I SAW THE blue and red lights flash in my rear-view mirror just after 5 a.m. on Christmas Eve. The sun hadn't risen yet as I drove down Interstate 76 with my wife after leaving our hotel in Youngstown, Ohio. I've been pulled over a handful of times, and except for a speeding ticket in Utah, it had been for things like forgetting to turn my headlights on in a rental car, or a broken taillight I didn't know about.
My lights were on this morning.
We'd just bought the car -- a purple Toyota RAV4 -- four days earlier, and the taillight was working just fine.
Turning on my blinker, I steered the SUV onto the shoulder. I could feel my heart thumping in my ears. I took a deep breath and tried to remain calm, attempting to stop cycling through the names and stories of Black people killed by police over the past year. But Breonna Taylor kept creeping into the foreground of my mind.
"Grab the registration," I said to my wife. I know she heard the anxiety in my voice as she rifled through the papers in the glove box.
As she did, I slid my license from my wallet and put it on the dashboard with my phone. Everything I'd need would be in full view of the officer, just like my father had taught me. We also had our negative COVID-19 tests in hand, just in case we were asked to produce those.
I saw the light outside the driver's side window before I saw the officer. He tapped lightly on the window, and I rolled it down for him.
"Going a little fast there," he said.
I had been going seven miles per hour over the speed limit, he told me. "My apologies, officer," I said, turning on my Indiana drawl. "I didn't notice." I never have a thicker accent than when I'm speaking with law enforcement.
When he asked for my license and registration, I leaned forward to get them from the dashboard and passed them through the window. "Been following you for seven miles," he said as he took them. "You were fine, only a few miles over until the speed limit dropped," he said. "You didn't slow down. You got an insurance card?"
I tried not to panic. I was tired. He wasn't wearing a mask. My mind was racing. He just told me he'd been following me. I felt the fear and anger rise from my stomach through my chest. I clenched my jaw to keep it from spilling through my lips. "It's on my phone," I said. "Is that OK?"
"Sure," the officer said.
I don't think I've ever been so afraid. As I was fumbling through my phone, trying to remember how to navigate my AAA Mobile app, I hoped he'd see a scared kid and not the raging adult I was struggling to contain.
He ended up giving me a warning.
For much of my adult life, the public discourse about Blackness has focused on the precarious nature of our lives. I knew that I didn't have anything illicit in my car. I knew that I was unarmed. But I also knew that it might not matter. Breonna Taylor, an EMT and aspiring nurse, was killed at home in bed. And I also had no idea why the police officer pulled me over until he confessed to following me for seven miles to catch me in a speed trap. It was probably my out-of-state plates that did me in, but in the moment, all I could hear was my father's voice in my head saying, "Don't give 'em a reason."
Don't give 'em a reason.
But I know that sometimes that isn't enough.
I LEARNED OF Breonna Taylor's death months after it happened. I might have heard or seen something before, but the earliest memory I have of Taylor came amid the wreckage of the early summer. George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. And later came the shouts to remember too, that Taylor was shot to death by police in her own home while sleeping on March 13, 2020, in what has been described as a "botched raid."
Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Sandra Bland. Tamir Rice. John Crawford III. Freddie Gray. Laquan McDonald. Philando Castile. Alton Sterling. Ahmaud Arbery. Tony McDade. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor.
I'm so tired of learning names. I'm tired of our lives being cut short. I'm tired of the existence of so many people being reduced to their manner of death. Our list of martyrs is endless. And we say their names in the streets, in our homes, and we stitch them on jerseys. All the while knowing that it's not nearly enough. It's not justice. It's not change. It's just an endless litany of public grief and outcry.
In Breonna Taylor, I see my sister -- a vibrant 26-year-old Black woman. Many WNBA players saw themselves reflected in Taylor as well. And they are all too aware that violence against Black women often goes ignored or diminished, just like the activism and conversations they work to amplify in the WNBA and beyond.
It's not a mistake that so few women are included in the list of names of Black people killed by police. Despite experiencing higher rates of discipline in schools, higher levels of incarceration, and higher rates of police violence than white peers, Black women are far too often left out of conversations of Black suffering and trauma. And that hasn't changed with the resurgence of public activism.
Women have long been leading movements for racial justice. Many organizers in Ferguson were Black women. Black women stood shoulder to shoulder with Black men during the Civil Rights Movement. The oft-cited Black Lives Matter movement and organization was spearheaded by three women. And it's Black women and trans people who have led the growth of athlete activism in the last decade.
When the WNBA season opened last July amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests against racial injustice, it did so with Black Lives Matter painted on the floor and Breonna Taylor's name etched on the back of each jersey. The WNBA then announced a social justice council, with the intention to honor women who had lost their lives to violence, including transgender women, throughout the season.
"Black women get swept underneath the rug literally every day," says reigning WNBA MVP and Las Vegas Aces forward A'ja Wilson. "It's up to us, women that look like them, that for the next generation that looks like us, to continue to push and to amplify."
It's far from the first time players in the WNBA have spoken out. In 2016, spurred by the Minnesota Lynx protesting the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, multiple teams began using their own platform for protest -- and were fined for doing so -- while others posted unified photos stating that "Black Lives Matter."
What sets the WNBA apart is that solidarity -- and especially so among the players. The collective action is a shared burden across the demographics of the league -- Black, white, Latina, Asian-American, queer, straight, cis and trans. It is the only professional league in the United States in which every single white athlete has shown up so visibly for their Black teammates.
For the 2020 season, WNBA players partnered with the "Say Her Name" campaign as a core pillar of their activism. "Say Her Name" is a campaign housed by African American Policy Forum that illuminates the stories of Black women often excluded from the public narrative of the violence Black people experience in light of a dearth of data.
On the topic of gender-inclusive racial justice, a 2015 "Say Her Name" campaign's report, says this: "The failure to highlight and demand accountability for the countless Black women killed by police over the past two decades, including Eleanor Bumpurs, Tyisha Miller, LaTanya Haggerty, Margaret Mitchell, Kayla Moore, and Tarika Wilson, to name just a few among scores, leaves Black women unnamed and thus underprotected in the face of their continued vulnerability to racialized police violence."
The report, which reveals 44 stories of Black women and trans people who have been assaulted or killed at the hands of law enforcement, also says this: "The media's exclusive focus on police violence against Black men makes finding information about Black women of all gender identities and sexualities much more difficult ... The erasure of Black women is not purely a matter of missing facts. Even where women and girls are present in the data, narratives framing police profiling and lethal force as exclusively male experiences lead researchers, the media, and advocates to exclude them."
In the narrative of rising athlete activism, 2016 is often referred to as the year that featured NBA players LeBron James, Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony and Dwyane Wade at the ESPYs and Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, which ignores the WNBA contributions that same summer. The work stoppage started by NBA players -- and joined by WNBA and MLB teams -- in protest of the shooting of Jacob Blake garnered attention that far outweighed the more sustained actions taken by the WNBA.
"We literally don't get credit because we're women," Wilson says. "But we don't care, because we're still trying to make the world a better place."
WHEN I WAS sitting in my car on Christmas Eve, I thought a lot about my dad. As I've written before, he has a routine for when he's stopped by police. It's one that I've seen up close.
License, registration, insurance card and wallet go on the dashboard; his hands sit at 10-and-2 on the steering wheel. When the officer asks him for his license, my father tells the officer it's on the dashboard. When the officer tells my dad to reach for it, he does so slowly. He refers to the officer as "sir" or "ma'am" without exception. My dad is not a formal person.
When I asked him why he did all of this, he relayed the immortal words of Richard Pryor: "I don't wanna be no m-----f---ing 'accident."
I didn't really understand what he meant when I was younger, but sitting in my car in the early morning hours of Christmas Eve, I understood. Reading about the death of Breonna Taylor, I understood.
There was no reason for Taylor to die. She wasn't breaking the law. She was in bed.
ELIZABETH WILLIAMS MARCHED past Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park in late May 2020. Williams is the starting center for the Atlanta Dream and the secretary on the executive board of the Women's National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA). It was her first protest, and she was there because the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis just days prior was too much to bear. The park, which is usually full of tourists, locals, diverse faces, was teeming with the National Guard, called in by the governor.
"Say his name," one organizer called out.
The crowd responded. "George Floyd!"
"Say her name!"
"Breonna Taylor!"
Williams says she was overwhelmed by a sense of pride as she joined the chants. The diversity of the crowd filled her with hope as she fought anxiety at the sight of law enforcement clutching their rifles.
"I think for a lot of people of color, there's just fear associated with these sorts of authority figures," Williams says now.
The protest, for Williams, was just the first important moment in a summer full of them. WNBA players hosted seminars with attorney Kimberle Crenshaw, the co-founder of the "Say Her Name" campaign, with Stacey Abrams, and even Michelle Obama. They also helped change the face of the United States Senate.
The Dream, supported by the rest of the league, protested comments made by the team's then-owner Kelly Loeffler, as she ran for Senate. Loeffler had referred to armed protesters -- legal under Georgia's open-carry law -- as operating under "mob rule." The protesters had gathered in response to the police killing of Rayshard Brooks. In response, the entire league wore "Vote Warnock" shirts, in support of Loeffler's opponent, Raphael Warnock, a former pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and campaigned for him throughout the summer and fall. Warnock eventually defeated Loeffler, who then sold the team to a group that included former Dream guard Renee Montgomery.
This ongoing activism, which now includes COVID-19 vaccine education, should force us to pay attention to the experiences of Black women and trans people instead of papering over them.
It is striking that almost nothing has changed in the nearly five years since I originally wrote about this. It's been a year since Breonna Taylor was killed, and she hasn't received the justice she deserves, which is often the case when Black people are killed by police. She deserves to be remembered. And we should also remember the efforts of those who have honored her. The WNBA absolutely deserves that.
But it's not enough to back up a truckload of flowers. It's up to all of us to say their names, to ensure that Black life is more than precarious.
Say her name. Attend a march. Shop at Black-owned business. Invest in Black communities. Care about us. All of us.
