“Living Proof of Something So Terrible”

Painter's insights elucidate the gendered relations of power that inform the suppression of black women's narratives of sexual trauma. As Painter, Toni Morrison, and others have argued, this albatross has historically weighed heavily on the shoulders of black women writers. While the reparative work of "healing" must unfold within legal and socio-political realms, it should also include those traumatized black bodies that are "living proof of something so terrible". The traumatic "practices of inequality" found their way into the present, into a "post-civil rights" era-not through law, politics, or social custom per se but rather through the materiality of Hamer's black body. When histories and memories of the modern civil rights movement are mobilized to exaggerate the US nation-state's historical commitments to racial equality and when advocates of inequality routinely transmute history and memory into a mode of enacting power. Rather than a misplaced or ahistorical symbol signify the continued vitality of racial hierarchies nearly a century and a half.