@bleachbred Yesterday’s deleterious decision in the Breonna Taylor case was vexing, to say the least.
A grand jury empaneled in Kentucky failed drastically to indict any of the white male police officers associated with cold-blooded murder of the late EMT — an essential worker amid the pandemic — via a burst of bullets (dozens) inside her Southside Louisville apartment.
As you know by now, the murder of 26-year-old Breonna Talyor occurred after plain clothes policemen shockingly busted into her home during the early morning hours, as she and her boyfriend were sleeping.
The failure by the grand jury to effectuate justice leaves the Black community in Kentucky and nationwide reeling with the hopeless feeling that Taylor was effectively murdered twice: first, by trigger happy and reckless white policemen; and second, by a blatantly racist judicial system that treats African Americans as second class citizens.
Adding avoidable insult to avoidable injury is the fact that the Kentucky grand jury was directed on the consideration of evidence by a Black state attorney general, Republican Daniel Cameron, who gladly accepted a prominent speaking role at the Republican National Convention just one month earlier.
Rather than the policemen who killed Taylor facing “equal justice under law” — the principle upon which America’s judicial system is purportedly built — only one former officer was charged with so-called “wanton endangerment” for misfiring his gun into a neighbor’s apartment.
This blatant miscarriage of justice is nothing short of appalling, especially in the wake of countless recent killings by police of innocent black men and women for highly questionable reasons.
The Breonna Taylor case unequivocally and painfully demonstrates, yet again, that Black Americans are not viewed by law enforcement as flesh and blood human beings. We are not always accorded even the most basic civil rights granted to all citizens under the U.S. Constitution.
BIO
Elwood Watson is a professor of history, African-American studies and gender studies at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of several books, academic articles and anthologies. He is the author of Outsiders Within: Black Women in the Legal Academy After Brown v. Board (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), the co-author of Performing American Masculinities: The 21st-century Man in Popular Culture(Indiana University Press, 2011) and the editor of the anthology Generation X Professors Speak: Voices From Academia (Scarecrow Press 2013).
A grand jury empaneled in Kentucky failed drastically to indict any of the white male police officers associated with cold-blooded murder of the late EMT — an essential worker amid the pandemic — via a burst of bullets (dozens) inside her Southside Louisville apartment.
As you know by now, the murder of 26-year-old Breonna Talyor occurred after plain clothes policemen shockingly busted into her home during the early morning hours, as she and her boyfriend were sleeping.
The failure by the grand jury to effectuate justice leaves the Black community in Kentucky and nationwide reeling with the hopeless feeling that Taylor was effectively murdered twice: first, by trigger happy and reckless white policemen; and second, by a blatantly racist judicial system that treats African Americans as second class citizens.
Adding avoidable insult to avoidable injury is the fact that the Kentucky grand jury was directed on the consideration of evidence by a Black state attorney general, Republican Daniel Cameron, who gladly accepted a prominent speaking role at the Republican National Convention just one month earlier.
Rather than the policemen who killed Taylor facing “equal justice under law” — the principle upon which America’s judicial system is purportedly built — only one former officer was charged with so-called “wanton endangerment” for misfiring his gun into a neighbor’s apartment.
This blatant miscarriage of justice is nothing short of appalling, especially in the wake of countless recent killings by police of innocent black men and women for highly questionable reasons.
The Breonna Taylor case unequivocally and painfully demonstrates, yet again, that Black Americans are not viewed by law enforcement as flesh and blood human beings. We are not always accorded even the most basic civil rights granted to all citizens under the U.S. Constitution.
BIO
Elwood Watson is a professor of history, African-American studies and gender studies at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of several books, academic articles and anthologies. He is the author of Outsiders Within: Black Women in the Legal Academy After Brown v. Board (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), the co-author of Performing American Masculinities: The 21st-century Man in Popular Culture(Indiana University Press, 2011) and the editor of the anthology Generation X Professors Speak: Voices From Academia (Scarecrow Press 2013).