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Breonna Taylor Is Not a Meme
It’s good to spread awareness — but let’s actually do something instead of relying on punch lines
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
Breonna Taylor is not a meme.
I don’t like to traffic in the gory details of a Black person’s death — especially when it comes at the hand of the state — but the brutality of Breonna Taylor’s bears repeating.
Shortly after midnight on March 13, Louisville police officers, executing a search warrant, used a battering ram to enter the apartment of Breonna Taylor while she was in bed with her boyfriend Kenneth Walker. Upon hearing a loud banging at the door, and following a brief exchange, Walker fired his gun; the police also fired several shots, reportedly striking Taylor at least eight times.
According to the Louisville Courier Journal, those Louisville police officers had been investigating two men they believed to be selling drugs out of a home near Taylor’s. Their warrant, as noted by the New York Times, was what is referred to as a “no-knock warrant, allowing them to enter without warning or without identifying themselves as law enforcement.”
No drugs were found in Taylor’s apartment — because the officers were at the wrong home.
The Louisville Metro Council voted unanimously in mid-June to ban no-knock search warrants in light of the police killing. But as far as justice for Breonna Taylor, there has been little.
I get the intent behind the memes. But we need to talk about the way we chronicle death — namely someone else’s.
Of the three officers responsible for Taylor’s killing, only one has faced any real sort of repercussions — and that was only a week ago.
People are rightfully furious about the situation, and if you’re an active user of social media (whether by choice or by coercion), you’ve likely seen their posts calling for justice. Most are innocuous — but some people are turning their calls for justice into a meme. The tweets and posts always start innocuously, copying the format of a viral…
