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Should We Keep Using Breonna Taylor’s Image?
Are we protecting Black women, or are we using them?
Breonna Taylor’s face is everywhere: on magazine covers, billboards, murals across the country, and memes on social media. Her image has become a symbol of the fight against police brutality, but are we doing more harm than good?
As Tiana Reid writes in an essay for ZORA, there’s a thin line between visibility and exploitation. In our efforts to create necessary outrage over her murder, we may be making Breonna Taylor’s face a tool for profit or personal virtue signaling.
“This monumentalization of Black women renders them fungible. Her image, manipulable, is asked to do so much work,” Reid writes. “Prevailing images of the Black woman, as a figure, are the metaphors upon which we pirouette, spinning and spinning around a morbid fixation.”
