Breonna Taylor memes, Black pain, and the fight for the personhood of Black women
Breonna Taylor was murdered in her home on March 13, 2020. She was an innocent woman who fell victim to violent policing in the form of a no-knock warrant. In this instance, the Louisville Police Department was clearly at fault. Even the charges brought against her boyfriend, who shot back in self-defense, were dropped because of the questionable credibility of the officers’ tale. Yet her killers were not arrested, and her death did not make national news until May, alongside the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, who had been killed in February.
Following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police in late May, protests for Black lives and against state violence have been held in every U.S. state and multiple countries, and the names of Floyd, Arbery, and Taylor have reached social media users worldwide. But since protests started, only Breonna Taylor’s death has been made into a meme — the death of a Black woman.
In June, after over 100 days without justice for Taylor’s death, memes calling for the arrest of the officers involved went viral. Such memes include a picture of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!, edited to say “I Can’t Believe Breonna Taylor’s killers haven’t been arrested!”; and a tweet saying “Drink water, eat pizza, and arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.” Several Black women — myself included — have spoken out online against memes like these, saying that they are dehumanizing Taylor and making her death a punchline.
This assertion mirrors the fight against digital blackface (using primarily black emojis, reaction pictures and gifs as a nonblack person), which has become a Twitter hallmark. The problem is that users can tweet funny photos of Black people — commonly women — without any regard for their wellbeing. Take Ashley “Ms. Minnie” Ross, star of “Little Women: Atlanta” who tragically passed after a car accident in April. Following her death, fans of the show tweeted pictures and gifs, but many were insensitive considering the nature of her death, even after co-stars shared their grief. Their pleas to mourn her in an honorable way have been ignored. But Black women have long been denied honor.
175 years ago, in Antebellum Alabama, Dr. J. Marion Sims created a procedure to repair damage to the vaginal area after childbirth. From 1845–1849, he worked to perfect this procedure, performing at least 30 surgeries on ten women, until he moved to New York in 1850 and began regularly operating from his own women’s hospital. Here’s the catch: the ten women he operated on experimentally were all enslaved, operated on without anesthesia because he believed that Black women did not feel pain. Contextually, it was a popular belief, used by whites to justify the horrors that victims of slavery would endure for hundreds of years. But in New York, his white patients were treated with anesthetics. In later years, Sims became the president of the American Medical Association and was dubbed “the Father of Modern Gynecology”. Until 2018, a statue in his honor stood in Central Park.
In 1951, a young Black mother named Henrietta Lacks was treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Tumor tissue taken during a biopsy was sent to the hospital’s lab for research. The researcher, Dr. George Gey, discovered that the tumor cells — labelled HeLa for the woman the sample had come from — multiplied at record speed, and he sold cell batches to research labs nationwide. The HeLa cells were used to further medical research ranging from polio vaccine development to the complete mapping of the human genome. Just about every cancer treatment developed in the last 60 years has been based on work using her cells. Meanwhile, Mrs. Lacks died that same year, 1951, at the age of 31. Though Dr. Gey received wealth and national acclaim, Lacks’ surviving children, all senior citizens, have yet to receive a dime from Johns Hopkins or any lab that uses her cells.
Over the summer, after much speculation, Houston rapper Megan Thee Stallion confirmed that she was shot, allegedly by Tory Lanez, a Black male rapper who she considered to be her friend. When asked on Instagram Live why she didn’t tell the police Tory shot her, Megan stated that she was concerned for his safety as a Black man, even as he had violated hers. And yet afterward, even though Megan talked openly about her trauma, and with “Protect Black Women” still lingering in bios on Twitter, thousands of people decided that Tory wasn’t at fault, that he’d shot Megan because she’d swung on him first, or grossest of all, that he did it because he found out that she was a trans woman assigned male at birth. Things got ugly, to the point where Megan’s fans shared childhood photos to prove that she was cis. But a few days later, Tory apologized for shooting her, because apparently he’d been drunk, which prompted conversations around drunkenness and abuse.
Then on Wednesday, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron (a Black Republican) announced that a grand jury decided that the officers involved in Taylor’s death were justified in firing their weapons, saying that he had to put his emotions aside and look at the facts. There was only one charge issued, and not for anything related to Taylor at all. Officer Brett Hankinson was charged with wanton endangerment because a stray bullet damaged a neighbor’s wall. To the white jury and the Black attorney general, Hankinson’s only crime was the shot that missed. In this situation, a wall’s integrity mattered more than Breonna’s life.
In the few days since, as people are still reeling over this injustice in a myriad of ways, Tory’s involvement in Megan being shot have resurfaced. On Thursday, T.I. came to his aid in an interview saying that he believed Tory’s assertion that it didn’t happen as Megan said. Tory tweeted about clearing things up at midnight, in what many thought would be another livestream but turned out to be an album release. And now, despite video evidence, a song on the album questioning whether Megan had even been shot in the foot, has had thousands of (mostly) men on Twitter insisting that there are two sides to the story, and it’s become a “he said, she said” situation. Tory’s album is now #1 on iTunes, and many of the same black men who quoted Malcolm X and swore two days before to protect Black women with their lives have now reverted to calling us bitches.
What do these events have in common? Throughout centuries of American history, Black women have had to fight to be treated with respect, dignity, and humanity. In life and in death, countless Black women, including Henrietta Lacks, Ms. Minnie, and now Megan thee Stallion and Breonna Taylor, have been denied the grace given to their white counterparts. And now, with no charges related to her actual murder, memes by nonblack “allies” about Taylor’s death — which were a quirky, deliberate ruse to trick apathetic people into caring — have been for naught, just as Black women knew they would be. This is because of the ways that we have been used over the centuries — often for entertainment, research, or outrage — and just as quickly discarded. Even today, 40% of beginning medical students believe that Black people have thicker skin, and Black mothers are three times as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications, all because slavers’ ideas about our pain prevent us from being considered human.
This is the same womanhood — the same humanity — that became abstract after celebrities wore t-shirts with Breonna’s name for the hundredth time, and the same womanhood that was called into question for Megan. Although it shouldn’t have mattered if she really was trans, her womanhood was questioned and had to be defended just the same. All of this shines a light on our centuries-old fight for personhood we’ve often been robbed of — for the freedom not to be seen as test subjects, or mammies, or whores, or welfare queens, brutes, or Looney Tunes caricatures. We fight for the care that is at times extended to everybody but us. And sadly, from the looks of things, today is not the day that our fight will finally be over.
