There is a Black woman named Roberta Elder. There isn’t much known about her life or how she grew to become a serial killer. She killed babies, children and husbands in pursuit of life insurance money, using arsenic to poison her victims food. Isn’t it disturbing that you may be thinking this was a fictional story? We have racialized violence so much to the very point that the perpetrators of violence become the center of the violence itself — even as a way to decenter certain victims of similar crimes. And in a white terroristic society, we can see clearly why a Black serial killer would go under the radar. Because on the one hand, Black people’s lives are discarded in every regard, but particularly in their deaths as victims of violence. So citing a story around a Black woman serial killer seems almost fictional, not because Black people dying at the hands of brutality is anything new — but because the function of serial killers has been to create a container for white people to diagnose and distance themselves from their own violence.
There is a whole market carved out to glamourize and pathologize stories of white male violence. How much money has been made selling the stories, the pathology of white serial violence? Stories of serial killing have been dominated by white men and we see a sort of culture of diagnosis hellbent on finding out how their innocence turned into violence, while Black and brown victims of serial violence in particular go unnoticed and ignored, be they from Black and brown serial murderers or white ones. In fact, in the case of well-known serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, there was a young Laotian boy, Konerak Sinthasomphone, who was running, bloody and naked from him. The police officers stopped him and “Officer Gabrish and two fellow officers accepted his [Dahmer’s] explanation that the youth was an adult and his lover and that the boy was drunk.” No way did they simply believe the story. They didn’t give a shit about a young brown boy who looked beaten and bruised and entrusted his life, whatever the outcome, to a white man just like them.
The presumption of white innocence has gotten more Black and brown people killed than any other type of violence in this country.
Serial violence by Black and brown people historically and presently going unnoticed is not only a function of apathy toward Black and brown victims, but acknowledges that serial killing by Black and brown people simply doesn’t serve the narrative that the American criminal consumption industry would like. Because perhaps if everybody is out here serial killing, regardless of race and ethnicity, then maybe all of that “black on black crime” serves no purpose when very clearly we have a representation of white on white crime. Though not it’s intention surely, serial killing highlights the fact that proximity to those who are similar to you is clearly a primary causation of violent crime, not any predisposition to violence as the American narrative would like to espouse. White people kill white people, more. Black people kill black people, more. It’s called location, location, location.
The term “serial killer” has it’s own connotation because of the focus on who is harmed and who dominant culture presumes to be innocent. White women harmed by white men, two groups presumed innocent and worthy of attention, make up the reason that Black and brown victims of serial violence are largely unseen and unknown.
The self serving nature of the industry of consuming serial killing entertainment allows for whiteness to do what it does best — center itself. And who dares question this disproportionate storytelling? White people are victims of violence and it’s certainly of interest as to why these white men did this and that. And it would be compelling if it didn’t further perpetuate the statistics of law enforcement focusing more on white victims than Black and brown ones. Serial killing as a part of our entertainment culture is no longer one of simple true crime. No. It’s existence exposes the absolute gap of empathy, care and long-term investigative work done on behalf of one group versus another, and definitely exposes the hyper-humanization of white killers and the dehumanization of Black and brown ones. Namely that, there are no specials, TV shows dedicated to dramatizing Black people serial killing other Black people as a way to diagnose their innocence turned guilty.
*enter crickets and the TV show You, the Following, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile*
Why would it be that we don’t know of any black women serial killers, besides Roberta Elder and Clementime Barnabet, whose stories aren’t of interest this million or perhaps billion dollar entertainment industry? Because the demographic she killed is far less appealing than the demographic of white men’s victims. White women. Telling stories of serial killers in the ways that they do, serve a double edged purpose of maintaining white male desirability, even if just for the purpose of desiring to them portrayed on television as well as avenging white women victims. It’s not interesting to the narrators to diagnose, dig deeper into how these Black women became serial killers, their back stories and certainly not their victims. They don’t ask because they don’t care. Instead, they tread with negligent assumptions about why Black people kill other Black people, all leading to self-hate, genetic disposition and historical stereotypes.
But where are the deeper analyses of white male rage against white women via serial killing and the correlation of that violence to white male rage against Black and brown people via mass murders? Could this type of killing relate to the foundations of violence, patriarchy and anti-Black racism in this country? Perhaps these killings are generationally passed down due to the violence of their forbearers? Do white people hate each other and this violence stems from their ancestral cultures that used barbarism as means for humiliation and punishment? Or maybe it’s a function of the deeper systematic roots of injustice. Or all of it.
I don’t tend to see any of these sorts of questions asked while the entertainment industry makes bank off of focusing solely on white criminality in a glamourizing light. *color me shocked*
Because the only justice that really matters to white media and systems is that that justice is served for white women and children. Serial killers have become a sort of fascination and the storytelling around them serves a function to garner attention for predominantly white victims of injustice while black victims of serial murders go unavenged and underserved in the justice system. Of course, justice can’t really be the term used if all of these murders are not highlighted in the same way. And the only reason they are not is because making a story that is glamourized and popular about a black murderer isn’t appealing because pathologizing a black person as innocent until turned violent or guilty is not in the best interests of American anti-Black narrative.
As a black woman, developing stories of a character of a black woman serial killer myself, I find it disturbing to read about a real black woman serial killer, mostly because I really thought only white men were serial killers for the longest time. But of course, being a serial killer has nothing to do with race. In our culture, it has to do with money, narrative, bias toward or against certain people, and the continuation of ignoring Black and brown victims of violence.
What strikes me as so interesting about Roberta Elder is the fact that there is no history about her. Serial killers often receive such detailed, well investigated backstories that offer a clue as to when these murders started and reasons for their violence. She was caught in 1952 at a time when several white male serial killers had received their own profiles of their serial violence. Of course, the only media that cared about her violence was black media, The Pittsburgh Courier. Perhaps it was lack of resources and funding or perhaps she was tight lipped that makes her so unidentifiable in her life. But even so, there is no known information about when she was born or even when she died. Black life receiving no attention, alive, dead, innocent, guilty, is a facet of the ways in which whiteness and white people and white institutions have already declared Black people less than human, less than worthy of recording and documentation, and certainly less than deserving of justice.
The numbers surrounding Black women and children going missing are staggering, devastating and vile. And this sort of ignoring black victims, ignoring when Black women and children go missing only piles on to the secrecy, mystery and fictional nature of Black serial killers. Because if no one is searching for black victims, then how will we ever find the serial killers who are hidden under a veil of apathy that white people and white “justice systems” created?
Black people have not only been serial killed by black people, of course. The case of Ed Buck who murdered two Black men in his apartment went under the radar, went unnoticed in his harming gay Black men because he was wealthy, white and a major contributor to the Democratic political establishment. He victimized countless other vulnerable men who and had his white male violence continued, who knows how many more Black men would be dead. Again: the presumption of white innocence has gotten more Black and brown killed than any other form of violence.
But one of the biggest factors of serial killing is the profiling. And the United States already has a profile for black people and definitely black women. The United States has a historical edict of which profiles are victims and which are criminals. So if the very people who are being victimized by serial violence are already viewed as criminals by a state that’s sole goal has been to kill, rape, lock up and destabilize that victim population, there is no mechanism for these victims to go into a new profile of deserving of justice. The “justice system” is serving it’s function. And the most glaring one is to further criminalize Black people while utilizing this justice process to avenge white people.
It would be amazing if I didn’t already have a scary in-depth understanding of how this country works. The idea of black on black violence still serves as a way for white people to differentiate themselves in the realm of particular types of violence, mostly gang related violence. And yet we have a glaring representation of white on white violence that has generated millions of dollars for entertainment all while still making white people feel superior to other themselves in the realm of violence.
Black people are dying by everyone’s hands. The most vulnerable being Black trans women, black children and black queer people. And Black people will keep dying if we keep allowing the mystification of one type of violence that has simultaneously been industrialized for the white men while also serving the purpose to deny black victims their day in the light of any type of recognition of the harm and fatal consequences they have endured.
It is quite clear to the dominant consumerist culture and the adjudicating one that the only reason for Black and brown criminality is just that — the generalizing and tropifying reasons only associated to being Black and being brown. But for white men, it seems to them that it’s far more complex than that. It’s at least complex enough for them to dig into their childhoods, reach into the recesses of the memories of those who knew them and even contrast their criminality to their humanity.
Black criminality gets turned into entertainment as a way to confirm while white criminality gets turned into entertainment as a way to understand. This is most certainly why we do not know about Roberta Elder and Clementine Barnabet as we do all of the white male serial killers I don’t need to list here because they are already coming up in your mind right now.
Nina Love is a writer, commentator, poet, thinker, and deeply curious about humanity and life. She is a self-propelled writer and if you’d like to support her writing, dreaming, resting and storytelling:
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