Say Her Name: Breonna Taylor And America’s Deadly Case Of Racial Amnesia

(First published in Forbes on August 10, 2020)

On March 13th, plainclothes policemen in Louisville, Kentucky killed Breonna Taylor, an unarmed 26-year old Black woman, during the execution of a no-knock search warrant at her home. Despite local and nationwide efforts of activists and high-profile celebrities, the police officers who were responsible for Taylor’s death have yet to be brought to justice. So why are Americans already beginning to forget about Breonna Taylor?

Call it a deadly case of America’s racial amnesia.

America’s inability to stay focused on experiences of systemic racial injustice is nothing new. In fact, there is a long history of white racial forgetfulness and cognitive dissonance that has plagued America since its founding. Whether it is the debate over the racist origins of the United States, or the revisionist history that many white Americans project of their own personal experience with race, white America has a long history of forgetting its racist history. In doing so, many white Americans mistakenly claim for themselves a clear conscience. 

Yet, as the American author Mark Twain famously wrote, “a clear conscience is a sure sign of a bad memory.” 

The truth is, America can not claim the nation has a clear conscience, especially in the aftermath of 2020’s social protests. Despite the well documented history of racial injustice inflicted on American descendants of slaves, Black Americans, and other racial minorities in America, there is undeniable evidence that our nation has a very bad memory of recalling those events and leveraging them to help shape a better future.

Take, for example, a string of events from 1967 that is reminiscent of this year’s protests following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In 1967, after violent urban protests rocked cities such as Detroit and Newark, President Lyndon Johnson commissioned an 11-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. The Kerner Commission, named after its chair, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, Jr., delivered a landmark report that assessed the nation’s racial trajectory at the time and succinctly expressed a troubling, yet enduring, conclusion: the nation was “moving toward two societies: one Black, one white – separate and unequal.” The commission was unambiguous about what needed to be done to prevent the deepening racial divide, and made a set of key recommendations, including: “increasing communication across racial lines to destroy stereotypes, to halt polarization, end distrust and hostility, and create common ground for efforts toward public order and social justice.”

Sound familiar? 53 years after this report was released by the Kerner Commission, the U.S. finds itself not only failing to remember (and implement) those recommendations, but a vast majority of Americans don’t even know about the Kerner Commission at all.

Even more troubling, America doesn’t only have a long-term memory problem. It has a near-term memory challenge as well. 

Take, for example, Michael Brown. This past weekend, family members and activists paused to remember the death of the 18-year-old Black teenager on the sixth anniversary of his death. Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in 2014 and then left face-down in the road for hours. Brown’s death ignited fierce protests and prompted another wave of conversations about police violence and racial injustice in America, with calls for “never again.”

Yet in the over five years since Brown’s death, “again” has happened repeatedly — over 5,000 individuals have been killed by police, and a disproportionate number of them have been Black men. According to reporting by The Washington Post, Black Americans make up only 13% of the U.S. population, yet they account for over a quarter of the police killings. Perhaps people remember Michael Brown, but the statistics, and the highly publicized deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and others show America isn’t learning its lessons of racial injustice fast enough. 

In fact, no matter how many times people are told to #SayTheirNames, the reality is that Americans, and especially white ones, are forgetting the names of Black victims of police violence faster than ever. Not only are they forgetting names — they are also forgetting about the need to fight for justice for Elijah McClain, Michael Ramos, Nicholas Perez, Modesto Reyes, Derrick Scott, and Cameron Lamb, and countless others who have died at the hands, and bullets, of police. 

And now they are forgetting about the fight for justice for Breonna Taylor too.

In her book, So You Want to Talk About Race, author Ijeoma Olou pointedly describes a key allure of racial amnesia in America. “A lot of people want to skip ahead to the finish line of racial harmony,” Olou writes. “Past all this unpleasantness to a place where all wounds are healed and the past is laid to rest.”

But in the case of Breonna Taylor, more than 150 days after her death, only her 26-year-old body has been laid to rest – nothing else. Her murderers have not been arrested, her death has not been vindicated, and justice hasn’t been served. Yes, there are protesters in Louisville calling out for justice every single day, and yes, Oprah is putting her on the cover of her magazine. Yet, for many the memory of Breonna Taylor’s death is starting to slip into the background of a worsening coronavirus pandemic and a deepening recession.

This cannot, and should not be the case. America’s conscience with respect to Breonna Taylor shouldn’t be clear. It’s conscience with respect George Floyd and Michael Brown shouldn't be clear. It’s conscience with respect to slavery and over 400 years of racial injustice shouldn’t be clear.

Yes, America is suffering from a pandemic of racial amnesia. Masks and social distancing won’t stop this deadly virus – only a combination of memory, empathy, and justice can help stop its spread.

Perhaps then, every American will remember Breonna Taylor at least once…

And for all.