The Secrets of Silence

The Everyday Policing of Black Women and Their Stories about Violence

Shannon Malone Gonzalez

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780691260440, 9780691260433
• eBook ISBN: 9780691260471
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why black women’s stories of encounters with the police are missing from official and unofficial accounts of police violence

In The Secrets of Silence, Shannon Malone Gonzalez investigates how the policing of black women is tied to the policing of their stories. Over a period of four years, Malone Gonzalez conducted intimate life-history interviews with black women about their encounters, listening to those who had never shared their stories before, had never even been asked to, or had tried repeatedly to speak to those around them to no avail. They all described the unspoken or whispered connections in the ways officers and communities socially control black women to put them “in their place.” Centering black women’s searches for recognition of their violent encounters with police and other people in their lives, Malone Gonzalez examines the pervasive and often invisible forms of everyday policing that render black women’s stories missing from official data, headlines, and community conversations.

Articulating what she calls “the space between” recognition of black women’s stories and their encounters, Malone Gonzalez shows that policing is as much about silence as it is about violence. Black women’s silenced stories, then, provide a way to name and critique the institutional and intimate forms of policing that break and bend black social relations into a complex web of social control. Drawing on abolition feminism and black knowledge traditions, she envisions storytelling—and listening—as a way to reimagine, remember, and reconnect in solidarity and worldbuilding.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. “I Wish I Was Taught to Be Okay in Me”: The Space Between the Talks and Vulnerabilities to Violence
• 2. “What Happens in Our House” / “You Don’t Call the Police on Your Family”: The Space Between Home and Police Contact
• 3. “He’s Just Gonna Be Right Back Out There”: The Space Between Violence Definitions and Disclosure of Police Gender-Based and Sexual Violence
• 4. “I Was Kinda Scared to Report It”: The Space Between Speaking and Intracommunal Backlash and Police Retaliation
• 5. “When We Gather”: The Space Between Lived Experiences and Self-Definition
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: A Brief Note on Methods, Continued
• Appendix B: Demographic Tables
• Appendix C: Phase 2 Interview Guide
• Appendix D: Final Survey Measures for Types of Police Violence
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index