“Those Who Commit the Murders Write the Reports”: Misogynoir, Weathering and the Disenfranchised Grief of Black Women Under the American Moral State

In her 1893 address “Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” Ida B. Wells observed that “those who commit the murders write the reports.” This article takes Wells’s indictment as a genealogical key for reading the United States as a moral state: one that establishes and justifies norms through its institutions and records, deciding whose suffering counts as a public wrong. Its objective is to examine how the state’s 2025–2026 actions affect Black women and how they resist, analyzing federal vital statistics and legal documents alongside independent data (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Violence Policy Center, NAPAWF–Ipsos) and reading from a womanist standpoint that names the harm as misogynoir, linking weathering to disenfranchised grief, hypothesizing that unrecognized grief is itself a chronic stressor. This article examines how Black women experience interconnected losses across five areas: health (Black women dying from pregnancy-related causes at 3.2 times the rate of White women), employment (widespread job losses and displacement), voting rights (greater difficulty proving racial discrimination in voting districts), historical memory (efforts to erase or undermine historical and scientific evidence), and violence (weakened police accountability). These losses accumulate as physiological wear, and the state that produces them disenfranchises the grief they cause. The article traces womanist practices of counter-reporting, collective mourning, and restorative rest, and recommends restoring federal data systems, disparate-impact enforcement, and the Voting Rights Act.