On Breonna Taylor and the disposability of Black bodies
Yesterday, a grand jury in Kentucky returned an indictment against one of the police officers who murdered Breonna Taylor, for "wanton endangerment". The other two officers were not charged at all.
This may seem unrelated, but the following also happened:
Notre Dame and South Florida have suspended football activity because of positive COVID tests of multiple players.
— Greg Pinelo (@gregpinelo) September 23, 2020
So far, not so good with the whole college football thing.
I was asked in this space: What did they expect?
And my answer was blunt: They expected money to flow in at the expense of young, mostly Black, bodies.
The fact is that Black bodies, Black minds, Black souls have been expendable in this country since 1619. That's a subject which isn't really seriously up for debate. Until 1865, Black bodies were legally expendable, at least in the slave-holding South. It was not a crime to kill your slave. And after Emancipation, Black Americans had the appurtenances of citizenship, but they were honored more in the breach than in the observance. And, of course, lynching a Black body to send a message rarely resulted in prosecution, much less conviction, as this tweet reminds us:
This picture is from 65 years ago today. Emmett Till's killers acquitted after a jury deliberated for a little more than an hour. sixty-five years. Today. pic.twitter.com/XVFJaELDWu
— David Dennis Jr. (@DavidDTSS) September 23, 2020
You're Black. Bang. You're dead. This is the leitmotif of Black America for four hundred years. No amount of "patriotic education" will wash this away. The only thing which will wash away this stain is an acknowledgment of our sins, and a commitment to expiating them. As one raised in the Catholic tradition, it's not as easy as saying "Oh, I'm saved", or "Oh, I'm not racist", and calling it a day.
We see this every time a prominent Black man or woman, who has achieved monetary and cultural success, speaks to the problems even they face as Black people in America. "Stop whining, just dribble." Not only should white people not feel guilty, but Black people shouldn't speak to their own experiences, which aren't ameliorated by their fame, their wealth, their notoriety.
This country cannot progress until it deals honestly and humbly with its crimes. However, I have hope. I have hope because we are a country which strives to be better. We are a country which elected a Black man as president. We are a country which is on the verge of electing a Black woman as vice president.
It's a truism that other Western democracies with large Black populations, such as France and Britain, aren't going to have a Barack Obama or Kamala Harris any time soon. We have many deep and onerous problems. But in some ways we are better positioned to deal with them, because as much as a rump white minority wishes to deny it, the nature of this country has always been multicultural, and has always had the conversation of how to traverse a society which doesn't have a long history like European countries, but is founded on the principle that it's loyalty to an idea, not a plot of land or a language, which defines it. Many times we've gotten it wrong, as with the Chinese Exclusion Act. But we are not our ancestors. We are constantly regenerating. We have the potential to truly be great, and not have that phrase be a meaningless collection of words spouted by a carnival barker. That's what I hang on to.
Breonna Taylor will have justice. And when she and others like her have justice, we will have peace. And then there's nothing we can't do.