Tumblr, in particular, is designed to facilitate the spread of content through its reblogging feature and as such, is a natural extension of the GIF phenomenon which is a file not only almost immediately divorced from its own specific provenance but from the very concept of provenance.

A portal known as the “Door of No Return,” leading to the slave ships, offered the forlorn captives a last glimpse of home, before they were sown to the wind and sold in the West. For nearly four centuries, this traffic continued, seeding the populations of the Caribbean, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Central and North America, and draining societies of their prime populations while fomenting civil conflict among them in order to more effectively cull their people. On the high seas, the vessels jettisoned bodies in such terrible numbers that the poet Amiri Baraka once wrote, “At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean there’s a railroad made of human bones.”

Women of color and poor women face a double bind in their historic unequal protection by, and justifiable suspicion of, the U.S. legal system.

Since I published this piece, so many people have begun to share their own, different, and equally important experiences; I wanted to bring together some of those perspectives (lightly edited for length and clarity) to keep the conversation going.