Policing Race, Policing Sex, Policing Gender -- talk by Andrea Ritchie

Drawing on over two decades of research, organizing, litigation and policy advocacy, Ritchie, co-author of Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, will place police abuse and killings of women and LGBTQ people like Sandra Bland, Dajerria Becton, Mya Hall, and Janisha Fonville in the larger context of historic and present-day trends of policing of gender and sexuality in service of race and poverty based policing. She will also explore how centering the experiences of women and LGBTQ people of color within larger movements for police accountability and against violence necessarily shifts organizing strategies, policy demands, and our overall vision of safety.

Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian police misconduct attorney and organizer who has engaged in extensive research, writing, and advocacy around criminalization of women and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people of color over the past two decades. In 2014 she was awarded a Senior Soros Justice Fellowship to engage in documentation and advocacy around profiling and policing of women of color – trans and not trans, queer and not queer.

Over the past 5 years Ritchie helped found and coordinate Streetwise & Safe (SAS), an organization focused on gender, race, sexuality and poverty-based policing of LGBT youth of color, and now serves as the organization’s Senior Policy Counsel. As such, she serves on the steering committee of Communities United for Police Reform (CPR), a citywide campaign to challenge discriminatory, unlawful and abusive policing practices in New York City.

Ritchie is co-author of Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women (African American Policy Forum July 2015); A Roadmap for Change: Federal Policy Recommendations for Addressing the Criminalization of LGBT People and People Living with HIV, (Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School 2014); and Stonewalled: Police Abuse and Misconduct Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People in the United States (Amnesty International 2005), and author of Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color, in The Color of Violence: The INCITE! anthology (2006, South End Press). 

Ritchie was lead counsel in Tikkun v. City of New York, groundbreaking impact litigation challenging unlawful searches of transgender people in police custody, contributing to sweeping changes to the NYPD’s policies for interactions with LGBTQ New Yorkers. She also served as co-counsel to the Center for Constitutional Rights in Doe v. Jindal, a successful challenge to Louisiana’s requirement that individuals convicted of “crime against nature by solicitation” register as sex offenders, and Doe v. Caldwell, the class action filed to remove all affected individuals from the registry, resulting in relief for over 800 class members. 

Arresting Violence | Reconceptualizing Justice

In this time of militarized policing, racially targeted state violence, and mass incarceration how do we envision queer and feminist justice?

This year’s Gender and Sexuality Seminar will pursue this question through a variety of lenses: scholarly, archival, legal, and activist. We will examine how race, gender, and sexuality intersect in the criminal legal system, and discuss how they shape the possibilities for—and the risks involved in—intervention and dissent.

Given social media’s vital role in enabling unprecedented forms of political organization, and news media’s often problematic role in perpetuating the biases at hand, we hope the seminar series will be a forum for thinking strategically about cultural engagement in the academy, the classroom, and on local and national levels.

A day-long Symposium on April 1, 2016 will bring all four seminar speakers back for a culminating panel and will feature a keynote speaker.

Sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard and the Committee on Degrees in Studies
of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.