Why black women’s stories of encounters with the police are missing from official and unofficial accounts of police violence

In The Secrets of Silence, Shannon Malone Gonzalez investigates how the policing of black women is tied to the policing of their stories. Over a period of four years, Malone Gonzalez conducted intimate life-history interviews with black women about their encounters, listening to those who had never shared their stories before, had never even been asked to, or had tried repeatedly to speak to those around them to no avail. They all described the unspoken or whispered connections in the ways officers and communities socially control black women to put them “in their place.” Centering black women’s searches for recognition of their violent encounters with police and other people in their lives, Malone Gonzalez examines the pervasive and often invisible forms of everyday policing that render black women’s stories missing from official data, headlines, and community conversations.

Articulating what she calls “the space between” recognition of black women’s stories and their encounters, Malone Gonzalez shows that policing is as much about silence as it is about violence. Black women’s silenced stories, then, provide a way to name and critique the institutional and intimate forms of policing that break and bend black social relations into a complex web of social control. Drawing on abolition feminism and black knowledge traditions, she envisions storytelling—and listening—as a way to reimagine, remember, and reconnect in solidarity and worldbuilding.

“This is far more than a book about policing. It’s a book about what we refuse to see, and who we refuse to hear. With profound care and ethnographic power, Malone Gonzalez brings us into the silences black women carry—and how those silences are structured, sanctioned, and survived.”—Forrest Stuart, author of Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy

“The Secrets of Silence is a powerfully, beautifully, and carefully written exploration of black women’s experiences with police violence. Malone Gonzalez dives into the unrelenting, the traumatic, and the enduring grief with an ethic of care and an attention to rigor that is simply masterful. It is a gutting and necessary intervention into how we understand policing and state violence.”—Treva Lindsey, author of America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice

“In deep dialogue with black feminist scholars and activists, The Secrets of Silence fills critical gaps in sociology and public discourse with the lived truths of black women and girls. With lyrical clarity and rigorous research, Shannon Malone Gonzalez brings their voices to the center, revealing how everyday police violence is entangled with broader systems of social control. This powerful book is not only a compelling corrective but also an inspiring invitation to reimagine justice.”—Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body

“The Secrets of Silence is quite original, paying attention to policing in a holistic, intersectional, and feminist way. Black women’s and girls’ narratives about police encounters allow us to not only see the social control of policing, but also that silence is socially constructed in black women’s policing experiences. Silence is not an absence, but rather a type of narrative feature that tells how policing punishes entire communities, not just the young men in them.”—Saida Grundy, author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man

“The Secrets of Silence is compelling. With painstaking care for victims and survivors of police brutality and through astonishing revelations, Malone Gonzalez brilliantly explains why women and girls’ heartbreaking narratives about police and state violence are absent from news headlines, official reports, and public conversations.”—LaShawn Harris, author of Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy

“Secrets of Silence is a beautiful, bold, and disruptive intervention—an honest, tender, and imaginative model for black feminist sociological theorizing and methodology par excellence. Shannon Malone Gonzalez deploys ethnographic methods to unmute the everyday policing and violence that sustains black women’s intersectional vulnerabilities to harm by officers and others in public, private, and the liminal spaces between. With clarity and conviction, this text offers a necessary callout and a collective gathering, reaffirming our commitment to liberation and the transformative power of black feminist thought.”—Whitney Pirtle, coeditor of Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis

“Meticulously researched and deeply thoughtful, The Secrets of Silence presents a timely, in-depth, and story-driven look at the ‘deeper processes at work within our social world’ by chronicling black women’s experiences with police violence. Through her analysis of the impact of policing on black women and the impact it has on these women’s lives, Malone Gonzalez reveals that black women’s stories have not only been ignored but also invisibilized—erased by our nation’s refusal to recognize and take heed of black women’s pain. This study is urgent and necessary, analytically savvy, and deeply caring. We must listen to black women. Our society depends on it.”—Christen A. Smith, author of Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil