Razack’s spatialized justice and Cece McDonald

        This week I will engage with Sherene Razack’s article, “Gendered racial violence and spatialized justice: The murder of Pamela George”. The article not only forced us to be more critical of space and the current implications of certain bodies in certain spaces but discussed the historical context through which these spaces were “made”. Razack also makes the vital argument that to discount all the factors of race, gender and colonialism in the murder of Pamela George would be unwise and actually miss the point entirely. George's intersectional identities as a woman, a sex worker, an indigenous body and one that had repeatedly been subject to colonial violence layered on top of one another to shape the way that her  case was received by the court.  

All of these arguments made me think of the fairly well known story of Cece McDonald (Here is a brief outline of her story, although I should warn you that the narrative itself is definitely problematic http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-transgender-crucible-20140730). McDonald is an African-American trans-woman in her twenties. One night, she and her friends, all of whom were also African-American and some non-binary, went out to buy groceries. On their way, a "handful of cigarette-smoking white people” began to yell derogatory racial, gay and trans slurs at Cece and her friends. The situation escalated and in self -defense, Cece stabbed one of the men, Flaherty, "in the chest, burying the blade almost three and a half inches deep, slicing his heart”. Cece was charged with second degree murder and sent to jail for 19 months.

I think that this is an interesting example of a role reversal to the Pamela George case. What stands out the most to me are the ways in which it seems to prove that vulnerable bodies are meant to die, not meant to fight back. Both George and McDonald were targeted by white males as vulnerable/easy victims due to their race, class, gender and sexuality.

One of the major differences in the cases is that Cece lived and Pamela did not. But Cece’s fight back was criminalized. McDonald was punished by the legal system for being a survivor. In the case of bodies that are racialized, gendered and seen as “expendable” by society, there is no real alternative to violence. In the eyes of the court, vulnerable bodies should accept victimization. Any resistance to fulfilling this role in the script is unacceptable. Looking at these two cases, we can look at the justice system as another space in which certain vulnerable bodies are subjected to another kind of violence.

I thought that another interesting difference between the George and McDonald cases was the physical spaces that the crimes occurred in. Razack states that George’s perpetrators identified George’s body as one that was subjected violence because of her profession and the pervasive violence that occurred in the spaces that she worked. The hate crime against McDonald occurred, according to the article, in the "tree-lined streets of her quiet working-class Long­fellow neighborhood in Minneapolis”. I think that this should prompt us to think about what happens to certain spaces when certain bodies with certain mindsets of entitlement enter them. As discussed in class today, Razack touches on how certain white male bodies who feel like they can do whatever they want, wherever and whenever they wan, transform spaces that they're in symbolically, resulting in very physical results.