Former Oklahoma police officer Daniel Holtzclaw was convicted Thursday on 18 of 36 charges of rape and sexual assault against 13 black women and one minor. The sentences recommended at the time the verdict was read amount to more than 250 years in prison; Holtzclaw will be formally sentenced in January 2016. It appears that the justice system has done its job. The media however, did not.
The case had flown under the radar of national mainstream news from the very beginning. Kirsten West Savali, an editor for The Root, says that was because Holtzclaw’s victims were not white women:
You may not know his name because his alleged victims are black. That fact has led to blink-or-you’ll-miss-it mainstream media coverage and either lukewarm interest or outright apathy from almost everyone who isn’t also a black woman.
Jermaine Terrell Starr has also written about why he thinks the case got so little attention from national media: A confluence of historic and contemporary reasons, from respectability politics in the African-American community to the hesitancy to cover sexual assault victims due to privacy concerns.
The invisibility of black women even prior to Holtzclaw’s trial led Kimberle Crenshaw, law professor and a founder of the African American Policy Forum, to push for the #SayHerName campaign, which specifically recognizes the ways in which black women experience state violence at the hands of police. Crenshaw talks about why the Holtzclaw trial is important and why we all should have known about it before the guilty verdicts were handed down in this video.
For Holtzclaw’s reaction to the verdicts and the recommended sentences, check the video below.