It’s time to confront — fully — violence against Black women

There is a certain kind of tragedy that resists the ordinary language of opinion writing. It sits there, heavy and immovable, forcing us to confront not only the event itself but the long moral shadow that stretches behind it.

The recent murder-suicide involving Virginia’s former lieutenant governor and his wife is one such tragedy, an intimate catastrophe that draws us into questions of power, gender, race, and the quiet, accumulated burdens people carry behind closed doors.

When tragedies like this happen, we reach instinctively for the immediate causes: the stress, the relationship, the personal unraveling. But if we stop there, we miss the deeper structure: the historical and cultural architecture that shapes how violence, especially against women, unfolds in this country.

And if we are honest, that architecture looks different depending on who the woman is.

The history of violence against Black women in America is not simply a subset of violence against women broadly; it is its own long and painful narrative, braided with the country’s racial history. From the era of slavery, when Black women’s bodies were treated as property and subjected to routine violation, to the present day, where their suffering is often underreported, underinvestigated, and undermourned, there has been a persistent moral blind spot.

This is not just a failure of law enforcement or policy. It is a failure of imagination, a failure to fully see the full extent of a Black woman’s humanity.

Part of the difficulty lies in the way our social movements have historically fractured along lines that, in theory, they sought to transcend. Gender issues broke apart over race, as when white suffragists refused to deal with the Black voting issue, preferring to focus efficiently on just one problem. Efficiency, in that context, came at the cost of solidarity. It created a hierarchy of suffering, implicit but powerful.

Later, race issues divided along gender lines when Black men in the 1960s and ‘70s asked Black women to forgo feminism because racial solidarity was more important. Again, a kind of moral triage took place. The urgency of one struggle was used to silence another.

What we see, over and over, is a pattern: When movements narrow their focus in pursuit of clarity or momentum, those who live at the intersection of multiple identities — Black women, in particular — are often asked to wait. To prioritize. To endure.

But history suggests that waiting has consequences.

In the case of intimate partner violence, those consequences are stark. More than 40% of Black women will experience physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetimes. In some studies, that number rises closer to half when stalking and sexual violence are included.

Black women are killed by intimate partners at rates roughly three times higher than white women, and for those between the ages of 25 and 44, the risk of homicide can be several times greater. These are not marginal disparities. They are structural signals — evidence of a system that distributes vulnerability unevenly.

The work of building a just society is as much about repairing fractures as it is about advancing causes.

And yet, alongside these measurable harms, there is another layer that is harder to quantify but no less real: the daily exposure to subtle forms of violence. The dismissive comment, the professional slight, the presumption of strength that becomes a denial of vulnerability, the quiet erosion of safety in spaces that should be secure.

These experiences rarely make headlines. But they accumulate. They shape how danger is perceived, how help is sought, and how suffering is interpreted — by others and, eventually, by oneself.

» READ MORE: Let’s talk about Carla Hayden and America’s discomfort with Black women in positions of authority | Opinion

There is a line in Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World by Jessica Marie Johnson that should give us pause: Black women, she writes, have long had to “imagine freedom within and against systems that rendered their intimacy and interior lives vulnerable.” It is a quiet sentence, but it contains a world. It reminds us that for many Black women, safety has never been a default condition. It has been something to be negotiated, constructed, and defended — often alone.

This brings us back, uncomfortably, to the present. According to reports, Justin Fairfax shot and killed his wife, Cerina, before taking his own life on April 16, in their northern Virginia home, with their children inside. It is an unspeakable act, one that collapses the distance between public stature and private devastation.

» READ MORE: The murder of Black women in the U.S. is a public health crisis | Opinion

Without presuming motives beyond what is known, we can still observe something essential: Violence of this kind does not erupt in a vacuum. It emerges from patterns, personal, yes, but also cultural. It draws on ideas about control, about masculinity, about ownership and despair. And when race and gender intersect, those patterns can become harder to see clearly, obscured by competing narratives about representation, loyalty, and progress.

In our open-hearted embrace of diversity, we often celebrate representation as an unqualified good. And in many ways, it is. Representation matters. It reshapes institutions and expands the realm of possibility. But diversity, let’s be honest, can lead to societal tensions, and sometimes we downplay the hard work.

That work includes building a shared moral language that does not fracture under the weight of difference. It includes resisting the temptation to segment our empathy — to care deeply in one direction while neglecting another.

And it includes acknowledging that the intersections of race and gender are not peripheral concerns; they are central to understanding how power operates in everyday life.

What would it mean to take that seriously?

It would mean telling fuller stories. Not just about individual tragedies, but about the patterns that give them context; the statistics, yes, but also the silences. It would mean recognizing that violence against Black women is not only episodic but environmental, not only visible in catastrophic moments but embedded in daily life. It would mean refusing to let familiarity dull our moral response.

There is a temptation, in moments like this, to search for resolution — for a lesson that can be neatly extracted and applied. But perhaps the more honest response is to sit with the tension. To recognize that progress is not a straight line, and that the work of building a just society is as much about repairing fractures as it is about advancing causes.

And perhaps, above all, it requires a discipline of attention, a willingness to see fully, to see consistently, and to see those who have too often been rendered peripheral as central to the story we tell about ourselves. Because until we do that, tragedies like this will continue to feel both shocking and, in some deeper and more troubling way, familiar.

Jack Hill is a diversity consultant, child advocate, journalist, and writer.

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