How ‘Is God Is’ Is Changing the Conversation About Black Women and Domestic Violence

NEW ORLEANS — When Gretta Gordy Gardner was a prosecutor, she asked a domestic violence victim’s mother why she had testified for the man who hurt her daughter. 

The answer stopped her cold: It’s better to have a man who beats you than no man at all.

“That made me understand the survivor so much more; her culture, growing up the way she did. But I think the thing with justice is — it can depend,” she said. 

It’s something that sits with her till this day as the chief legal and program officer at Ujima, The National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community.  

The question of what justice means has never had a single answer, Gardner said. She argued that society insisting on one has always been part of the problem.

“Only the survivor can say what justice is. And we have to honor that. And that’s really hard,” she said. 

The organization has spent the past several months convening conversations in cities across the country in the wake of high-profile killings of Black women and children. The Shreveport, Louisiana, killings of eight children and a near-simultaneous murder-suicide in Virginia reopened long-standing debates about who protects Black women and children from domestic violence. In the Virginia case, former politician Justin Fairfax allegedly shot his estranged wife, Dr. Cerina Fairfax, before killing himself. 

In the months since, cases of Black women being killed by their partners have continued to stack up, making visible a crisis advocates say has been hiding in plain sight for decades.

On a recent night in New Orleans, Gardner and others gathered for a screening of Is God Is — Aleshea Harris’ revenge play, now adapted for film. It was tense from the opening frame. 

Call it catharsis. Call it offensive. Call it what it was: a room full of Black women, many of whom had survived violence themselves, watching two Black women reclaim it, and refusing to be polite about it.

The story follows twin sisters, Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), who were burned nearly to death as children by their father (Sterling K. Brown) and left to survive on their own. When their dying mother (Vivica A. Fox) resurfaces and gives them his name and location, they go looking for him. Not for answers, and not necessarily for closure. 

When the twins finally find him — and engage in a bloody battle with him — the audience reacted to the gore in a way that society has deemed unacceptable. Some clapped, others made noises in approval. In that moment, the carefully constructed belief of how survivors are supposed to respond to their own pain came apart a little.

That reaction is the subject of an ongoing and uncomfortable conversation in domestic violence advocacy circles: What does survivor agency actually look like when survivors get to define it themselves? 

For Harris, telling a story about two Black women who put their fate into their own hands was the only option.

“It would feel like a sin against myself not to center these women and give them agency,” the writer and director told Capital B before the screening. “A lot of the impetus for writing it was my frustration with that policing of Black women, with that messaging to Black women and girls, especially — that we’re meant to be quiet about these things. And to suffer in silence is to gain some kind of virtue.”

Gardner said the resources for survivors have always been thin. Now, they are thinner.

There is no single system that has ever been built to meet the crisis, she explained. There are young survivors who turn to friends and family; older women who turn to churches; women whose abusers are beloved in the community, whose mothers testify for the defense, and whose own children are used as leverage against them leaving. 

For decades, the dominant framework has asked victims to channel their trauma into the language of recovery: therapy, forgiveness, and forward motion. What Is God Is dares to ask, and what the audience of mainly Black women dared to answer, is whether rage, revenge, and the refusal to be redeemed on anyone else’s timeline counts, too.

The screening, which included a panel with Harris, was organized by Ujima as part of an ongoing series of community gatherings designed to move the conversation about domestic violence from the headlines into something more durable — and more honest. 

Ujima situated the room with advocates who could connect viewers with resources. Breathing exercise preceded the conversation, led by a trauma-informed facilitator.

Louisiana, where the film was shot and where the screening was held, is one of the worst states in the country for violence against Black women, a reality that has been freshly visible in recent months following a high-profile mass killing in Shreveport. The goal of the evening, Ujima’s organizers were clear, was not to valorize the violence on the screen. It was to open space for survivors to define, on their own terms, what safety, accountability, and justice actually mean — whether that looks like prosecution, community-based restorative practices, or something the legal system doesn’t have a name for yet.

Two months before the screening, a man named Shamar Elkins shot and killed eight children — seven of them his own — a few hours away in Shreveport. His wife, the mother of four of the children, was among the wounded. The incident was classified as a domestic violence event and became the deadliest mass shooting in the country in more than two years. Neither the White House nor the president issued a public statement.

And just a month before, a few days removed from her high school graduation, 18-year-old Ra’Mya Rene Silvan was shot and killed in New Orleans by her 20-year-old ex-boyfriend outside of her family home. 

Harris said she didn’t plan to film in New Orleans as this crisis was exploding. The script was written years ago, born from a lifetime of accumulated “knowing.”

“The problem is so prevalent and so ongoing that even though I wrote this a while ago — it’s so present and so timely. Some of us are always thinking about this,” she said. “It’s like news, but that’s because these women who suffered these tragedies — their stories were brought to the fore. I’m grateful for that. But there are so many other stories that weren’t.”

That invisibility is part of what Ujima was organized to disrupt. Founded to address domestic violence, sexual assault, and community violence specifically in the Black community, the organization has spent the past several months convening conversations in cities across the country in the wake of the Shreveport and Virginia killings. 

As this violence has made headlines, advocates like Gardner have worked to bring forward alternative justice work that although it doesn’t have a clean label, it has a growing body of evidence. Restorative justice is a community-based process that centers the survivor’s voice, brings in trusted community members, and asks harm-doers to take direct accountability rather than ceding all authority to the state. It has shown measurable results in domestic violence contexts. 

In one model Gardner pointed to, a “circle of peace” brings survivors, trusted loved ones, and the person who did harm into the same room to answer a single question: What does each person need to move forward? Hybrid programs using these circles alongside other interventions have been shown to cut domestic violence crimes roughly in half compared to standard police response alone, and they have been especially promising in communities of color, where mistrust of the criminal justice system runs deep.

Researchers who have specifically studied the model for Black women survivors have found that restorative approaches do something that mandatory arrest and prosecution often cannot: They actively encourage survivors to voice what they want, incorporate those wishes into the solution, and honor their multiple loyalties — to themselves, their children, and their communities — that make leaving or prosecuting a partner so rarely simple. 

The criminal justice system, as Gardner put it, tends to label people and stop there. It was not, she suggested, designed to hold the kind of complexity the film had just spent two hours depicting. That work, she said, falls to the community. 

But the question of why that work falls to the community at all — why Black women have been left to save themselves — has roots that go deeper than any policy gap.

Historian Darlene Clark Hine first identified what she called the “culture of dissemblance” to describe how, in the aftermath of slavery and its abundant sexual violence, Black women developed a strategy of silence about their inner lives — including their pain — as a form of self-protection. 

Over generations, that survival strategy calcified into a cultural mandate. The myth of the “Strong Black Woman” is an archetype that researchers have traced directly to slavery-era controlling images of Black women as unbreakable, unfeeling, and immune to suffering. In practice, the archetype functions as a trap. 

Studies on domestic violence and the Strong Black Woman schema have found that it causes survivors to suppress their emotional responses rather than process them, and to resist seeking help out of fear that doing so marks a personal failure. 

“People have said to me, ‘You’re stronger than that, you’re a fighter — how did this happen to you?’” said Tamu King, a domestic violence survivor and founder of The Changed Mind, in an interview earlier this year. “I explain to them that domestic violence is about power and control. It has nothing to do with the strength of a victim.” 

The insistence that Black women absorb and transcend violence, rather than name it or rage at it, is not a cultural accident, advocates have made clear.

Is God Is has earned near-universal critical acclaim and brought the discussion back into the culture. It has been described by Variety as a film that “prioritizes amoral catharsis over moral righteousness” and by audiences as “a compelling and ferocious poem on sisterhood.” But the version of it that screened in New Orleans on a Tuesday evening in July — with a trauma facilitator at the front of the room asking survivors to breathe — felt like more than that. 

“I had to make this story to sort of try and excise my own rage and my own anger. I needed to expand, move beyond that,” Harris said. “I needed these girls. I needed their fierce love for one another. I needed them to fight for themselves and each other, not for a man.”

Read More: 

• She Got 27 Years for Killing Her Abuser. Judge Rules Oklahoma’s Survivors Act Won’t Free Her.
• What Recent Killings of Black Women Reveal About a Growing Crisis
• After 8 Children Die, Survivors Reveal How Louisiana Normalizes Partner Violence
• For Black Women, ‘Diddy’ Verdict Is a Reminder of Justice Denied

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