Black Evidence: A History and a Warning

In this unflinching audit of American history, political scientist Watts Smith (Stay Woke) surveys the many ways that Black people’s testimonies have been systematically ignored and excluded. Noting the cyclical nature of civil rights advancements and white supremacist backlashes, she suggests that the latter are often predicated on new methods of dismissing “Black evidence.” To make her case, Watts Smiths spotlights numerous well-known contemporary examples of anti-Black brutality and inequity, showing how they connect to longer histories of the suppression of Black speech. For example, she situates the questioning of the credibility of Rachel Jeantel, a friend of Trayvon Martin, during her testimony in Martin’s murder trial, within America’s lengthy history of the exclusion of legal testimony by Black people, which she suggests has created a lasting “presumption of Black incompetence.” She discusses the viral video of the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery alongside the history of gaslighting of Black witnesses to crimes—increasingly challenged today by video evidence. And she ties Black women’s higher rates of maternal mortality, likely stemming from doctors’ ongoing trivialization of Black patients’ accounts of their own pain, to the legacy of eugenics and the “medicalizing” of Blackness. By astutely placing the past in conversation with the present, this compels readers to consider the way bleak, unaddressed histories continue to cause harm. (Mar.)