Forget bad apples: Police shoot people like Jacob Blake and Breonna Taylor because of a bad system.
The police are failing us. We should ask for our tax money back.
By Brittany Packnett Cunningham, MSNBC Opinion Columnist
There is not a day that goes by that I do not think of Breonna Taylor. It took months for news of her killing at the hands of the Louisville Police Department to reach the national media. On the same day I spoke, and cried, about her death on my former podcast, “Pod Save The People,” Errin Haines, editor-at-large for The 19th, reported on the story in a collaboration with The Washington Post. (The 19th is a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics and policy.)
A few months later, when the grand jury in her case returned with an indictment for only one officer — and for the wanton endangerment not of Taylor, but of her neighbors — Haines reached back for a quote, as she had done many times since we first met in Ferguson, Missouri, to discuss yet another moment of Black pain.
“This is the lowest charge in one of the highest profile cases. What are folks supposed to tell their daughters?” she texted.
“The truth,” I said. “That they love our labor and not our lives.”
Such is the cycle for Black people, especially Black women, in America. We continue to be, as author Zora Neale Hurston proclaimed, “the mules of the world.” Taylor labored as an essential worker, an EMT on the front lines of a deadly pandemic and was still discarded by officers who cared nothing for her life and a system that treats us as disposable.
If Black women are good enough to carry this country on its back, winning its elections and securing its democracy, we should be worthy of its protection. And our protection is rendered impossible without fully examining and altering the systems that do us harm, from the medical apartheid that killed Dr. Susan Moore to the law enforcement systems that killed Breonna Taylor.
Forget bad apples: Police shoot people like Jacob Blake and Breonna Taylor because of a bad system.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/it-s-not-abo...
Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Tuesday, January 5th 2021 at 10:30PM
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