Malcolm X’s Warning and the Evolution of Violence Against Black Women
Malcolm X said in 1963, “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.”
Sixty years later, that truth still stings. Not because it’s outdated, but because it remains devastatingly accurate.
The forms of violence have evolved, become more sophisticated, even algorithmic. But the intent? That’s remained exactly the same.
The invasion of the Trump era on our society has been a wrecking ball. I use the word invasion with the sincerest intent. Any perceived wins that we may have celebrated as marginalized people in America are now seemingly null and void, especially for those living and working at the intersection of race, gender, and class.
With white supremacy repackaged as populism and patriarchy rebranded as “traditional values,” Black women once again became public targets—called “low IQ,” “lazy,” “nasty,” “DEI hires.” These slurs are not random. They are strategies to re-inscribe hierarchy.
Malcolm X named what violence looked like in 1963: physical brutality, legal exclusion, social abandonment. Today, violence may not always wear a hood. It wears an algorithm, a headline, a law.
As theologians Jennifer DeShazier and Danielle Williams note, “power itself may be neutral; intent determines harm.” The harm is most definitely intentional.
Think about what we’re witnessing:
Then: You couldn’t vote, couldn’t own property, couldn’t testify in court, couldn’t even claim agency over one’s own body.
Now: The overturn of Roe vs Wade has muddled the waters for women to have autonomy over their bodies, sexual lives, and reproductive systems. Currently, the voting rights act on the chopping block along with other rights that we already fought to gain.
Then: You were property, objectified, your body not your own.
Now: Your achievements are dismissed as “DEI hires,” your intellect questioned regardless of credentials, your presence in leadership spaces treated as charity rather than merit. And our bodies are still objectified and we are considered “property” to men.
Then: Violence was overt: lynching, church bombings, dogs and water hoses.
Now: Violence is algorithmic through social media harassment campaigns, hostile work environments, policy decisions that disproportionately harm Black women while claiming to be “colorblind or race-neutral.”
Adding insult to injury, the disrespect has gone digital. The lack of protection has been codified into systems that claim neutrality. The neglect has been institutionalized into structures that ask, “Why are Black women so angry and standoffish?” instead of “Why are we still treating them this way?”
Here’s what makes the violence even more insidious: it persists despite evidence to the contrary.
Black women remain the most highly educated demographic in the United States and the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs. We are not what they say we are. We have never been what they say we are.
Yet the narrative of our inadequacy is so deeply embedded in American consciousness that no amount of achievement can dislodge it. Malcolm X knew this in 1963. We know it in 2025.
Beneath the surface of our resilient prowess lies the ancestral burden of our pasts. In our blood flows the trauma of objectification, disregard, and neglect - even from our own communities. Yet that same blood pumps the rhythm of survival, warrior ethics, and communal love. We are strong because we must be, even when we are, socially and politically, the weakest.
As Harold Lasswell defined it, politics is simply “who gets what, when, how.” In the last election cycle, that question became a weapon. One of our own could occupy the second-highest office in the land and still be called “trash.” The courage to speak in such a moment is not only resistance. It is reclamation of voice, intellect, and Imago Dei—our DNA of divine image.
Womanist theologian Chanequa Walker-Barnes reminds us that proximity to power never protects us from racism; it often increases our exposure. True reconciliation requires confronting inequity in power, privilege, and access. Black women know this intuitively.
This is what Malcolm X understood that many still refuse to acknowledge: no amount of respectability, education, achievement, or proximity to power will protect Black women from violence. Because the violence is not about what we do or don’t do. It’s about maintaining a hierarchy that requires us to remain at the bottom.
The most disrespected. The most unprotected. The most neglected.
But here’s what Malcolm X also knew: we would resist anyway.
From Maya Angelou’s caged bird to Melissa Harris-Perry’s “crooked room,” Black women have learned to sing through distortion, to stand upright in spaces designed to tilt us and keep us small, even uncomfortable. We refuse to go quietly into any cage—whether political, ecclesial, or domestic. We are Barbie refusing to surrender back to a box.
The violence has evolved, so our resistance has evolved too. We’re not just marching anymore. We’re building economic infrastructure. We’re creating art that redefines what beauty, strength, and intelligence look like. We’re writing scholarship that exposes the architecture of misogynoir. We’re running for office, starting businesses, earning degrees, and reshaping culture—all while navigating spaces designed to keep us disrespected, unprotected, and neglected.
Courage for us is not volume. It is insistence. It is continuing to speak when history tells us we should be silent, when even allies ask for softer tones. We no longer feel the need to be loud. Moving in silence has proven to be better—for our souls, our community, for everyone.
bell hooks once observed that America’s refusal to legitimize women speaking about race reveals a “long tradition of sexist and racist thinking.” That refusal still echoes. Yet as Ecclesiastes 1:9 tells us, “There is nothing new under the sun.” The patterns come back, but our will is strong. Stronger than ever.
Sixty years after Malcolm X spoke those words, we’re still fighting the same fight. The violence looks different—more polished, more coded, more algorithmic—but it’s the same intent dressed in new clothes.
And we’re still here. Still speaking. Still building. Still refusing to be what they say we are.
What is that truth we keep speaking?
That we will not be silenced, even when we are caged in. We will continue to deconstruct and decolonize in our own circles and circumstances. We will always be strengthened by God to reconstruct and rebuild. No matter how loudly the racist patriarch screams. We will continue to speak truth to power.
Courage, then, is not the absence of fear. It is the audacity to keep singing in the crooked room. To use every note, every breath, and every platform to tell the truth until the walls themselves begin to bend.
Malcolm X named the violence in 1963. Sixty years later, we’re still naming it. But we’re also transcending it, surviving it, and building something beyond it.
Because our liberation has never been solitary. It has always been communal. Each time we speak, we widen the field of freedom for everyone else.
And that’s the real threat. Not that we’ll be disrespected, unprotected, and neglected. But despite it all, we keep rising. Keep building. Keep singing.
That we refuse to stay in the place violence tried to keep us.
