Ashanti Carmon Was a Beauty, Too Swiftly Lost
She found a way out of no way and was loved for it
This story is part of Know Their Names, a collection of articles illuminating and celebrating the lives of Black Trans women.
Instead of practicing for her driver’s test, making plans for junior prom, or exploring universities to attend after her high school graduation, 16-year-old Ashanti Carmon was choosing authenticity over assimilation. At that tender age, Ashanti, brave and resolute, found herself resisting pressure to repress her gender expression.
She left home in order to become the woman she wanted to be.
The journey was difficult. Ashanti didn’t have much support in the way of family. Her mother was reportedly deceased and news reports later disclosed that she didn’t have a close relationship with her father. Others in her family drifted away from her for embracing her identity as a young Transgender woman.
But what Ashanti lost with her birth family at the age of 16, she found with her supportive chosen family by the time she turned 20, and later, as she approached 30, with a true love that sustained her.
“I would tell her ‘Girl you’re so pretty! You should be somewhere modeling or something,’ and she would just grin and laugh. That smile. It never changed. It was always the same.”
“Ashanti wasn’t on my caseload, but she would visit some of the girls at the drop-in center,” says Earline Budd, a case manager at HIPS, Helping Individual People Survive, a nonprofit organization that provides education, advocacy, and harm reduction resources for sex workers in the D.C. community.
Ashanti cared about the young girls at HIPS, says Earline, who describes Ashanti as “vibrant, young, and full of life.”
“She was beautiful and I used to always tell her that whenever she would come in,” says Earline. “I would tell her ‘Girl you’re so pretty! You should be somewhere modeling or something,’ and she would just grin and laugh. That smile. It never changed. It was always the same.”
That smile, back when she was 16, may have helped Ashanti find her friend Nialah Dash, who became the yin to her yang. As a teen living on her own, Ashanti eventually took to working on Eastern Avenue, a street on the border between northeast Washington, D.C., and Maryland, where many engage in sex work as a means to survive, according to the Washington Post. There, she found refuge among other disenfranchised Trans women as they worked the streets.
Ashanti and Nialah became inseparable, according to the Post. They even traveled together, and struggled together, to find affordable housing in a city known for its high rents. They grew up and grew older.
However, despite this friendship, and many others, Ashanti resolutely decided to take care of herself on her own terms. Ashanti worked at fast-food restaurants and other gigs but still sometimes returned to the streets to make ends meet.
“Ashanti was very independent and kept things to herself,” Ruby Corado, the founder of Casa Ruby, a Transgender organization and LGBTQ support center in Washington, D.C, tells ZORA. “I was upset when I learned Ashanti was looking for work. I wish she would have told me. She could have had a job at Casa Ruby.”
Even so, Ashanti tried to make it work by sticking with Nialah. “Some days we couldn’t pay for the room,” Nialah told the Post. “We were going through hard times because we didn’t know where we were going to live. We would sit together in the car and cry.”
The struggle of street life, paired with societal abandonment, finally began taking a toll on Ashanti. And that’s something Ruby intimately knows about. That’s why she is currently working on securing a building to create permanent housing for Trans women who share common housing circumstances with the teen.
“The housing vouchers the city provides don’t link to good housing,” she explains. “They put the girls in neighborhoods that are too dangerous, so good jobs are a better way to help.”
Despite her experiences in her formative years, Ashanti was described by close friend Donshia Predeoux as a beautiful, tall, jovial woman, with “a bright smile that would change the day you were having. She took every opportunity she could to lift up other girls.”
Donshia also recalls that occasionally, Ashanti reached out to her grandmother when she needed help. But getting help meant temporarily de-transitioning. Ashanti would have to wear a hat to cover her long hair and gloves to conceal her long, gel-polished nails — often embellished with glitter.
Outside of those fraught moments, the pair had fun.
“My most memorable time with Ashanti was when we went to Madame Tussauds wax museum, took pictures with all the actors, actresses, and singers, and pretended we were acting right along with them,” Donshia says.
And, when they had a bit of money to spend, they loved going to the beauty supply store to shop for hair. Donshia says Ashanti would always say, “Ma, I want my hair braided!”
While Ashanti sometimes received economic support from those who expected her to be who they wanted her to be, Ashanti’s social support came from community members and a special someone who would soon afford her the opportunity to experience a love she’d only dreamed of.
In 2013, sparks flew when a mutual friend introduced Ashanti to Phillip Williams. They fell in love. The Post reported that, in a Facebook status posted nearly two years later, Phillip professed his love for Ashanti, stating “it’s a good feeling for us because there’s someone out [there] for somebody.” More recently, Phillip spoke directly to Ashanti via a heartbreaking statement to WUSA-Ch.9, a Washington D.C., CBS affiliate: “I will love you forever.”
That love is what brought them to make a home together, even if it was sometimes hard to pay the bills. And those bills — and issues attaining a safe job with a livable income in the United States — are some of the biggest hurdles that Black Trans people have to deal with today.
Black Trans women tend to experience severe poverty disproportionate to other race and gender identities within the LGBTQ community at large. This is largely in part due to their experiences with transmisogynoir, which exists at the intersections of racism, sexism, and transphobia. According to a 2009 report released by the National LGBTQ Task Force, the National Black Justice Coalition, and the National Center for Transgender Equality, 34% of the participants reported their household income as being slightly under $10,000 per year. Therefore, it’s not uncommon for Trans people to resort to sex work to avoid falling back into the bottomless pit of poverty.
“She was there for her survival,” Donshia recalls.
But more than anything, Ashanti desired safety, stability, and an opportunity to realize aspirations for her life. One of her aspirations was to be married. In the words of her favorite Beyoncé song “Single Ladies,” “if you like it then you should’ve put a ring on it.” Phillip did exactly that. Phillip asked Ashanti for her hand in marriage a month before she was tragically murdered.
Phillip told the Post that life had become much more stable for Ashanti, who was recognized for her exemplary hard work at Dunkin’ and named employee of the month. Phillip said Ashanti only returned to Eastern Avenue to pull clients on the weekends to supplement their combined income.
Such work, everyone knew, was fraught with peril. Her friend Nialah had already said she’d been robbed at gunpoint multiple times. But Ashanti needed to make ends meet.
Still, she put personal relationships before the hustle and just the day before, Phillip and Ashanti had gone out to dinner and a movie before he went to work. Ashanti later hung out with friends.
Within 24 hours, the streets claimed Ashanti for their own. She was shot multiple times and pronounced dead on the scene in the 5000 block of Jost Street in Prince George’s County — not too far from the edges of Washington D.C. It was Saturday, March 30, just one day before the Transgender Day of Visibility. Her murder rocked the D.C. community and many were inconsolable. Police are still investigating.
Phillip, her fiance, strongly spoke out against the tragedy.
“Until I leave this earth, I’m going to continue on loving her in my heart, body, and soul,” Phillip said in this interview with NBC4 Washington out of Washington D.C. “She did not deserve to leave this earth so early, especially in the way that she went out. She did not deserve that.”
