Image Credit: Bellew, Frank, Artist. Visit of the Ku-Klux / drawn by Frank Bellew. , 1872. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2001695506/. Ever since police officers in the narcotics unit of the Louisville Metro Police Department killed  Breonna Taylor as she slept in her own home, I’ve been thinking about night riders in the nineteenth century, and finding disturbing parallels with SWAT and narcotics units in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Somehow these modern-day police entities are doing …

Perhaps unwittingly, Coel’s idea of a “theft of consent” evokes a deep history specifically of Black women’s fraught relationship with notions of sexual consent in Western culture.

In the WNBA, where Black women are 74% of the players, and in NCAA Division I women’s basketball where Black women are 51% of the players, it is important to center gender in ongoing conversations about race, social justice, and sports.

While Mario Cuomo presided over the state during the 1980s and 1990s, NYPD officers killed Eleanor Bumpurs (1984), Sharon Walker (1984), Yvonne Smallwood (1987), and Mary Mitchell (1991). In 2016, during Andrew Cuomo’s second term in office, sixty-year-old Deborah Danner was shot to death in her Bronx apartment.

Even as Breonna Taylor’s case receives more attention outside of Louisville, largely as a result of national and international responses to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, can we really expect justice if almost 3 months after her murder none of the accused officers have even been charged?

In the years since Aiyana’s untimely death, the number of black women and girls either killed by police or who have died in police custody has grown to include: Tanisha Anderson, Yvette Smith, Rekia Boyd, Natasha McKenna, Sandra Bland, Kindra Chapman, Kimberlee Randall-King, Joyce Curnell, Ralkina Jones, Raynette Turner, Kayla Moore, Gynnya McMillen, and Korryn Gaines.