This column first appeared in The Amendment, a newsletter by Errin Haines, The 19th’s editor-at-large. Subscribe today to get early access to her analysis.
It is an arresting image: On the Fourth of July, a lone, young Black woman sits on a train filled with White nationalists headed to commemorate America’s 250th birthday in our nation’s capital.
Her thousand-yard stare is one of dignified terror. It is a moment forced upon her, in a democracy still reckoning with its contradictions about who gets to belong, where patriotism and freedom are perverted and how a Black woman becomes an unwitting and unwilling passenger amid a sea of mostly white men.
Their identities are not known, but the fear the image evokes is familiar. A crowd of faces, sitting and standing, intentionally unseen behind sunglasses and scarves. And then, in their midst, a single face exposed: brown, female, eyes fixed in the direction of the camera. In this photograph, what was meant to intimidate became insight.
The men are masked. She is not.
Once again, a Black woman was captured in a moment where she must confront the worst of America with composure and become the mirror that shows the distance between who we are and who we say we are — or who we want to be — as a country.
We do not yet know the name or age of the woman in the visceral and now viral photograph taken Saturday by Reuters photographer Cheney Orr. But we know the look on her face.
(Ira Wilmer Counts Jr./AP)
We saw it on the face of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford as she calmly walked to class amid a racist, screaming mob en route to her first day at Little Rock High School on September 4, 1957. We saw it on the face of 23-year-old Diane Nash, one of the courageous Freedom Riders who did not know whether she would return home when she set out with other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as leader of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins.
We saw it in 2016 on the face of 28-year-old Iesha Evans, a nurse who stoically and peacefully faced down armed officers in combat gear at a protest in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, over the death of Alton Sterling, her sundress flapping in the July breeze behind her, her hand extended to hold the weapon pointed in her direction at bay.
These women became enduring symbols of their citizenship and self-worth, their quiet resistance demanding respect.
And now it has happened again. I do not need to know who she is to know who she is.
This was a young woman who was just trying to get to her destination: maybe running an errand, heading to work or going home after her shift. Maybe she was going nowhere in particular. She does not need a reason to be on the train; she is simply existing.
But then the train stops and the men boarding do have a reason for being there. We know them, too.
(Jonathan Bachman/Reuters)
The men on the train were part of Patriot Front, a white nationalist group formed in the aftermath of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where masked white men carried tiki torches and marched in opposition to the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The group has promoted the “great replacement theory” and on Saturday, hundreds of their members descended on Washington, chanting “Reclaim America!” and waving Confederate flags on the country’s 250th anniversary.
The Black woman on the train was not physically harmed that day. But the specter of harm was present — and recognizable not only to her, but to many Black women. For them, at the least, such encounters are just another microaggression of the day; at worst, they can result in actual harm.
Either way, as a Black woman, you’re just hoping to survive the moment — and hoping there isn’t a next time. But there is always a next time, because to be a Black woman in America is to know that the indignity and inequality that come with racism and sexism are the train that is never late.
Looking at this scene is a stark and stinging reminder of how unsafe Black women remain in this country. How we have no control over when or where the threat will show up along the journey, or how it will look: the loss of voting rights and bodily autonomy — or a job in an environment that is against diversity, equity and inclusion.
We cannot know what the Black woman on the train was thinking or feeling at this moment. But we recognize the image as an indictment. It should make all of us pause to consider what it is that we are celebrating as America turns 250.
At times, the terror and intimidation has come with masks; at others, they have been in plain sight, spitting, yelling and aiming their violence at us. The Black women on the receiving end are often only later regarded as brave and courageous. In the moment, the goal is to make them feel less American. The result is always the opposite.
Black women have repeatedly reflected the truth of our country back at itself. Like the woman on the train, we are all on a collective journey, too many of us surrounded by those who are unwilling or unable to see our full humanity.
She did not look away. How much longer will we?