Waking up to a ghost

Looking at VillageVoice.com this morning, I stumbled upon this and felt an old hurt come back.

NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit

“My daughter is dead. I know she endured physical torture,” says Carmichael. “But the police—the police put us through mental torture. Dealing with the police was more of a nightmare than finding Romona’s body.” By then, she says, she had resigned herself to the fact that Romona was dead. But the police? “They were just nasty,” she says.

Romona Moore. It’s a name that you’ve probably never heard, or only heard in passing. Speaking for myself, I’m not sure whether I so much recognize the name so much from the memory as from a learned anger.

I won’t pretend that I knew Romona personally. All we had in common was matriculation at Hunter College. But I remember sharply what I felt when comrades of mine in Student Liberation Action Movement at Hunter reported at a meeting that Romona had disappeared — had disappeared for days — without action taken by any authority. It was not so much that we needed to be told there was something wrong; Hunter College and the Upper East Side was alight with flyers for another missing person case, police were everywhere looking for the woman. Who was white and affluent and not Romona Moore.

Later, when police finally found Romona’s dead body, word traveled more quickly than the initial disappearance. Romona had not just fallen off the face of the earth. Two men had kidnapped her, physically tortured her, and sexually assaulted her repeatedly. Finally they killed her.

We in SLAM! knew what to feel toward the men who did this — we didn’t need prompting for that outrage. We even knew what to feel toward the police — that this was a clear case of a “cheap” life versus that of Svetlana Aronov, the Upper East Side millionaire whose missing person poster was all over the area surrounding Hunter College.

What we never figured out was what we could do that wasn’t fraught with a sense of submission to some cold and indifferent system. I suspect we won’t find an answer until the lives of women and people of color — and tellingly, the women of color who, despite being at the intersection of oppressions, seem to really fall in the cracks between anti-white supremacy and anti-patriarchy organizing — are no longer so cheap.

Much easier said than done.