Black women are increasingly targets of mass incarceration and reentry. Black feminist writers call attention to scholars’ need to intersectionalize analyses around how Black women interface with state systems and social institutions. This study foregrounds narratives from Black women to understand their plight while navigating reentry through a phenomenological approach. Through semi-structured interviews, narratives are analyzed using critical frameworks that authentically unearths the lived realities of participants. Themes reveal that for Black mothers, reentry can be just as criminalizing as engaging crime itself. These women face dire consequences around their mothering that induce them into tremendous bouts of trauma. Existing interlocking oppressions enflame newfound barriers due to their contact with the criminal legal system—yet they survive via divergent forms of resilience.

This work develops and conceptualizes a new theory, Post Traumatic Slave Master Syndrome, that is utilized to critically correlate historic patterns of lynching Black women to contemporary violent state (actor) responses to Black women’s resistance, specifically relating to the neo-lynching of Korryn Gaines and Sandra Bland. This work deviates from the tradition of analyzing the history and contemporary effects of racism and white supremacy, patriarchy, lynching, policing, and state-sponsored violence from the perspective of the effects upon the victim and instead critiques how white supremacy affects the perpetrator. This chapter contributes to ensuring that Black women resisters continue to #SayHerName.

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