After reading Gregg's post last week about "Orange is the New Black," I watched an episode of Melissa Harris-Perry's talk show on MSNBC, about OITNB. Transgender actress Laverne Cox spoke about the case of Cece McDonald.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/cece-mcdonald-transgender-hate-crime-murder

This case brings up many of the same issues that Cheryl Hicks examines in "'Bright and Good Looking Colored Girl': Black Women's Sexuality and 'Harmful Intimacy' in Early-Twentieth-Century New York." Hicks writes about how working-class Black women's romantic and social lives were under surveillance (p. 149). They were often picked up by police -- sometimes just for walking in the streets while Black. They were commonly charged with vagrancy, disorderly conduct and prostitution (p. 420), and once arrested, racist and heterosexist prison officials hoped to reform them and strengthen their moral character. 

I see echoes of this history in Cece McDonald's case. According to the Huffington Post, 

   "CeCe McDonald, a transgender woman ... was controversially sentenced to 41 months in prison for second degree manslaughter after allegedly defending herself against a racist and transphobic attack." (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/13/laverne-cox-cece-mcdonald_n_4588838.html)

Recently, on Jan 13, McDonald was released from a men’s prison in St. Cloud, MN, after serving time for surviving a violent, racist, transphobic attack. 

Her story is moving. Here, her support group describes what happened:

   "Around 12:30 am on June 5, 2011, CeCe was walking to the grocery store with some friends, all of them young, African American, and LGBTIQ or allied. As they passed a local bar, the Schooner Tavern, a group of older, white people who were standing outside the bar’s side door began hurling racist and transphobic slurs at them, without provocation.  They called CeCe and her friends ‘faggots,’ ‘niggers,’ and ‘chicks with dicks,’ and suggested that CeCe was ‘dressed as a woman’ in order to ‘rape’ Dean Schmitz, one of the attackers. When CeCe approached the group and told them that her crew would not tolerate hate speech, one of the women said, “I’ll take you bitches on,” and then smashed her glass into CeCe’s face. She punctured CeCe’s cheek all the way through, lacerating her salivary gland. A fight ensued, during which one of the attackers, Dean Schmitz, was fatally stabbed.

"CeCe was the only person arrested that night.  She was briefly taken to the hospital where she received 11 stitches in her cheek. While she was still suffering both physically and mentally from this traumatic incident, she was left alone in a room for three hours and then interrogated, and then placed in solitary confinement at the Hennepin County men’s jail." (http://supportcece.wordpress.com)