breonna taylor’s life matters more than your meme, twitter.

I take it that if you are reading this, you don’t need to be reminded of the two weeks or so when the Black Lives Matter Movement was virtually ubiquitous on social media. George Floyd’s face in particular became emblematic for the movement itself; the adage, ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’ has never been truer as Floyd’s face continues to serve an immortal reminder of the deep wound racism continues to inflict on us. When I think about the response to Floyd’s death – when I think about the seven minutes and forty-six seconds Derek Chauvin spent kneeling on his neck, and Tou Thao’s cruel rejoinder, “this is why you don’t do drugs, kids” – I am overcome with rage and dejection. I am reminded of the protests where, sombre and mourning, we took the knee for an equivalent seven minutes and forty-six seconds and were met with the visceral and haunting reality of a man whose life was mercilessly taken from him.  

And then, on the other hand, we have the popular attention garnered by Breonna Taylor’s death. At best the meme, “anyway, arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor” (an indiscreet echo of the comic punchline, “anyway, here’s ‘Wonderwall’”), is a lazy throwaway - inconsequential and trivial. At worst, we have posts such as this since edited Lili Reinhart Instagram:  

Which is awfully reminiscent of this particular antique from the Tumblr epoch of the mid-2010s:

While Floyd has been lifted as a martyr, the ‘meme-treatment’ of Breonna Taylor’s death is virtue-signalling gone horribly wrong. In her posthumous existence, Taylor’s legacy has been compromised. Cleary, it is not enough to simply #sayhername. 

But I want to be fair. I do not pretend to know what goes through the mind of every person calling for the arrest of Breonna’s killers in meme form. Yet, what with the ongoing pandemic, and near daily reports of black and brown people going missing or worse, 2020 is proving hard enough without additional in-fighting. A lot of online culture is devoted to calling people out for the ways in which they are doing their activism wrong. And while many of these criticisms ring true, I want to recognise that knowing how to approach unchartered waters such as these can be choppy, to say the least. So, I repeat, I want to be fair.

If you are like me, the recent exposure to so much of what is wrong with the world might have, at times, left you with a sense of resolve. Stymied by are-you-a-robot checkpoints on Change-dotcom and scouring Facebook for the next protest, I felt, for a lack of proper phrase, like I was doing something. After all, even this exiguous kind of activism felt a lot better than my day-to-day plodding recumbence. But, if I must face the music (and against my will, I shall) these actions alone made from the safety of my parent’s house in the so-called ‘Garden of England’ were perhaps doing more for my self-esteem than anything else. Without boiling over into complete defeatism, I was always left with the despondence at the end of the day that I could and should be doing more. I’d imagine, therefore, that the unfortunate meme-ing of the injustice surrounding Breonna Taylor’s death is not simply self-congratulating posturing. In a world where the tools to dismantle the master’s house can be mistaken for a 240 character tweet, the line between activism and slacktivism is often blurred. So, while I could accuse all those who like, retweet or post a Breonna Taylor meme of being shameless clout-chasers (and although I am sure the criticism would stick somewhere) I will not.

To push the boat out even further: if memes are (as some argue) an art form of sorts, then what makes this gambit to raise awareness and to keep-on-saying-her-name any more egregious than, say, protest music used to express trauma and pain at a broken system? If Dead Prez’s Police State can rhythmically impugn a justice system that demonstrably favours one type of citizen, then memes can communicate the rampant absurdity of a system that will name a law to ban no-knock warrants after a woman whose killers are blatantly on the loose. Right? Kendrick Lamar – a prodigy at transforming trauma and black pain into Pulitzer prize winning, toe-tapping and beat-heavy bars – seldom chooses substance over style, or vice versa for that matter. Music commentators from Mic the Snare to The Needle Drop comment on the icon status of Lamar’s magnum opus, To Pimp A Butterfly, for its excellent “craftmanship, musicianship [and] poetship”, specifically drawing on the ways in which he is able to uncompromisingly meld themes of sin, violence and injustice with tracks displaying undeniable talent. The song Hood Politics – which is able to balance a catchy refrain with commentary on the illicit activities and police brutality of the LAPD – makes an artistic performance of sensitive themes. (And it does so flawlessly!)

So where, if at all, can we draw the line?

Listening to other both black voices on social media, as well as my own gut instinct about the wrongness of these memes, it is abundantly clear that despite whatever good intentions people might have, it is a disrespectful and trivialising way to engage with her memory. (Indeed, it is not like Kendrick Lamar rapped about police brutality over a GarageBand beat and sold it to the big bosses at Just Eat for a new commercial jingle, is it!) And I think it is important that it is black voices we are listening to here. As Duke Ellington put it once, “a black man feels [a] black man’s music most…” . That is to say, with race motivated violence being both the anxiety or reality for black people, navigating and expressing that trauma is an exercise too terrible to dull down and make accessible through a meme. But I think that something more sinister is at work too; not only do these memes serve to trivialise Breonna Taylor, but she is bifurcated for our attention-deficit consumption. So worried are we that she will fade into obscurity that on one hand we have a black woman who died too young and too tragically, while on the other we wield her like a rubber hammer in a game of Whack-a-Mole serving a gotcha-moment ‘boink’ to anyone who dared forget that they still haven’t arrested the cops who killed Breonna Taylor. The error is in forgetting Breonna’s humanity, all the while clinging onto the tragedy of her memory.