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IN HER WORDS 'More Than Just Tragic': Ma'Khia Bryant and the Burden of Black Girlhood Two academics discuss the fatal shooting of the 16-year-old in Columbus, Ohio, highlighting the different standards that young Black girls are held to.
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Alisha Haridasani Gupta By Alisha Haridasani Gupta Published April 24, 2021 Updated April 26, 2021 "Ma'Khia Bryant was a child." — Brittney Cooper, the author of "Eloquent Rage" and associate professor of women's and gender studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University
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It happened in a matter of seconds.
On Tuesday, in Columbus, Ohio, a police officer fatally shot Ma'Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old Black girl.
Body-camera footage shows Officer Nicholas Reardon, who was responding to a 911 call, arriving at a chaotic scene, with several people engaged in a heated fight, outside Ms. Bryant's foster home.
As the officer gets out of his vehicle, Ms. Bryant is seen lunging at a woman with what appears to be a knife in her hand. Then, seconds later, in the frenzy and chaos, she lunges at another woman.
"Hey! Hey!" Officer Reardon says as he pulls out his gun. "Get down! Get down!"
He fires four quick shots, killing Ms. Bryant in an instant.
The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is conducting a third-party investigation. And some experts, after watching the footage, have pointed out that Ms. Bryant was armed and seemed to be acting erratically, deeming the use of deadly force justifiable.
But the timing of the shooting — on the same day that the former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd last May — underscored, for many, the incessant drumbeat of police brutality and systemic racism. Ms. Bryant's young age — so evident in her giggly TikTok videos, dancing and doing her hair like any teenage girl — also highlights the unique burden of Black girls: In media coverage, Ms. Bryant has consistently been referred to as a woman, and her behavior and her body size have been scrutinized to suggest that she presented a large, uncontainable threat to everyone at the scene.
"Ma'Khia Bryant was a child," Brittney Cooper, author of "Eloquent Rage" and associate professor of women's and gender studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University, said on MSNBC on Thursday. "The way that she has been talked about — because she is a big girl — people see her as the aggressor. They don't see her humanity. They have adultified her."
A 2017 report by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality found that, because of layers of gendered racism, adults tend to view Black girls as more threatening, more aggressive, more mature and less innocent than white girls of the same age, robbing Black girls of the freedom to be children. The report found that Black girls as young as 5 years old are held to adultlike standards and, in turn, receive harsher punishments for their behavior: Black girls are more likely to be suspended or arrested at school than their white peers, often for minor infractions, like using their cellphones or throwing tantrums. In another report by the same researchers, one girl recalled that in elementary school, during a game at recess, she had thrown a ball and it had hit another girl in the face. She was then accused of assault and battery. Others shared that if they spoke up in class, they were labeled sassy or outspoken, while their white peers were seen as intelligent.
