 |
| Breonna Taylor L.A. memorial June 2020 |
By Sikivu Hutchinson, From The Humanist
Last week was the first time in US history that
thousands have taken to the streets to demand justice for the life of a Black
woman. In cities across the nation, the Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name
movements converged to stand for twenty-six-year-old Breonna Taylor, murdered in
cold blood by Louisville, Kentucky, police in her own apartment.
The terrorist
attack on Taylor has elicited global outrage for and reckoning with the erasure
of Black women from mainstream narratives of police violence. After months of legal
silence, the September 23 grand jury decision exonerating three officers of
Taylor’s murder was a collective gut punch to her family, Black women, Black people,
and Black communities.
Only one officer, Brett Hankison, will stand trial for the charge of “wanton endangerment” for firing ten rounds of his gun that, according to the conclusions of the grand jury, struck the exterior of a nearby apartment. The charge is considered the lowest of four classes of felonies and carries a maximum sentence of five years and a minimum of one. This means that Hankison will more than likely serve less time than a dog killer.
Incidentally, it was announced yesterday that one of
the grand jurors filed a request to speak to the public and for the grand jury
recordings to be made public, contending that Kentucky Attorney General Daniel
Cameron misrepresented their deliberations and that they weren’t given the
option to indict the two officers who shot Taylor. Those recordings will be
released on September 30th.
Cameron’s sickening declaration that no one was to
blame for Taylor’s execution would have been inconceivable if one of Donald
Trump’s vaunted white “housewives” had died similarly in the white suburban
homes he has sworn to protect. Indeed, Taylor’s killing underscores the danger
that “being home” poses to Black women across the nation.
According to the African American Policy Forum, which spearheaded
the #SayHerName campaign in 2015, Black women and girls are often victimized by
police terrorism in their homes. This threat is magnified by the
disproportionate rates of domestic and intimate partner violence Black women
experience overall. In October 2019, Atatiana Jefferson was murdered at her home
in Fort Worth, Texas, by police officers conducting a “welfare check.” In 2010 seven-year-old
Aiyana Stanley-Jones was murdered during a
police raid of her Detroit home. In a brutal echo of the charge in Taylor’s
case, the officer who murdered Aiyanna was charged with the sole count of
“reckless endangerment” and ultimately acquitted.
Decades before, the 1979 murder of Eula Love by LAPD officers in the
front yard of her South Los Angeles home was one of the most prominent early
examples of domestic police terrorism against Black women. Her killing was a
watershed for local activism around police violence and excessive force. I
vividly recall attending a community protest and
call to action for Love when I was in elementary school. What her murder highlighted
to me as a Black girl growing up in Inglewood and South L.A. was how Black homes
could never be safe spaces insulated from state violence. Unlike white
women, Black women could never expect to receive “domestic” protection, nor be
shielded by presumptions about their feminine innocence.
Many Black women and girls have been in deep trauma
over the grand jury’s decision in the Breonna Taylor case. It has reopened profound
wounds that reflect the everyday dehumanization Black girls face. And it has
underscored the way Black women are socially constructed as racial others and
“fallen women” (to paraphrase bell hooks). The racist-sexist vilification
of Taylor as the girlfriend of a drug dealer who “got herself killed” only
reinforces this vicious narrative. It has been widely noted among Black folks
that white male murder suspects, from Dylan Roof to Kyle Rittenhouse, who go on
savage killing sprees are always treated with Emily Post-like care and civility
when apprehended. In a Covid summer that has seen the savage police murder of Dijon
Kizzee in Los Angeles three weeks ago for bicycling while Black, and
countless others for breathing while Black, the police state has become an even
more oppressive everyday presence in Black folks’ lives.
As a teen, I have vivid memories of guns being pulled on
me and my friends by police officers in Inglewood, California, when we were on
our way home one night. The police later claimed that our car backfired and they
mistook it for gunshots. In a matter of minutes we were surrounded by squad
cars as the police screamed at us to get out of the car. Panicked by being at
gunpoint, I struggled to open the front passenger door. My friend’s brother,
who was driving, was handcuffed and forced to lie on the ground. We managed to
escape with our lives, but, like so many other Black teens in similar
circumstances, a night of fun and frivolity had been transformed into one of
terror and trauma. Unlike so many other Black teens, we lived to tell.
Prior to being hired by the Louisville Metro Police
Department (LMPD) in 2003, Hankison received a scathing evaluation from his former supervisor
at the Lexington Police Department (in Lexington, Kentucky), where he’d worked
from 1999 until 2002. He had also been accused of sexual assault. Neither of
these issues discouraged the LMPD from hiring him. In any other profession
these deficits would be disqualifying, but for far too long the thin blue line
has shielded incompetent to murderous officers from due process and
accountability.
Reform measures that were promised as
part of Louisville’s $12-million settlement to Taylor’s family have been touted
as a first step in addressing the police department’s complicity in her death.
Yet, these reforms have to be negotiated with the police union, whose
notoriously corrupt practices enable officers to operate as though they’re
above the law. One of these reforms includes expanding records maintained in
officer personnel files. As critics have noted, piecemeal reforms fall well
short of addressing the core issue of how entrenched police-state terrorism led
to Taylor’s execution. Until the American police state is defunded and ultimately
abolished, being at home will continue to be a public health threat for Black
women and girls.
Sikivu
Hutchinson is the author of Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and
Heretical and the founder of the Women’s
Leadership Project Black feminist humanist program for girls of color in South
L.A. On October 17th, The WLP will be holding a #Standing4BlackGirls
community action in Los Angeles to end rape culture and sexual violence for
Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
