I'm Kimberly Crenshaw, and this is Season 2 of Intersectionality Matters,

the podcast that brings intersectionality to life by exploring the hidden dimensions of today's most pressing issues,

from Say Her Name and Me Too to the War on Civil Rights and the Global Rise of Fascism.

This idea travelogue lifts up the work of leading activists, artists, and scholars

and helps listeners understand politics, the law, social movements, and even their own lives in deeper, more nuanced ways.

Let me try to describe Gina Bess, for those of you who haven't met her.

She enters a room adorned in white.

Her long hair is wrapped elegantly in a white headwrap.

She's gracious.

She's smiling.

She's bringing spiritual energy in a small suitcase that brims with treasures, crystals, candles, sage, and other good-smelling things.

And as she unpacks each item, she carefully places them around a small table, saving the center

of what is now becoming a display for the most precious

cargo in the suitcase, a stuffed toy, a well-worn media book, and a framed photo of her

daughter handsomely photographed in her navy uniform. It's only the sharp intake of her breath when she pulls her hands away from the photo

that the excruciating pain that she carries is revealed.

It's the sound of a broken heart that radiates underneath her regal demeanor.

It's a posture that's at odds with the agonizing longing and the barely containable rage that convulsed just underneath Gina's surface.

She is the mother of India Kager, a Black woman killed on September 5th, 2015 by Virginia Police.

It's a story of police killing that is so savage, so senseless, so sudden, so

unnecessary, and so unjustified, that it leaves terrified witnesses to the story, knowing that in this quasi-police

state in which most black people live, anything can happen to any of us at any time.

...