Cerina Fairfax is dead. Her estranged husband, Justin Fairfax—former lieutenant governor of Virginia, a man whose career was built on the votes and trust of Black constituents—is believed to have shot her before turning the gun on himself. In the hours after the news broke, when the only proper response was grief for the woman who had been killed and fury at the system that helped kill her, a segment of Black leadership made a different choice. They rushed to the timeline to post about what a great man Justin Fairfax had been. How they would remember his contributions. How his legacy mattered. Some of those posts have since been deleted, the way one wipes away a stain that makes company uncomfortable. The stain was the reminder that a wife-murderer is a wife-murderer, and that those who burnish his image in the immediate aftermath of her killing are doing the work of the apparatus that killed her.
Across the country, the machinery that produces these killings grinds on. In Coral Springs, Florida, police were called five times to the home of Nancy Metayer Bowen. Five times. Stephen Bowen walked in and murdered her. In Shreveport, Louisiana, Shaneiqua Elkins sought a divorce and her husband Shamar shot and killed eight of her children and a cousin before killing himself. The arithmetic is not in dispute. The Violence Policy Center documented last year: Black women are two and a half times more likely to be murdered by men than white women. The CDC’s 2024 data shows they are 13 percent of the population and nearly 30 percent of the intimate-partner homicide victims. This is not a statistical anomaly drifting through a neutral system. It is a structural output.
A society that prioritizes the privacy of the male home, guarantees the unchecked flow of firearms into domestic disputes, and treats patriarchal entitlement as a cultural given will produce exactly these bodies. The beneficiaries are the men who wield the entitlement; the diffuse cost is borne entirely by Black women. The structure protects the perpetrator’s privacy and the perpetrator’s access to the means of murder. Guns make the murder easy. Misogyny makes it desirable. The state makes it legally permissible to hold the gun until the moment the trigger is pulled.
The public narrative moves immediately to deflection. Justin Fairfax’s mental and emotional health reportedly deteriorated after sexual-assault allegations. Shamar Elkins checked himself into a VA hospital. The diagnosis of “mental illness” is deployed to obscure the structural mechanics of the violence. It deserves a specific kind of contempt. The data on untreated depression, VA waitlists, and post-allegation breakdowns is real, but it does not absolve the choice to shoot. None of it separates the act of murder from the entitlement that made him believe her life was his to take. The mental-health alibi is made available to Black men who kill Black women because it serves the same function as the carceral-state alibi: it shifts the blame from the killer and his enablers onto the system’s failure to fix him, while letting the system that armed him and the community that excused him off the hook. Misogynoir is the constant. The excuses are interchangeable.
The deflection is not only clinical; it is communal. The tributes to Justin Fairfax—the posts, the testimonials, the deliberate separation of the man they knew from the man who had just murdered his wife—are not an anomaly. They are the public face of a protective reflex that kills Black women. The argument is familiar: the criminal justice system is built to destroy Black men, so any consequence for a violent Black man is a victory for the carceral state. The argument is true. The state that locks up Black boys for drug possession is the same state that shrugs when Black women are shot. The prison system is not the answer to intimate-partner violence. That does not make the refusal to hold killers accountable any less of a betrayal. The betrayal is structural: by treating every consequence for a violent Black man as a victory for the state, we ensure that the most vulnerable people in our community—the women who are being beaten and shot and killed—are the ones who pay the cost. Malcolm X warned that the field Negro’s prayer for the master’s house to burn was not an expression of malice; it was a recognition that the survival of the master’s image was costing the field its future. You cannot protect the community by protecting the man who is actively destroying it from the inside. When the community refuses to name the violence in the name of solidarity, it becomes an accomplice to the slaughter. The community closes its ranks and the woman dies inside the circle. Malcolm warned never to take your case to the criminal. We must stop treating state indifference as a reason to excuse the violent man in our own family, our own neighborhood, our own timeline. The late King, eulogizing the four children killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, insisted that the more important inquiry is into the system, the way of life, the philosophy that produced the murderers. That is the precise analytical move this crisis demands.
Then there is the gun. The weapon used most often to murder Black women is a handgun, and the handgun is the product of an industry that has spent two generations engineering a legal regime in which the gun is easier to obtain than mental-health care. Shamar Elkins checked himself into a VA hospital because he needed help; he was released and still had a firearm. The gun lobby’s preferred sequence—thoughts and prayers, then talk of mental illness, then the insistence that nothing can be done—plays out on a loop, and the loop never mentions that the gun is the common factor. When the public narrative settles on mental illness or carceral bias, the gun lobby’s favorite cover story writes itself—a tragedy of untreated depression, not a policy choice to keep handguns legally available to men with histories of violence. You cannot be serious about stopping Black femicide without confronting the industry that supplies the ammunition, the lobbying apparatus that blocks every restriction, and the politicians who take their checks. The men in the barbershops and the group chats who hear a woman’s name and respond by asking what she did to provoke him are the retail arm of the same machinery.
The wicked-problem framing applies with full force. The communities most vulnerable to intimate partner violence are also the communities most vulnerable to the predations of the police. Intervening with state force risks handing a struggling mother over to a child protective system that will strip her of her children, or handing a survivor over to a carceral system that will criminalize the victim when she fights back. The apparatus designed to protect is also an apparatus of capture. Naming the wickedness as wickedness is the operational starting point. The root cause of the violence is not the existence of the police; it is the patriarchal control over Black women’s bodies, the economic dependency that traps them in abusers’ homes, and the cultural permission granted to men to resolve emotional disputes with lethal force. The intervention point is at the level of the threat: the financial independence that allows escape, the secure housing that guarantees survival outside the house of the abuser, and the community accountability that names the violence without handing the woman over to a carceral state that will only punish her. It is the community that must build the protective infrastructure the state refuses to provide and the state refuses to fund.
The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice by itself. It is held straight by the weight of the guns and the silence of the institutions. The arc bends under the force of nothing except the hands that push it. If those hands are busy penning tributes to executed wives’ husbands, the arc bends away from justice. If those hands are dialing the number of a police department that has already failed to protect a woman five times, the arc bends away from justice. If those hands are writing checks to politicians who protect the gun industry, the arc bends away from justice. We cannot claim to be building anything worth calling a community while we canonize the men who murder our sisters. The Beloved Community is not built on the graves of Black women. It is built when the community, the state, and the conscience align to say that the life of the woman in the house is the measure of our shared humanity. The only question that remains is whether the men who have spent years claiming to stand for the community will finally stand for the women in it who are dying. The evidence of the past year—the calls for care resources that go underfunded, the community reeling from a shooting that murdered eight children—says the answer so far is no. The work of this column, from this day forward, is to make that answer lethal to their reputations until it changes.