In the past week or two there have been doctors saying how healthy Felon 47 is, along with Fund Managers openly wondering if he is insane. I have another hypothesis.
I don’t really think Felon 47 is insane, I think he is evil and crazy (there is a difference). I still remember when the late Dr. Frances Cress Welsing wrote that we have never scientifically studied “Evil.” She noted that at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazis where they were tried for “Crimes Against Humanity,” where they exterminated millions of Jews, Gypsies, Afro-Germans, LGBTQIA, and the Disabled, those Nazis were ruled to be perfectly sane by the world’s leading psychologists.
Now, I don’t want to make light of anyone’s mental health or this nation’s severe mental health crisis. Yet, every time some man does something horrible, particularly if he’s a white man, people speculate about his mental health instead of calling him the evil son-of-a-bitch that he is. I feel the same way about these school shooters who are overwhelmingly white and male who try to kill everybody they can, all because they can’t get a girlfriend.
Felon 47 is trying his best to get rid of every brown skinned person who migrated to the USA without giving any of them due process as he shreds all the basic tenets of our Constitution. He’s sending a majority of people who are not criminals off to other countries while his sycophants explain these actions as a part of keeping America safe. Short of putting them all into ovens to get rid of them the way Nazis would, he has ordered them all to an uncertain fate somewhere else in the world.
Everything Felon 47 is doing to immigrants and legal citizens, who happen to not be white, is going to make this nation a hundred times less safe. Go piss off the world and you will find out that the world is not majority white; it never has been.
People who voted for Felon 47 are also crazy and evil too—and dumb. Did this previous italicized sentence upset you a bit? Did it sound like I was unfairly vilifying an entire segment of the US population without giving them an opportunity to explain their choices or even redeem themselves? Well, I don’t give a damn because that is exactly what Felon 47 and his supporters are doing to immigrants, women, Black folks, Latinos, LGBTQIA, and the Disabled.
Felon 47 supporters voted for this; and even if some of them can prove they didn’t think Felon 47 would do all of this harm, no self-respecting Black or Brown person with half a brain is going to try to weed out who might be on their side from those who would kill or harm us. We have never had that kind of time to deal with anyone or anything that normalizes evil.
This essay is a revisit and an edit to a memory I wrote about 10 years ago, but a memory I hope might help someone else, particularly a Black or Brown woman.
Most of my encounters with police have been rare and routine. Most of the police officers I have dealt with have been courteous and helpful. I have made the occasional phone call about the neighbor whose dog has been running around the neighborhood terrorizing a few people. The police come out, speak with the offender, and the matter is resolved. Yet, I remember this incident…
A police officer discovered I had a “First Insurance Cancellation Suspension” on my driver’s license. For those of you born late in the 20th century, let me explain. An insurance cancellation suspension was common if you changed cars or changed insurance companies. You used to get a form in the mail from the Department of Motor Vehicles instructing you to record your new insurance or your new car. Occasionally, however, you might not receive the form by mail, and you could easily forget about it.
If your new car/new insurance data had not arrived at the Department of Motor Vehicles when you bought a new car or changed your car insurance, you could end up with this particular type of suspension. You typically had to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, show them your new purchase, along with your new insurance card.
In what appeared to be a routine road check for driver’s license and insurance, the Decatur, Georgia Police held me for three hours only a few months after I purchased a car from my elderly uncle. This happened in the spring of 1998 when I was back in college to complete my Bachelor’s degree at Agnes Scott College.
After checking my Driver’s License number the officer stated that I had a “First Insurance Cancellation Suspension” on the car I previously owned. I showed him my new insurance card on the car I was driving. I knew I would have to straighten out the suspension before I drove any car again. Since I was about a mile from the campus, I asked him if he could radio the Agnes Scott College Police and have someone from that police department drive down the street, and pick me (and the car) up.
I explained that I would have my Mama come pick me up at Agnes Scott and we would go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and get the suspension problem cleared up.
“I’m not calling anybody,” he yelled. I pulled out my student ID. He said, “I don’t need that. Girl, get out of the car.” I was a grown woman then in my thirties; and while I might not have looked as old as my birth certificate said I was, I was nobody’s “girl.” I kept my mouth closed, but I am sure he sensed my displeasure.
I got out of the car and he instructed me to lie down in the street. When I asked why are you doing this? He told me to shut up. While I lay down in the street for over 30 minutes, he and another two officers pulled the back seat out of my car. They searched the trunk. If it had not been for the little old man that came out of his house to watch, I do not know what else might have happened. I was terrified, but I suffer from something my Mama used to call, “Your Daddy’s Disease.”
She said my father never showed fear when under pressure. I don’t show it either. Daddy always looked fearless, even menacing, when some horrible event was going on. Then later when everything was all over, he would fall apart, shaking and reaching for a good stiff drink. “That kind of thing can get you killed, Joy,” Mama said, “When someone expects you to be afraid, sometimes the worst thing you can do is look like you have no fear.”
This event was before everyone had a cellphone. A female police officer appeared and asked me if I wanted to call my Mama using her phone. The first police officer decided to write me a simple ticket for driving with a suspended license and he left me standing there in the street. He drove off.
That sweet little old man stood there and talked with me until Mama arrived. He told me he thought the Decatur police were doing some kind of sweep. “They’re looking for somebody that’s up to no good, and they’re tryin’ to find ‘em in these road blocks,” he said. Mama arrived in about 30 minutes and picked me up. My new best friend—that sweet observant little old Black man told me to leave my car where it was until the suspension problem was straightened out.
“Them SOBs are probably waiting somewhere watching and waiting for you to drive off so they can give you another ticket or take you to jail. I’ll watch your car until you get back,” he said.
Mama asked me how my clothes got so dirty. I lied and told her I slipped and fell. She would have had a heart attack if I told her what really happened to her only child. We headed to the Department of Motor Vehicles. The clerk handed me a simple form that I filled out citing that I no longer owned the previous vehicle and therefore had no insurance on that vehicle.
I had to write down the serial number and model of my current car and provide my proof of insurance. The clerk recorded my data and lifted my “First Insurance Cancellation Suspension.” All of this took about 20 minutes.
I did argue my case in traffic court. The police officer rolled his eyes at me as I explained in detail his refusal to call the Agnes Scott College police even after I showed him my student ID. I told the judge every detail and showed him my insurance card, the purchase of my car, and the statement from the Department of Motor Vehicles that lifted my insurance cancellation suspension.
To add as much injury as I could, I said, “I missed my Latin Class because of this!” The judge dismissed my case. I paid no fine. I was lucky. Yet, I sensed that what happened to me was not rare. This kind of treatment happens to women, and particularly Black women and women of color, with a frequency that many people do not want to admit.
Black women encounter more than our share of rudeness and physical intimidation from male police. This offending officer was Black. It’s easy to talk about racist cops, but it is not so easy to talk about SEXIST ones. And for the record, I don’t like Black men who are cops anymore than I like White men who are cops. Here’s the rub…
I consider myself to be an average size woman. By the time I was 50 years old, I managed to gain enough weight to make it to a whopping 135 pounds at 5 feet, 5 inches tall. At the time of this incident, I weighed only about 115 pounds. That police officer was at least 6’ 2” tall and weighed well over 200 pounds. He called me a girl. He told me to shut up. He did not throw me to the ground, Thank God. Yet, just imagine how easy it would have been for him to do so.
I remember when master filmmaker Ava DuVernay started AFFRM which stood for African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement. Later she modified it and renamed it ARRAY which has gone on to release one masterpiece independent film after another by Black women, Women of Color, white Women filmmakers and other Black filmmakers.
Goddess knows that Ava’s television series Queen Sugar remains my all time favorite television series of all time, right up there with POSE. Her film ORIGIN completely shattered every boundary of how a film infused with activism and history could be made and change minds. If you haven’t seen that film, I really don’t consider you a member of the Left if you haven’t done so. If you watch it, you will not be the same. You will never think the same; and every assumption you ever had, you will rethink it.
(Ava DuVernay here with Dr. Suraj Yengde who portrayed himself in the film ORIGIN. The film received a 9-minute standing ovation at the Vienna Film Festival in 2023.)
There was one thing Ava did when Queen Sugar hit the airwaves. She decided that only women, and particularly Black and other women of color, would direct the show. She gave over 40 women directors their television directorial debuts because, she reasoned, if she did not do it they would never be given the chance.
The irony is that DuVernay’s production of Queen Sugar earned recognition as one of the most ethnically and racially diverse crews in television history. Ain’t that something?
So, here’s something to think about. Ava DuVernay has some real badass men around her. Yet, ARRAY was and still is staffed primarily with women; and this company has run like a top since its inception.
So, here’s something else to ponder. Since Felon 47 is hellbent on controlling women, eliminating the histories of Black people and other POC from the record, and granting companies the right to not give a good Got-damned whether any of us will be hired for any job, isn’t it just as plausible for us to not hire or phuck with any of them?
I mean, if I am a Black woman running a successful business and I don’t want to be bothered with sexism or racism, then I can simply not hire any man of any color and not hire any white person of any gender. And what I will be doing will be perfectly legal under the administration of this president. Marinate on that for a moment.
“Intersectionality is a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that often are not understood among conventional ways of thinking.” — Kimberlé Crenshaw
Recently, I responded to a question about the factors that stymied women’s quest for suffrage during the mid-to-late 19th century. I brought up the pragmatism and egalitarianism of suffragist and abolitionist Lucy Stone whose legacy remains largely overlooked. And therein lies the problem.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton have rightfully earned their place in Women’s history. They battled for the vote in ways almost unimaginable. Yet, they both held racist and classist views. Now before you start yelling about how both of them worked in the abolitionist movement, spare me. You can be anti-slavery and still not think the slave is your social or political equal. The inability to shake off one’s sense of entitlement has extreme consequences for everyone.
When lawmakers decided to include Black men as voters in the 15th Amendment without including the franchise for white women, both Stanton and Anthony were rightfully livid, but livid to the point where they then fought against the passage of the 15th Amendment altogether. It passed, however, in 1869 and was ratified in 1870.
Stanton wrote that it was unconscionable and dangerous to give the vote to Black, Chinese or Irish men because they were inferior. Anyone that did not fit a strict Anglo-Saxon and native-born status was considered inferior. Additionally, neither Stanton nor Anthony had thought about Black women voting at all.
Stone broke with Anthony and Stanton over their racism. Orator, writer, abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass cut his ties to Anthony and Stanton as well. The tragedy was that Douglass had attended the Women’s Conference at Seneca Falls in 1848 and had been a huge and early advocate for women’s rights. Moreover, it was Lucy Stone’s brilliant oratory that had inspired Susan B. Anthony to join the suffrage movement.
Stone read the political winds correctly. She formed the American Woman Suffrage Association which concentrated on gaining women the right to vote on a state-by-state basis. She knew that Congress was not going to grant the franchise to everyone.
Stone believed that the enfranchisement of Black men was progress. Although she was disappointed that the 15th Amendment did not include women’s suffrage, she did not believe that denying the franchise to others would help women in the long run.
Black men, rather than white women, were granted the right to vote first for a variety of reasons. As a historian, I know that the Republican Party in the 1860s was the party of Lincoln (not the sh*t show it is now) that freed Black American slaves. They controlled both the House and the Senate in 1867 to 1869. They knew that recently freed and enfranchised Black men would inevitably vote Republican and increase the party’s political dominance.
Granting the franchise to white women would have mixed political results as many white women still believed in the lost cause of the South in spite of its loss during the Civil War. They would have voted Democrat which was then the favored party of the former slave-holding South.
Some of Stone’s ideas were tied to her upbringing. She came from a hardworking farming family in Massachusetts. Both of her parents were abolitionists. While quite young, she, along with Lucretia Mott and Abby Kelly Foster helped William Lloyd Garrison establish the American Anti-slavery Society which was founded in 1833.
All of her brothers attended college. Yet, Stone had to postpone her education. She taught school for several years and was able to scrape up enough money to attend Oberlin College, the first college in the nation to accept Black people and women. When she graduated in 1847, she became the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a college degree.
Stone had planned to remain a single woman because she feared losing her independence to a husband. She finally yielded to Henry Browne Blackwell’s persistence. Blackwell was also an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate. Blackwell would learn years later that Stone finally decided to marry him after he met and aided a young slave with her owners while traveling on a train.
When Blackwell asked the girl would she rather be free, she answered “yes.” Blackwell and an accomplice helped get the young girl off of the train and away from her owners. It was that act of liberation that won Stone over.
While neither Stone nor her contemporaries Anthony and Stanton lived long enough to see women receive the right to vote, their different approaches and beliefs underscored a perpetual problem in the quest for women’s equality and the right to vote.
Stone never stopped fighting for the rights of Black people as she continued her fight to get the vote for women. She believed that both causes were interrelated. The same cannot be said of Anthony and Stanton.
The fight for the right to vote for women was often fractured by racism well into the 20th century. Stone’s stances on racial equality and equal rights for women cost her some popularity among some white women. Anthony and Stanton emerged as the face of white women’s suffrage. Yet, Anthony and Stanton also emerged as suspect to Black men and women.
After Lucy Stone died of stomach cancer in 1893, her only child, Alice Stone Blackwell reached out to the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and began the process of repairing the divided women’s suffrage movement. They created a new coalition. Alice Stone Blackwell followed her mother’s mantra to make the world better.
Lucy Stone deserves more historical attention than she receives. Her example should be emulated precisely because she understood the “intersectionality” of gender and race (and the political implications that go along with it) long before Black scholar and lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term and defined the theory in the late 20th century. Stone recognized that, no matter how different gender and race may appear, women’s equality was inextricably linked to racial equality. You must fight for both, not just one or the other.
I remember a conversation with my late cousin Billie Allen, who was an actor, dancer and stage director. She was here in Atlanta in 2003 directing her close friend, actor Ruby Dee in “Saint Lucy’s Eyes,” a play written by Bridgette Wimberly.
The play was about a woman who performed back room abortions for young women who were in serious trouble. The protagonist named “Old Woman” performed abortions out of mercy and out of a sense that those pregnant women were having their futures derailed by unplanned pregnancies.
Billie mailed me a copy of the play before it came to Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, and not long after it had a successful off-Broadway premiere at New York’s Women’s Project Theater in 2001. Turning me into her personal dramaturge again, she and I discussed the hot topic of abortion. Then she shared with me something I did not know.
She told me that back in the 1940s and 1950s, when a Hollywood actress became pregnant and had too many professional and contractual obligations to a studio, she typically went to Puerto Rico to have an abortion.
I soon learned that in 1937, the Puerto Rican legislature made abortion and contraception legal. It also made sterilization legal. That’s the kicker—sterilization. An island with a population of people, many of who have Indian, African, and Spanish ancestry were often seen as expendable.
Puerto Rico’s legislature voted with all of the eugenicist and racist taint that emanated from the United States’ highly racist sterilization programs that were completely in line with the eugenics (racial cleansing) going on in Nazi Germany.
I mentioned to Billie that I had seen a short documentary called “La Operación,” by Ana María García back in the early 1980s. It was a documentary about how people involved with “population control” arrived in Puerto Rico in the 1950s and 1960s and sterilized about a third of the island’s women who were of childbearing age.
While there were certainly Puerto Rican women who no longer wanted to have more children, many women were sterilized without knowing exactly what was being done to them.
Puerto Rico was the location of where the first large scale trials of birth control pills took place before “the pill” debuted in 1960 in the United States. Various pills were first tested on a tiny group of women in Boston. Yet, the largest group of clinical guinea pigs were Puerto Rican women; other women of color in the Western hemisphere soon followed.
In 1933 Margaret Sanger, long heralded as a leader in the birth control movement, wrote in Birth Control Review that “Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need …We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.” People of color were the bad stock.
In 1939 in a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, one of the architects of the United States’ eugenics movement (and heir to the Proctor & Gamble fortune), Sanger wrote that they should use Black male ministers to appeal to Black women to get them to agree to be sterilized. She sought to use Black women’s typical deference to Black clergy to accomplish her mission.
By 1955 biologist Gregory Pincus visited Puerto Rico and found it the best location to test birth control pills. After all, the island had no laws preventing contraception. Pincus and his partner John Rock, a gynecologist, promoted their work as poverty-prevention by making it possible for poor Puerto Rican women to have fewer babies.
And here we cisgender women are right now in 2025. We all worry about losing the right to make decisions about our own bodies; and we should. Yet, early birth control and abortion initiatives were never about women having the right to make their own reproductive choices.
The primary objective was to slow or stop the biological reproduction of any woman who did not belong to an accepted class or status of women classifiable as “white.”
Without fully understanding the racist origins of the state’s reproductive control over women, you will miss its original intent. Reproductive procedures, no matter how necessary they are, remain a political football; and Puerto Rican women, and other women of color were its first sacrifices.
Leslye Joy Allen 