtag, tragic headline. And so Black women, again, are left doing the sacred and exhausting labor of insisting, yes she was here, she was whole, she was more than what was done to her.
2026 Reported Victims (Intimate Partner Violence/Femicide)
Dr. Cerina Wanzer (49, killed in Virginia by husband she was in a divorce)
Nancy Metayer Bowen (38, Coral Springs Vice Mayor, killed by husband)
Ashanti Allen (23, pregnant, killed by ex-boyfriend)
Ashlee Jenae / Ashly Robinson (31, killed while on vacation with fiancé)
Qualeshia “Saditty” Barnes (36)
Barbara Deer (51, killed by son)
Davonta Curtis (Black trans woman in Chicago, killed by partner)
Pastor Tammy McCollum
Raven Edwards (D.C. mother of 3, killed by ex-boyfriend)
Gladys Johnson (22)
Bianca Huntley (34)
Daneshia Heller (30, body found in Fort Lauderdale)
Gabryel Ayers (26)
Victoria Alexander (38)
Teonia Stokes (22)
Jasmine Sheeler (24, killed in Detroit gun violence)
Zoey Price (7-year-old, shot in Atlanta)
Riley DeArmas (13-year-old, stabbed in Houston)
India Thomas (Killed in Houston)
Black femicide makes painfully clear that these are not separate crises running on parallel tracks. They touch and they feed each other. They produce particular forms of vulnerability for Black women whose lives are too often shaped by the violence of racism, patriarchy, neglect, and disbelief all at once. And when I look at the recent killings of Black boys and men in and around Queens, I see another face of the same national disorder. Different expression. Same abandonment. Same failure of care. Same ease with which Black life is exposed to premature death.Because here, too, we have been saying names. Demitri McKay Jr.Richard Carter. Quacere “Chase” Hagans. Jaden Pierre. And a 13-year-old boy whose name has not traveled as widely as his wound.
On March 24, Demitri McKay Jr., 29, was killed by a stray bullet after gunfire broke out inside a bar in Kew Gardens. ABC7 reported that he was an innocent bystander and an MTA bus driver.
On April 10, Richard Carter, 49, was shot and killed after attending a funeral outside The Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral in Jamaica. CBS New York reported that police believed the shooting was targeted.
On April 15, Quacere “Chase” Hagans, 15, was killed in a shooting at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow; police and local reporting described a triple shooting at a gathering in the park, and Nassau police later asked for more information in the homicide investigation.
On April 16, Jaden Pierre, 15, was beaten and then shot to death at Roy Wilkins Park in St. Albans. NY1 reported that a vigil drew hundreds and that officials said a fight among youths escalated into the fatal shooting. People and other outlets reported that bystanders recorded the attack.
That same day, a 13-year-old boy was stabbed in the leg near Rufus King Park during a suspected dispute.
These are not identical incidents and they do not emerge from one neat cause. One was described as a stray-bullet killing. One appears to have been targeted. One remains under active investigation. Three involved young people gathering in a park. But I refuse the lie that they are wholly disconnected. What ties them together is not a single motive. What ties them together is repeated Black vulnerability across public space.
A bar.
A funeral.
A church.
A park.
A basketball court.
These are not incidental backdrops. These are ordinary sites of Black social life. These are places where we gather, mourn, celebrate, flirt, hoop, remember, and try to be with one another. This can not be disputed. So when violence keeps erupting there, the lesson is bigger than “crime.” The lesson is that Black social life itself is being rendered precarious.
That is what I mean when I say the geography matters. But that recent post about Black femicide is still in my spirit because it forces a second truth onto the page: the danger is not only public. It is intimate. It is an epidermilization. It is why God and my Ancestors led me to a class in this moment of time and space on Frantz Fanon. Epidermalization primarily refers to a post-colonial concept coined by Frantz Fanon, describing the process where racial inferiority is internalized and manifested physically on the skin. It is the social and historical mapping of meaning—such as inferiority or status—onto the skin, effectively making skin color dictate identity and social interaction. Socioculturally, it is a term popularized by Frantz Fanon describing the process of reducing an individual to their skin color, or the social/racial marking of the skin. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon described the "epidermalization of inferiority" as the way black bodies are subjected to an "epidermal racial schema," focusing on the visceral, embodied experience of racism rather than just discursively.
The Associated Press recently reported that more than four in ten Black women experience physical violence from an intimate partner during their lifetimes, citing CDC research. The same AP report, drawing on 2025 Violence Policy Center data, noted that Black women are twice as likely as white women to be murdered by men, and that more than nine in ten Black female victims knew their killers. CDC data deepen the picture. In its analysis of intimate partner homicides from 2018 to 2021, Black women made up about 13.4% of the population but 29.9% of intimate-partner homicide victims. Those killings most often occurred at the victim’s residence, involved a male suspect, and involved a firearm.
That is why I do not think it is enough to write separately about murdered Black boys in parks and murdered Black women in homes as if these are unrelated moral worlds. They are not the same violence, but they belong to the same condition. Black Gendered Violence is rampant and omnipresent.
Black boys and men are too often made vulnerable in public.
Black women are too often made vulnerable in intimate space.
One form of violence is frequently spectacular: witnessed, filmed, gossiped about, turned into neighborhood footage and public shock. The other is often privatized: minimized, hidden in the language of relationship trouble, domesticated until the woman is dead. But both expose the same rotten structure beneath them, a society that does not protect Black life with the seriousness it deserves. The park and the home are connected terrains.
Both reveal what happens when patriarchy, anti-Blackness, easy access to guns, untreated trauma, social abandonment, and the erosion of communal accountability are allowed to ripen together. Both reveal what happens when care arrives too late. Both reveal what happens when Black suffering becomes ordinary enough for the rest of the world to move on while we are still counting the dead.
And in the case of Jaden Pierre, we must also talk about spectacle.
There is something profoundly broken about a social order in which children and teenagers learn to film violence faster than they learn to interrupt it. I do not say that to flatten the danger or to pretend intervention is always simple. I say it because the camera has become one of the moral instruments of our time. It records, circulates, distances, and transforms terror into content. So now Black death is not only a loss. It is also a clip, a post, a replay, a rumor, a digital afterlife that can continue violating the dead and the grieving. Reporting on Jaden’s death made clear that bystanders recorded what happened, and that detail should shake every adult conscience in this city. What are we going to do about the children and the Black maternal crisis?
As a Black feminist, I do not want an analysis that reduces everything to individual behavior. That is too easy and very dishonest. A little too performative. And yet-
What I see instead is a public pedagogy of abandonment. A neighborhood teaches,it teaches through what it funds and what it neglects. A city teaches, it teaches through which deaths get context and which get stereotypes. A nation teaches through whose childhood is protected and whose childhood is treated as already contaminated by adult danger.
It teaches through the lie that revitalization can be measured by storefronts and cosmetic development while Black people remain unsafe in parks, at funerals, on blocks, and in homes.
So yes, I am thinking about Black femicide when I think about Queens. How death is suffocating this place I call home in mind, body and spirit.
Black women’s deaths and Black boys’ deaths are not interchangeable. Black feminist analysis requires precision. But precision is not separation. The same social order that leaves Black women vulnerable to intimate terror also leaves Black boys and men vulnerable to public interruption, disposability, and premature death. Abandonment does not change even if the geography shifts.
It does not change when a man is killed after attending a funeral.
It does not change when a 15-year-old goes to the park and does not come home.
It does not change when a woman is killed by a man who once claimed to love her.
It does not change when a child is stabbed in the same borough where people are already lighting candles for someone else’s son.
This is patterned. This is structural. This is gendered. This is racialized. This is intimate and public at once. Make no mistake this is not random.
And because I love Queens, I refuse to romanticize it.
Because I love Black people, I refuse euphemism.
I am a daughter and I have a daughter. I love a place that keeps asking its people to absorb the unbearable.Because I am raising a daughter here, teaching children here, and carrying ancestral memory here, I refuse the lazy fiction that these deaths are isolated tragedies with no social meaning. They are telling us something about the world we have made and the world we have tolerated. I move through these streets with memory, responsibility, and caution. I know these parks. I know the lay of the land. I know what it means when a neighborhood starts speaking through blood. I feel something is quite off. I feel strange. You see we are in a multi-dimensional war. A war on the psyche, a war that is indeed spirtual, a war which requires us to detach from the material relaties of the thrid world while fundamentally making us into a particular third world space, a war for reality and illusion, and a war for authenticity and a warwarwarwar...etc.
They are telling us that Black life is still not being held at all.
Not enough at home.Not enough in public.Not enough by institutions.Not enough by each other.And until we tell the truth about that, we will keep lighting candles in the same places where we should have been building protection all along.
Disclaimer / Author’s NotevThis essay is thinking and feeling in multiple directions at once. I know it is holding grief, theory, place, gender, race, spirit, memory, and the psychic weight of living Black in America all in the same breath. That is intentional. I am not trying to flatten distinct violences into one neat argument, nor am I pretending that every form of harm is identical. I am writing as a Black woman who is free-thinking and free-feeling, and who refuses the demand to separate intellect from emotion, or analysis from ache. What I am offering here is not a final word, but a lived meditatio, this is a way of tracing the patterns, proximities, and structures that make these violences feel tragically connected.
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