LMPD's Blank Incident Report: The erasure of Breonna Taylor as a curriculum of conviviality

ABSTRACT

This article includes a description and discussion of physical violence and identity-based discrimination. I acknowledge that this content may be difficult. I encourage you to care for your safety and well-being. This article examines ‘conviviality’ in the context of police violence and systemic racism in the United States. Through an analysis of police incident reports and media interviews, the article argues that discourses of conviviality perpetuate colonial legacies and order Black lives. The article challenges the idea that conviviality is without consequence and highlights its limits in the face of ongoing discrimination and violence against Black people.

KEYWORDS:

• Breonna Taylor
• conviviality
• curriculum

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful for and would like to I thank the following individuals for their expertise and assistance in writing the manuscript: Dr. Sheltreese McCoy, Dr. Belén Hernando-Lloréns, Dr. Licho Lopez Lopez, Kandyce Anderson Amie and Althea Millers-Sims.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The author confirms that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article [and/or] its supplementary materials.

Notes

1 Please read more about the African American Policy Forum’s #SayHerName campaign at this website https://www.aapf.org/sayhername.

2 This is a common definition of racism circulating in the United States in part due to the U.S. Supreme Court’s reasoning in Brown v. Board of Education where the Supreme Court defined racism as a function of individual bias and prejudice. See Guinier (2004).

3 This number comes from including the United States’ early colonial period as a part of the formation of the current nation.

4 With the ratifying of the 13th amendment in 1865, Black codes (juridically speaking) ended with the start of the Reconstruction Era (1861–1877) following the American Civil War (1861–1865), but were transformed into ‘Jim Crow’ laws. The last of these Jim Crow laws were invalidated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by the United States congress.

5 Al Jazeera, Know Their Names: Police Violence in the US.

6 On 19 June 2020 Bene Cipolla, the Editor-in-Chief of the Chalkbeat announced that The Chalkbeat staff solicited student’s thoughts about racial injustice and published them through their online newsletter as a part of a project called the ‘Chalkbeat Student Takeover’. More information can be found about the project at this website: https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/6/19/21295651/chalkbeat-student-takeover-racism-in-america.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.