Following news of Erica Garner’s death, Kahana Cauley’s op ed in the New York Times provides numerous examples–from slavery, lynching, imprisonment, and the child protection system–of how the white supremacist system that governs the United States has afflicted and destroyed black families. “Black families are forced to attempt to prove our humanity over and over again to a legal and administrative system that doesn’t seem to believe in it, all the while hoping that we won’t have to lose our family members, or if we do, that other families won’t have to suffer the same pain.”