By Danielle Elizabeth Stevens

Dear Black women, femmes, and girls,

Who are neglected and erased within public discourse on police violence and state brutality;

Who are told our stories do not belong in dominant narratives of anti-Black violence because they are deemed “derailing”;

Who are granted a single moment to speak and then expected to disappear, our acknowledgment rationed and revoked;

Whose organizations are systematically under-resourced beside Black liberation spaces led by men, feminist spaces led by white women, and LGBTQ institutions led by white cisgender men;

Who are told—explicitly and implicitly—that our deaths are not worthy of public grief.

Whose suffering through sexualized state violence is deferred, postponed, and minimized while our communities mobilize around the spectacular deaths of Black men;

Whose braids, locs, twists, afros are cut, policed, barred from classrooms and workplaces for being too abundant, too visible, too alive;

Whose labor is extracted in organizing spaces that address violence against men of color while our own wounds remain unattended;

Whose perspectives are trivialized and delegitimized while white women and masculine voices of color are elevated as universal truth;

Whose brilliance in classrooms is met with silence or scrutiny, even as we are conscripted into the role of caricature, spectacle, or punchline;

Who are denied compassion because our power unsettles, because our excellence is misread as threat;

Who are separated, seized, and disciplined by a capitalist police state and reproductive injustice system that works tirelessly to sever us from love, safety, and continuity;

Who do not receive national vigils, presidential statements, or policy interventions in response to our deaths;

Whose names rarely circulate through mainstream media, whose stories are rendered invisible by design;

Who are taught—again and again—that the worth of our lives comes after white men, after white women, after non-Black people of color, after Black men;

Whose deaths are treated as ordinary, whose disappearance is framed as inevitable.

I breathe and sing your fullness into the world.

I hold every contour of your spirit with care, with reverence, with uncompromising love.

Though so many of your lives have been taken too soon, ignored for far too long, your presence exceeds the physical. You live beyond the limits imposed on you. Your spirit remains infinite, generative, and uncontainable.

My life’s work is devoted—without exception—to the collective imagining of our freedom. Everything about our Blackness, our Black femmeness, our womanhood, our girlhood, our motherhood is worthy, radiant, and sacred. Your wisdom has always been my blueprint for liberation. I carry you in my bones. You lift me. You feed my spirit. You shape my dreams.

My life is dedicated to Black women, femmes, and girls.

Always.

Your heart is my heart.

Your skin, my skin.

Your life, my life.

Each day that I live, I fight for you.

I fight for Skye Mockabee, Korryn Gaines, Joyce Quaweay, Marlene Pinnock, Mia Henderson, Islan Nettles, Lamya Cammon, Vanessa VanDyke, Renisha McBride, Marissa Alexander, Rekia Boyd, Latasha Harlins, Yaz’min Shancez, Payden McConnell, Tiffany Edwards, Aiyanna Jones, Yvette Smith, Tarika Wilson, Tyisha Miller, my mother, my sisters, my grandmother, you—and so many more whose names history refuses to hold.

I see you.

I value you.

You are human.

You matter.

With love,

your sister, Danielle

Ashe

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Danielle Stevens is a California-born (and raised) educator, writer, dreamer, and community healer. She is the Co-Founder of This Bridge Called Our Health, a community forum for women & femmes of color of all genders to explore, develop, and imagine the infinite possibilities of healing from and imagining a world free of trauma. She currently resides just outside of DC, and is currently engaging in a much needed renewal from 10 years of activism & community organizing. She now spends her time falling in love with her true self, her life, and every single thing in it.