Memes Are Robbing Breonna Taylor of Her Story

But the definition of what that justice should look like has shifted significantly in a manner of weeks. Activists have succeeded in making police abolition a mainstream political consideration, meaning that calling for the arrest of the officers in Taylor’s case is now a message that is out of step with the current demands for police and prison abolition. As a result, people invested in Taylor’s case are divided into two factions: those who want to pursue traditional means of justice and those who want to use her case as an example of how to enact alternative, more progressive means of redress that can be modeled for the future.

Taylor’s is the only case of the three mentioned above that has not seen any arrests. One of the officers involved, Brett Hankison, was fired from the police force, but only after unrelated allegations of repeated sexual assault were made against him. The other two officers—Jon Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove—have been placed on administrative leave but remain employed.

Given these facts and the infuriatingly slow pace of the case, it makes sense that supporters would try to bring it back into focus in an effort to earn the same consequences for all of her killers. But as Miranda Robinson, a Black project manager from Boston told me in a brief interview, the facile simplicity of these deft memetic turns “doesn’t call on people to do any deep thinking about reconciling their calls to abolish the police with demanding we ‘arrest’ these cops.”

I reached out to some women after spotting their disaffection for the growing trend and many shared similar sentiments. Arika Thames, a Black woman from Washington D.C., said that “sharing these memes does a disservice to the abolitionist movement because it seeks to legitimize and uphold the prison system that we are currently trying to tear down.”

“It’s literally lip service,” Katherine Laubscher, a mixed-race communications strategist from San Francisco, told me. And it’s easy to see why she’d think so. Reposting a meme falls within routine internet parlance. There’s nothing very novel about it. “It’s the easiest way for them to nod to the movement and seem woke without interrupting their scheduled programming. The vast majority of people will see a photo and double-tap and keep it moving.”

Robinson agreed. “People are desperate to go back to posting their selfies and memes but still want to get their cookies for caring about Black lives, with a cherry on top for their cleverness. It feels dismissive. Like she’s an idea rather than a person. You could slot any name, or frankly any cause, into their little captions and it wouldn’t change a thing because it’s totally divorced from lifting her up, mourning her, or preventing more like her,” she said.

The acceptance of this kind of humor, Robinson believes, is a sting of disrespect for Black women. “I think there would be tone policing about this lack of solemnity were it regarding anyone other than a Black woman,” she said.

Even in death, Taylor has not been allowed to stay at the center of her own story.

For many, the proliferation of these memes feels like yet another way in which Black women are erased. Even in death, Taylor has not been allowed to stay at the center of her own story. Coverage of and reverence for Black people killed by police divide cleanly along gender lines, with Black women squarely on the wrong side. Rapper Jay-Z released an open letter demanding justice for George Floyd, and within the week, the officers involved in his case were charged. Beyoncé released a similar letter in support of Breonna Taylor and was met with indignation from Louisville’s city administration. It’s hard to conclude anything other than that Black women have been deemed disposable. Black women ask for consideration and get nothing but dismissal in return.

Christine Boyer, a white writer from Boston, told me the memes flatten the potential of Taylor’s life. “When she’s diluted down to a glib, cutesy meme it’s a dishonor to her. She was very much a real person, with real thoughts and dreams and dislikes. She leaves behind a world of hurting family, friends, and acquaintances.”

Thames felt the memes also disregarded Taylor’s family. “Imagine being her family member and everyone on the internet is trying to make the best meme about your loved one’s death,” she said. It’s additional cruelty that Black women now know what is on the table should they meet their own demise.

I believe and support the abolitionist arguments in the abstract: It is clearly true that we cannot look to the same violent system that took Breonna’s life to then somehow validate it. The carceral system destroys lives and elides justice; defunding police and reinvesting into communities is a common-sense way to eliminate the need for policing in the first place. And given how often police officers escape conviction in the rare occasions in which they are arrested and charged, asking for justice from a system that routinely exonerates them for killing Black people feels like merely delaying heartbreak. As Kelsey Dickson, a Black sales administrator, told me, “Police policing other police doesn’t liberate anyone. There need to be firings with no new cops hired to replace them.” The goal, therefore, is not to punish, but to prevent further harm.

While that demand makes sense with the goal of dismantling police and prisons in mind, it still feels like an injustice that all these men should lose is their jobs. People lose their jobs every day, and it is hard to reconcile that in exchange for snuffing out a promising young life, the only thing of value these men might lose is their pensions. And then there’s the unequal treatment. Why should Breonna Taylor be the only one whose family doesn’t get the catharsis of an arrest?

It’s far too easy for Black women to be left out when synthesizing a movement into specific goals. As Dr. Brittney Cooper noted in a conversation with For Harriet’s Kimberly N. Foster, in a world without police, Black women are particularly vulnerable. It’s a reasonable concern given that more than 40 percent of Black women will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime. When Black women are in critical danger, there needs to be someone who will intervene. The problem, of course, is that with police, Black women are still vulnerable. So if we’re being harmed either way, why not abolish the system we know for sure causes additional institutional harm and build something new in its wake?

A simple quest to ensure Breonna Taylor was not forgotten as the country entered what felt like an unprecedented moment of racial reckoning became a complicated mass of issues. What we built out of the ashes of the carceral system might be beyond my personal imagination, but these memes, well-intentioned as they may be, merely reinforce the very systems that led to Breonna’s death. And that’s a problem we can fix today.

Update 7/8/20: This post has been updated to include Katherine Laubscher’s full name.