Lawrence Watkins: Remember female victims of violence on March 8

Twenty-three years ago, on this day, March 8, 1999, about 9:00 p.m., our daughter was stabbed in the back as she walked to her apartment in Brooklyn. That morning, Kofi Annan, then Secretary General of the United Nations, had declared March 8 to be a day to remember and oppose violence done to women. Amy was a social worker and had spent the afternoon meeting with a group of women who were victims of spousal abuse. She had literature in her pockets that concerned her work. Her murder was the aggression of three young men, a mugging gone bad, with a long kitchen knife severing her aorta. She lost consciousness as she fell literally on her face, her arms pinned under her.

Recently I saw a sticker on a pickup window, “White Lives Matter.” We had little need to be reminded. Of course White lives matter, they have always mattered. We Whites were born into the upper caste, our skin and features a clear sign of status. I know what the sticker meant: Black lives don’t matter more than White ones. African Americans, it says, should stop saying Black Lives Matter because that’s a put-down to Whites. And to make this point even sharper—lest anyone forget—the pick-up window displayed a Confederate flag, the symbol of White power in the Civil War and ever since among those who lament The Lost Cause.