Breonna Taylor and Black Lives Matter

SEPTEMBER 25, 2020

As a collective of student organizers whose work is centered around the right to an equitable education for every student in New York City, we cannot adequately convey our rage at the miscarriage of justice announced this week regarding the murder of  Breonna Taylor.

As youth leaders reckoning with the most traumatic summer of many of our lives, we have no choice but to dig even deeper into our work and realize that no — this ISN’T the most traumatic summer for many of the students we aim to represent — because they were privy to the value of #PoliceFreeSchools, restorative justice, culturally responsive education and socio emotional learning long before the DOE had a name for it or Covid-19 showed us the immense harm that exists in spaces where these concepts are not holistically understood, vigorously implemented and structurally supported.

Communities deeply impacted by the interpersonal, structural and systemic violence that comes with unambiguous Blackness have never had the option of not being aware of the destructive nature of the carceral state nor do they need a breaking news story to remind them the cost of their Blackness in a world built to uplift and protect whiteness- even when there’s no threat. Couple that with the reality of patriarchy and cis normative culture and Black women are in a position to be uniquely and irreparably harmed without recompense. 

Yet we are being told that not only did the officers responsible for her murder act ‘within reason,’ but that the hypothetical danger her neighbors were placed in when they emptied 6 bullets into her sleeping body is more grounds for accountability than the actual loss of her 26 year old life.

This is an abomination.

And it is one we see replicated in our schools each time the same infraction is punished differently based on the ethnicity or skin tone of the student in question. 

There is a direct link between the school to prison pipeline and the systemic violence against Black bodies we have watched play out as a nation all summer and even before then. 

To refuse to acknowledge either crisis is to become complicit in both.

At Teens Take Charge we are recommitting ourselves to the fight for equity in education equipped with a clear understanding that we cannot engage in this battle without also fighting explicitly for racial justice — and knowing that racial justice is educational, economic, judicial, health and housing justice. 

We stand with the young people organizing around the globe, and particularly in Louisville, to #SayHerName and ensure that Black people are not shamed for their righteous rage or the wide ranging manifestations of their trauma as their lives are snuffed out with impunity.

Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives have always Mattered.

And we will continue to agitate and organize until the value of Black life is affirmed not only with hashtags but in how the Systems meant to serve us function, and those that have never served us are dismantled. 

#DefundThePolice 

#AbolishThePolice

#FundOurSchools