By DWIGHT HOBBES
Black women’s lives matter. Shouldn’t be necessary to say but consider. Rodney King, George Floyd and Tyre Nichols are names no one is likely to ever forget. Not so, the likes of Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland and scores more who are just as dead at the hand of ruthlessly racist so-called law enforcement.
Don’t think so? Consider. St. Paul citizen Nekeya Moody, in 2020, died after Ramsey County deputies responded to a 911 call reporting her as having a panic attack. In a subsequent lawsuit her mother said it was due to excessive force and indifference to her medical needs. The medical examiner cited excited delirium, an excuse Minneapolis police tried with the murder of George Floyd but the American Medical Association debunks as unheard of outside cops trying to get off the hook. That same year, a half-dozen Louisville Metro Police officers forced their way into Breonna Taylor’s home, investigating drug dealing ten miles away, and shot the unarmed woman dead. This in response to her boyfriend firing a single shot at what he thought were intruders. They fired 32 rounds. In 2015, Sandra Bland of Naperville, Illinois was pulled over in Waller County, Texas for a traffic stop and, when she refused to be bullied and cowed by State Trooper Brian Encinia, was assaulted and hauled off to jail where she supposedly hung herself, something no one in his or right mind believes, especially since she’d exclaimed, “I can’t wait to go to court.” A person or persons went in her cell and saw to it she never got there.
There is no earthly reason to be less incensed about these deaths, but, odds are you never heard of them because no groundswell drew the same media coverage and public attention as men. There’s no national registry, but the Washington Post has reported that 48 black women were killed by police since that publication started tracking police-involved deaths by shooting alone since 2015. Think about it: that’s not counting other means. Either way, not one cop has been convicted.
Arisha Hatch at civil rights organization Color Of Change is quoted by www.insider.com, “Violence towards Black girls and women has always received far too little coverage, leaving the loved ones of countless victims of state-sanctioned murder without justice.” Since black lives matter so much, why doesn’t black women’s lives?
Dwight Hobbes is a long-time Twin Cities journalist and essayist.
