Her name was Breonna Taylor, and she was killed by the Louisiana Police Department while in bed with her boyfriend.
Her name was Natalie Simms, and she was forced to watch her tampon dangle between the fingers on the hand of an agent of the state. She consented to them searching her car but never her body.
Her name was Oluwatoyin Salua, and she was found dead after seeking refuge with a man that looked like her, that she marched for - a woman we wouldn’t have to mourn if men, both in uniforms and without, listened the first time.
To be shot in your own bed; To have an officer possess the remains of your uterine lining; To be killed for not having a bed. While the police brutalize all marginalized bodies, they seem to acuminate special cruelty for women- in many cases because they know they can violate women in ways that can never be reciprocated.
It is no coincidence that 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence or that many survivors don’t find asylum in a police department. The police, descendants of slave patrols, have always been tasked with the protection of property not humanity. When blackness and femaleness are commodified, people with those identities are subject to their jurisdiction. If a woman is property, you do not need her consent; If a black person is murdered, you are not a murderer; and if a black woman is found dead, there are no repercussions.
As a woman, a menstruator, and a Black person, I felt a part of me die when Breonna was killed, a part of me disappear when Natalie was violated, and a part of me retreat when Oluwatoyin was ignored. I was not consoled to hear that Natalie’s abuser was a woman or that Oluwatoyin’s abuser was Black, because they all heard no and kept going. And that hurts in a deeper way - my community lines are blurred or rather may not exist at all. Where do I go when other women, black people, and the state are all predicated on my demise? How do I exist?
And then everyone asks for my empathy that they have never returned - Black men ask me to fight, white women ask me to approve, and the police ask me to respect. They make me feel guilty for even thinking about myself. But the truth is that my existence is a hole in the fabric they have tried to knit; where people are and embody just one thing. My proximity to womanhood, blackness, and menstruation was never imagined - and that is why I live in a constant state of fear, because people must create brutality for me that is as intricate as my existence.
And I am tired; tired of being asked to give the most while receiving the least; to speak the loudest for others that are silent for me; to love the hardest while being neglected. I refuse to be everything in a world that deems me nothing. So I commit myself to only myself in hopes to find some semblance of autonomy, worth, and happiness - so that I can look at a bed without crying, a tampon without cringing, a helping hand without fear. And my active choice to live rather than survive is a radical act in itself.
