she opened not her mouth: on Breonna Taylor and the quest to make America unrepentant again

Breonna Taylor is dead — not as a character in fiction, or as a symbol or allegory of anything. Her death is a thing to be grieved on its own terms, and the loss of any human life does not require the burden of any additional “meaning” in order to matter. It is right for her to be remembered and to be revered, even to take her place among the great cloud of witnesses that both surround us and go before us in a long cosmic struggle for justice. It is right for us to say her name, as she now sits among the saints and elders. It would only be wrong that we reduce her to a caricature of anything less than sacred woman, her body and blood as real as any other human sacrifice slaughtered before her, as real as the bread and wine people taste when they remember the crucified one.

But Breonna Taylor’s life and death fits into a context, a broader story, and the verdict handed down in the trial of her killers carries powerful symbolic weight, indeed. For while her life was unique, particular, one-of-a-kind in the ways all human lives are, the verdict was common, generic, to be thrown in the same pile as all the others. There will be no replacing Breonna Taylor, but the trial will be reenacted over and over again, with different players in the chairs, but the outcome always the same.

And this is why there is now a whole different reason to grieve, now. Those not on the underside of America cannot seem to understand that while human loss is always tragic, not all tragedy is injustice — a tragedy becomes an injustice when the opportunity to do everything possible to right the wrong is refused; a tragedy becomes an injustice when the opportunity for repentance is possible, but is scorned.

Indeed, a frightening percentage of Americans are galvanized around what can only be described as an increasingly brittle commitment to non-repentance. There is an idea that being an American, is to be a person who has nothing to apologize for. That to be an American is to never be at fault in anyone’s story except your own. That to be an American is not to be contingent or have anyone else contingent on you, each of us the product of our own respective little declarations of independence — not independence from tyranny, but independence from each other. To be an American, in this view, is to be alone.

Our complicity in a God-denying, Love-crucifying world

As a Christian, this runs counter to the story I was given from the beginning. The Book of Acts, a continuation of the Gospel of Luke, gives us the early church’s account of the preaching, teaching and movement of the apostles under the power of the Spirit. And in its first recorded sermon after the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, it is no less than the Apostle Peter who stands before a crowd of thousands of people, and says these words, “You killed the author of life, but God has raised him from the dead.” (Acts 3.15)

Peter’s words carry a forceful indictment — not of Jewish people, as he himself was a Jew, and not of this gathered crowd in particular, which was obviously not identical to the crowd that oversaw the crucifixion of Jesus. It was not an indictment of broken purity codes, hard partying, or garden variety human failures. Rather, it was a way of saying that each of us has played our part in the violence of a God-crucifying, Love-denying world. That humanity has, as a whole, been complicit in creating the kind of systems and structures that made the torture and murder of the Son of Love possible. That humans in general have allowed themselves to be swept out with the tide of injustice that make reality a horror for the oppressed. And the invitation was simple: repent, change your mind, soften your heart — and come and follow the way of the slaughtered lamb.

It was not that we were not part of a God-crucifying, love-denying world before the crucifixion of Jesus — only that in the suffering of the innocent one, the way things have always been was fully on display. Of course the innocence of the Christ would seem a fairly high bar to clear, but to return to Breonna Taylor — this is why yesterday’s verdict is particularly heartbreaking: white America has largely demanded that any body trampled underfoot of society be sin-free, ambiguity-free, and mostly humanity-free in order to be deemed a victim of injustice. If you have a little weed in your pocket, if you have a prior conviction, if you have a smudge on your name or a skeleton in your closet, you probably got more or less what you deserved. Breonna Taylor had the quality that white America ostensibly demands — innocence. No one has made a serious argument that she did anything wrong. Most everyone agrees that what happened to her, should not have happened. Her death is, by consensus, a tragedy. But still not deemed clear enough or unambiguous enough, to be officially rendered an injustice.

At the same time, the sitting President continues his campaign to make America unrepentant again, signing an executive order expanding his ban on anti-racism training — because racism is not nearly as dangerous, evidently, as the people who talk about it. Launching a broadside against “critical race theory” — as if there is only one, rather than thousands — he reinforced the view of many of his supporters: that nothing that will actually happen in America will ever be as dangerous, as the way people speak about what happened.

This is the man who famously said he does not need to ask God for forgiveness for his sins. He is a self-made man, the only kind of American man there is. He doesn’t choose to recognize the terrors of the story begun in 1619, only a better story begun in 1776 — so this is what is. You can quibble with the particulars of the 1619 project, but the obvious basic impulse of the whole initiative to begin with was to get us to grapple with the underside of our common history more robustly, not to negate the values of equality stated in 1776 (however unrealized) in words that would be regularly appealed to by liberators from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King. To reckon with the reality of America’s past and cast a constructive vision for what America yet can be, need not be mutually exclusive.

Un-repentance even in the face of unassailable innocence

It is of course curious that despite the overwhelming majority of mass shootings in America being at the hands of white men with guns, that there will be no executive order about this, or that despite white supremacist groups being the number one domestic threat of terror in the U.S., you will find no meaningful mention of this by the administration. It is curious that even with 93% of protests in the wake of George Floyd being peaceful, the administration still wants to tell us that the greatest threat to civil society is not racialized crime or injustice — but protestors, who as the President reminded us via twitter in language unbothered by code, want to overrun our “suburbs.” All of this is an age in which the trauma experienced by black and brown Americans is more conspicuous than ever, as we witness these atrocities not anecdotally, but in overwhelming volume on our little devices where we can see the pain and hear the cries for ourselves.

Yet for those committed to a vision to keep America unrepentant and ahistorical, people who came ex-nihilo into a story of our own making, the story of black America has served as a far too convenient plot device for many of us to change our minds, no matter what we might see and hear. For we have collectively cleansed ourselves of all our ambiguity on our neighbors, and then recoil in horror at the complex narrative we worked so long to build — all the tentacles in the criminal justice system, in socio-economic structures, political dynamics. It all looks complicated to us, and complicated is bad, so we retreat into the stories we can tell after we’ve sanctified ourselves at someone else’s expense.

This is surely why many white evangelicals have decided that abortion is the only moral issue that really matters. For while the actual story told by the data around abortion is quite complex (For example: there is a lower percentage of abortions now than there were estimated before Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court appointments by Republican Presidents have generally only upheld Roe, the Court itself been largely irrelevant on the issue, etc.), there is one narrative argument that seems hard to argue: an unborn child is completely unsoiled by human complexity. A story that is not yet written is a blank slate unburdened by poverty, generational trauma, actual relationships, joy or pain, triumph or addiction, or the overall promise and peril of human growth and development. The unborn are unstained by sexuality, fear, discovery. It’s a story that does not need to be parsed, discerned or reckoned with yet, a story that requires no explanation. The unborn have a status no one on the other side of the womb can ever ascertain, no matter what they do or do not do — unassailable, unambiguous innocence. Human potential without the stain of human experience…what could be any “whiter” than that?

So many of us will choose to believe in the potential only of theoretical lives rather, than the lives of those already incarnate in flesh and blood. We will choose to believe the oppressed are more likely to be part of a conspiracy than the oppressor, that the protestor is more dangerous than any reality they might protest against, that a rock through a window is more of an existential threat than a bullet in the head. And the story will wrap up neatly enough, and we go back to sleep.

But then, there is Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician — she was so clearly the best of us. Not only was she innocent, she was literally sleeping until the incident happened. We are haunted by her smiling eyes, holding flowers in her uniform. Who was she a threat to? She met our twisted standards of unimpeachable innocence…but it was not enough.

Meanwhile, another day comes and goes in which conversations continue in the public square on race and racism, criminal justice reform, police brutality, critical race theory, the appropriate and inappropriate ways to protest, and which 70-something white man will win the election. Surely the life and death of Breonna Taylor has something to say to us about all of these things and more, about the truth and the lies. Yet she does not speak, only stands here in silent witness, like Jesus stood before Pilate. She does not testify of herself, even while her blood cannot help but scream from the ground. And we hear of her in the echoes of the prophet: “(S)he was oppressed and (s)he was afflicted, yet (s)he did not open her mouth; like a lamb before her shearers its shearers is silent, so (s)he did not open her mouth.” (Isaiah 53.7, NRSV)

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