The Case of Misogynoir : How Black Amateur Detectives Fight Police Brutality and Indifference
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | The paper analyses two crime novels written by African American authors, Walter Mosley’s White Butterfly (1992) and Charlotte Carter’s Rhode Island Red (1997). Through multiple perspectives, both novels raise awareness about institutional racism and gender-based violence against Black American women. In White Butterfly, the killings of Black women are disregarded until a white woman is murdered and the crimes get linked. The protagonist Easy Rawlins must navigate his own position as a Black private detective discriminated by white police officers of the LAPD, and as a Black man witnessing these gendered crimes. In Rhode Island Red, Nanette Hayes, the amateur sleuth of the novel, finds a man murdered in her apartment and is questioned by a Black NYPD officer Leman Sweet. While Sweet struggles with racism at work, his continuous violence and rage towards Nanette reveal the hostility not only between Black people and the police but also between Black men and women. As a consequence of systemic discriminatory practices, Mosley and Carter’s novels present two diverging viewpoints of the friction between the Black amateur detective and the police. To examine this conflict, the paper applies the term ‘misogynoir’ coined by a Black queer feminist Moya Bailey, to focus on racism and violence directed against Black women in both novels. Moreover, the paper proposes that the perpetuated stereotypes against Black people and the extent of police inaction towards racial violence and hate crimes are further magnified – apart from race – by the victims’ gender. Through the instances of misogynoir, both authors disclose issues of systemic and internalised racism and how notoriously impacted Black American women have been within the U.S. criminal justice system. |
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