thecurvature:

If a bunch of white supremacists start shouting racist and transphobic slurs at you and then smash your face in with a glass, running a way is a completely reasonable response.

But here’s the problem with it: if you run away, you’re calculating on them not chasing you. If they do chase you, they’ve got you from behind, and you are at an instant disadvantage in defending yourself.

In that moment when the glass hit her face, CeCe had to make a split-second decision as to whether these obviously-violent people who assaulted her out of nowhere and as a result of pure hate were likely to let her get away, or whether this was it and she had to fight for her life right here and now.

That choosing the latter has made her a criminal shows that the legal system’s definition of “reasonable” is inherently white supremacist and cissupremacist. A young Black trans woman was expected to gamble with her life rather than value it and defend it. And the only people to whom it seems “reasonable” that violent white supremacist transphobes who have already attacked her posed no credible threat to her life has to be either white or cis.

There’s no doubt that if the parties had been reversed here, CeCe’s still the one who would have been arrested. (Just like there’s little doubt that had he lived, Trayvon Martin would have been the one who was sitting in a jail cell.) After all, it’s perfectly “reasonable” in a white supremacist, cissupremacist legal system to fear a Black trans woman. But a cis white dude, no matter what he’s done? Not so much.