What if Breonna Taylor was a white woman?

On a Friday at midnight on Queens Road West in Myers Park, loving couple Annabeth and Charles lay asleep in their bed. To their shock and terror, three male intruders break in, unannounced. Charles, retrieves his legal firearm and fires a single shot hoping to protect Annabeth and himself.

In response, the intruders fire blindly, relentlessly, and recklessly through closed blinds into their home, spraying the house, hitting a neighbor’s house, and hitting unarmed Annabeth five times before fleeing and leaving this EMT dying on the ground and her blonde locks saturated in her own blood. This innocent professional committed to saving others’ lives dies callously as Charles helplessly calls 911.

Adding insult to injury, these three intruders are Black police officers with a warrant for an opioid raid for Annabeth’s ex, who was already incarcerated. Charles is charged with shooting an officer, although it’s not confirmed that his shot hit him. This charge is eventually dropped, however, and the state pivots to justify their killing by assassinating Annabeth’s memory trying unsuccessfully to frame her as part of a drug trafficking conspiracy with her ex who was alleged to sell his extra pain meds.

Charles and his Myers Park neighbors state the officers did not announce themselves, but after multiple interviews, the state is able to get a single witness to corroborate that they did. After the state stalls and punts to a grand jury, the Attorney General announces Annabeth’s shooting was justified. However, one officer will be charged; not for shooting Annabeth, but for hitting the hearty plank of Charles’s neighbor’s house. Property > Annabeth’s life.

Can you imagine the NRA being silent? How about “stand your ground” advocates? Are white people supporting the system since the attorney general in Taylor’s case said her killing was legal? Are white people saying she had it coming because of her ex’s activities? Or are they outraged like they were after the OJ verdict?

Be clear, the hypothetical scenario above would never happen, because neither Myers Park, Charlotte, nor the USA would tolerate it. Unfortunately for Breonna Taylor, she lacked the complexion for protection. Malcolm X rightfully described Black women as the “most disrespected, unprotected, and neglected person in America.”

From the 1600s until today, Black women have served as the nation’s most prominent caretaker while being its most abused and yet resilient demographic. Separated from their husbands and children while raising their torturer’s kids, raped to produce more permanently enslaved children, forced to use their breastmilk to feed their kidnapper’s children, experimented on without anesthesia to develop gynecology, abandoned during women’s suffrage after they worked alongside white women for voting rights, enslaved through human trafficking today, abused and raped disproportionately, suspended more as girls in schools, ignored medically in current day hospitals, and killed by police disproportionately with highest percent (57%) of unarmed victims compared to 20% for the lowest (white men).

And we have the audacity to gaslight them about being “angry.” Really? Why aren’t you?

When Somali officer Mohammed Noor tragically shot and killed blonde Justine Damond in Minnesota, he and his partner expressed fear and attempted CPR, but Noor still got 12.5 years in prison. But a police officer (especially a non-white officer) killing an upper-class white woman is an intolerable act punishable by termination and incarceration. Police know to work with white women as peace officers instead of police officers. We will never form a more perfect union until those in Myers Park demand the same treatment for Breonna Taylor that you would for Justine Damond, Nicole Brown Simpson and fictional Annabeth. Say her name.

This story was originally published September 29, 2020 at 8:31 AM.