The Drumbeat of Justice Denied
By Vivian Nixon
In Louisville, Kentucky, after midnight on March 13, police broke the hinges off the door of a private apartment. Three men fired guns — one man who was inside— and two police officers. Five bullets hit Breonna Taylor, unarmed, who lived in the apartment. She did not survive. Six months and 6 days later, a grand jury found no reason to hold anyone who fired the fatal shots accountable. There was no mention of Breonna Taylor in the decision.
The states refusal to hold Breonna Taylor’s killers accountable confirms what we already know. We are a long way from justice for Breonna, her family, and Black people in America. Attempts to withhold all the available evidence confirms that the outcome is not unintentional.
An Uncompromising Commitment To Racial And Gender Equity
Since 2000, College & Community Fellowship (CCF) has been concerned with the lives of women caught, trapped, and held in myriad ways by the American legal system. CCF seeks to increase women’s access to opportunity, so they can thrive. I do this work because my journey embodies the cost of racial and gender inequity and failures in the education, healthcare, and criminal legal systems. Suspicion and accusation have threatened the freedom of Black women for as long as America has been a concept. Breonna’s tragic death illustrates that helping women thrive must be fueled by a commitment to end racial, gender, and economic injustice.
CCF aims to remove barriers of inequity and help women see and pursue a future that would likely be withheld from them. We unite in all efforts to expand equity and justice. Women who join the CCF community are marked by accusation and know too well the failures of a carceral state. We do not believe that our access to equity and justice depends on violent retaliation. We hope, against all evidence, that failure to protect and serve the Black citizenry of this nation will end with revolutionary policy decisions.
A System Rooted In Unjust History
Billions are spent each year to operate biased systems of surveillance and punishment. How would our society be different today if the investments had been in, education, health, economics, culture, and spiritual nurture? Resources for a proper reckoning must be as massive as the structures and systems that have sustained state violence against Black communities for four hundred years. This is not a risk, but a debt owed.
The rapid additions to the roll call of unarmed Black people killed by police, eerily reflects a pandemic run amok, aided by those who hold the power to stop it. America’s historical problem of structural racism and its contemporary place on the precipice of cultural and political movement are center stage. The election of Barack Obama ushered in the era of hope and possibility. What may have been backlash to that moment, exploded as fury during the 2016 election season. Bold vision retrenched for a season, but unprecedented congressional turnover in 2018 proved that some had regrets. Once again, the levers are in the hands of the people.
A Reckoning Is Needed
A seismic shift is overdue. Ancient souls and current martyrs demand that the embedding of racial, economic, and gender injustice at the roots of our society be undone. The fates of, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor and hundreds more, are now linked to the struggle for justice and the fate of giants. Elijah Cummings, John Lewis, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fought injustice until death. Still, the erosion of civil and human rights threatens to be a cancer in the courts. We who witness daily lawlessness by the keepers of the law owe to their memories our vigorous participation in the democratic process.
Every eligible citizen can exercise their right to vote. Assist a friend, who may need guidance, so that they can vote too. Make at least one phone call to an elected official. State your position as a constituent whose vote decides their fate. Sitting idly by is not an option this time. The future of our democracy is on the line.
Government agencies that have peddled the rhetoric of public safety to some communities while unleashing public terror in Black communities, must seize the opportunity to get it right. Investments in participatory policymaking could raise-up solutions aimed at the root of the American struggle for freedom.
Systems must submit to inquiry and reckon with acts against the people. Power hoarders must see beyond their political survival. Courage will be the main ingredient of an agenda that engineers a world wherein abusive systems of social control are obsolete.
Individual citizens are not required to sacrifice more than the government invests in fulfilling its obligations to protect and provide. Until government understands its role in redressing the harms of the past, Black lives in America will remain under siege.
Between the inauguration on January 20, 2017 and September 25, 2020, more than 13,539,720 people have spilled into the streets to protest the injustice produced by structural racism in America.
Who among our elected representatives will listen? Who will stand up? Who has enough humility to confess that complicity is participation? Who has the courage to use the lever of power at their fingertips to insure equal protection under the law for all people? We, the people, are watching.