Who's Lives Matter?
In the “Meet Cute” chapter of my book, A BLIND EYE (coming April 2021 by NineStar Press), Babe and Max help a trans woman get a cab home. My editors questioned why I specified that she was trans, since she was not a pivotal character in the story.
This was my shoutout to Nizah Morris, a trans woman of color in Philadelphia who was found murdered after having made use of a police ‘courtesy escort’ in the early 2000’s.
In my opinion, to not specify that the character is trans, (even though she doesn’t have a name in the story) is to make her invisible as a trans woman.
The information below is taken from a blogpost written by Princess Harmony Rodriguez. The full post can be found at: https://www.workers.org/2020/11/52621/
At 207 Juniper Street, in the City of Brotherly Love, stood a bar called the Key West Bar and Grille. It had its own rich history, having been Philadelphia’s only integrated gay bar. But there, 12 years ago, lives were irrevocably changed. On any given night, there are thousands of drunk people in bars in that city. We are often reminded, however, that what are normal occurrences for the general public are “crimes” for trans people of color. Crimes that make us targets of police and police violence. Trans women of color are stopped, harassed, assaulted and murdered by police with impunity. The conversation about police violence must include us because our bodies, too, lay dead at their hands.
Nizah Morris
On Dec. 22, 2002, a black trans woman named Nizah Morris was drunk at Key West. Officers Elizabeth Skala-DiDonato, Thomas Berry, and Kenneth Novak were dispatched to the scene after a 911 call was placed by concerned friends. Skala-DiDonato offered Ms. Morris a courtesy ride to her home, and Berry accompanied them. Then, according to the police, Nizah sobered up and left the vehicle at 3:25 a.m.
Two minutes later, she was found bleeding and unconscious in the middle of the street. Berry was again dispatched to her location, where he declared a crime had not taken place, covering her face while she was still alive. Had she been taken to a hospital as soon as she was found, she more than likely would have lived. Instead, she was left on the scene for 40 minutes. She was taken to the hospital at 4:13 a.m. and died at 8:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve from a wound that could only have come from the butt of a gun.
While police say they do not know who or what killed her, the answer is obvious. The officers involved in her final moments, Skala-DiDonato, Berry, and Novak — the third officer sent to Key West who never accounted for his whereabouts between 3:13 a.m. and 3:25 a.m. — could more than likely have been her murderers. Nizah Morris’s death highlighted the immeasurable social and emotional distance between the trans community and the Philadelphia Police Department.
Police target transgender people of color
All over the U.S., police and transgender people are often at odds, the result of decades of policing that did not stop crimes, but enforced the unwritten laws of patriarchy and ensured social conformity. Black and/or Latinx transgender people often find ourselves the targets of increased police hostility because of white supremacist, transphobic policing being distinctly opposed to our continued existence.
In Philadelphia, trans women of color are often profiled as sex workers, drug addicts, or just plain criminals. Some of us are sex workers and/or drug addicts, the end result of being targeted for discrimination by the same oppressive system that profiles us. It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re actually doing something illegal, though, because being transgender (resisting patriarchy’s desire for our lives) is essentially illegal.
There used to be a competition among the officers of the Philadelphia Police Department. Precincts and individual officers would compete to see how many transgender women they could arrest or stop in one night. Did they ever stop this cruelty? I don’t know, but they adopted new standards and policies that would on paper give the impression that transgender people are respected by the PPD. Those new policies came about as the result of a laundry list of complaints of assault, sexual violence, and unrelenting insults during arrests which the transgender community presented to the PPD.