There are somethings you will never know if you don’t have a black-girl-body, if you are not or have not been a black girl or woman. Here’s what too many of us know, groping hands and sexually explicit requests and demands from girlhood, long before womanhood and frenzied demands for compliance from the first emergence of the slightest curve on our frames.

Our bodies are torn from us, gobbled up by relatives and strangers of all races. We have been put on display alive and dead, fetishized, coveted, demonized, ridiculed and raped on an industrial scale to produce more of us.

One particularly enduring experience of being a black girl or woman anywhere on this world is the right white women and men assert over our bodies. They put their hands in our hair and think they have done us a favor if they have asked permission first. Then become enraged when we say no. One woman offered me a Christian apology and hug to which I foolishly/innocently consented to find her stroking my now accessible hair. They demand explain we explain our skin – can we tan? do we burn? – our grooming and account for all of blackness everywhere.

[Some will look for me to say not all white folk and talk about my white allies, friends, loves and family members. If you need to hear that to hear me you are not hearing me.]

When I saw the video of Dajerria Becton with a white male police officer grabbing her by her hair and head pushing her face down into the ground, at one point dragging her on the ground by her arm, pressing himself onto her body, his knee in her back, his body clad in the uniform of the community in which she lives, adorned with the badge and gun funded by her parents’ taxes, her body clad in the bikini uniform of summer sun and fun leaving her body exposed for his grasping hands, I remembered too. I recognized what I was seeing because I have a black-girl-body too.

She will remember those hands. She will remember the weight of an unfamiliar, unwanted man pressing her down into the ground, trying to force her to submit, to comply. She will remember the entitlement with which he cursed her, snatched her, positioned her and released her at his leisure. Her memories will be located in the beautiful brown flesh of her black-girl-body.