“Say Her Name” is a phrase that dates back to the 2015 death of activist Sandra Bland in police custody, but for millions of Americans, that phrase will always call to mind Breonna Taylor. The September 23rd grand jury decision not to charge anyone in her death felt like exactly what it was—a system refusing to hear the 26 million people who have taken to the streets opposing systemic racism and police terror for the sake of American democracy and basic human rights. As a frontline fighter in the COVID-19 pandemic, working as an EMT in two emergency rooms in Louisville, Kentucky, having just bought a new car and planning to enter nursing school, Taylor embodied the very heart of America being stolen away.
As a Black woman aspiring to make a better life, Taylor stands for the hope of America despite its long history of injustice. Alongside Indigenous Americans, African Americans as a group have paid the highest price to build this constitutional democracy, and Black women have suffered horrendous abuse in every era of our history. At the same time, no group is better known for building community and fighting for a better world than Black women, from the abolitionist fighters to the Civil Rights Movement to the struggles of today.
Taylor’s death shows how tied today’s policing remains to its roots in the slave patrols of the 18th century. The police who raided her home at 12:30 a.m. on a Friday morning in March, blindly firing 32 shots without even knowing who was in their paths, showed no regard for the working people sleeping in their homes in her apartment complex. Rightfully, much has been made of the fact that the one officer fired was charged with shooting into a white family’s apartment while not being charged for firing into the home of another Black family. However, that very discrepancy shows that the community in those apartments was of mixed races, working people being denied the rights supposedly guaranteed to every American.
The fact that Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, was incarcerated in his home for two months after the police killed his girlfriend is an indicator of how brazen today’s police tactics have become. With a no-knock warrant in hand, the police have claimed they announced themselves, but only one neighbor heard anything. When Walker called his mother, next to Taylor’s body in the darkness, he still didn’t know who’d shot up her home. This isn’t the country Americans believe in, a place where the State is free to invade our homes in the middle of the night and take our lives with no one held accountable.
Brazen tactics like no-knock warrants were introduced in the 1960s when police forces like those led by Los Angeles’s Police Chief William Parker and his successor Darryl Gates used military training on their troops in a war against the poor. Gates would develop the first Special Weapons and Tactics (S.W.A.T.) teams. They would ramp up activity over the decades that followed, first in a War on Drugs, which would soon provoke uprisings like the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion. Behind all of these changes was the steady increase and, by the 1980s, the explosion of automation that is permanently destroying the value of labor and forcing a desperate working class to confront the system. For the ruling class, these same revolutionary changes to the economic base of society demand the rise of the police State to protect their interests. Meanwhile millions of Americans are fighting for their lives.
In 2020, with the uprisings in response to George Floyd’s murder (and, before that, Ahmaud Arbery’s famously videotaped killing by one retired and one off-duty officer), we’ve seen a militarized police force abandon all pretense that we live in a country that respects the rights of the people. Our class raises up Breonna Taylor’s name, alongside all the others, as a symbol of what America the beautiful truly might be—a place where our heroes are our sisters and our daughters, all of our family members in the broadest sense, our class, who put their lives on the line for the sake of others every day. We say her name because Breonna Taylor stands for America at its best, and we cannot rest until we’ve done all that we can do to build an America and a world worthy of her memory.
Published: October 26, 2020
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