Introduction: Burying the Un/Dead

Our cooptation of Sojourner Truth's famous statement, "Ain't I a woman" to "Ain't I human," is deliberate as it is didactic. A former slave, Truth was an outspoken advocate for civil and women's rights, abolition, and temperance in the nineteenth century. She is known for her remarkable speech at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in 1851, where she challenged prevailing knowledge about race and gender. Perhaps, Truth was not only speaking to the white women in Ohio that day. She was also drawing attention to the capitalist system that made her Black body a property. Laverne Cox has adapted the same phrase, "Ain't I a Woman?" to draw attention to the disproportionate murder of trans women of color—in particular, Black trans women and their mistreatment by the prison–industrial complex. Truth's intersectional uttering and Cox's adaptation to address anti-trans violence point to the centrality of intersectionality as an essential analytic in the examination of anti-Blackness. In other words, to unpack anti-Blackness is to examine its intersections with race, gender, class, sex/body ability, nation, and sexuality,¹ because as Bilge bluntly states, "our collective struggles will be intersectional or they would be bullshit."²

On May 25, the world watched in absolute horror as Officer Chauvin's knee bore down on George Floyd's neck for 7:46 minutes. News organizations played the video several times as if they are oblivious of its potential to retraumatize. I (the second author) read the news as the story broke but never watched the video, because just a few details of another incident where another Black person's life was so casually extinguished were enough. Enough for my heart to drop again, my head to pound again, my lungs to exhale grief again. Enough reconfirmation for a Black American woman who has been trained as an academic to critically identify systems of oppression and who also feels the pangs of fury and resentment as a descendent of America's enslaved people. As I tried to shake away the feelings of pain, I also wondered why this particular murder captured so much attention because this narrative is nothing new. I (first author) was preparing a lesson plan for my class when I received a text from my brother in Ghana, "Have you seen this video? I hope you are staying safe." I watched the first three minutes and then put my phone down. I could not bear the pain that my body had just been exposed. #Icantbreathe. I had heard the same words before by Eric Garner six years prior. #Icantbreathe. I turned to my laptop and continued to prepare for class.

Even though videos of police officers brutally shooting unarmed Black people are prevalent on the news, George Floyd's murder had a particular culminative effect on the American public consciousness. Perhaps, this was due in large part to the coronavirus pandemic and the resultant lockdowns. In this moment, there was no escaping of the co-witnessing of Black death. George Floyd's death ignited a fervent national and transnational activist flame and solidarity that cannot simply be overlooked. There were protests at U.S. embassies and on the streets against police brutality and authoritarian regimes in numerous cities such as Johannesburg, Accra, London, and Tokyo.³ Cognizant of the possibility of viral infection, Black Lives Matter protestors warily embraced the risk of protesting during a pandemic to speak against imminent death. #Wecantbreath. Although we acknowledge the significance and importance of the emergent transnational protests surrounding George Floyd's death, other forms of Black death did not receive such monumental transnational solidarity. Among many others, the murder of Tony McDade and Breonna Taylor by Tallahassee and Louisville police officers, respectively, received scant coverage in both national and international press. The comparison is less about deliberating which Black life should be given priority in social movements. Instead, we seek to bring attention to the need to resist white supremacist capitalist humanizing rubrics that generate hierarchies of human value.⁴ Of course, Cathy Cohen pointed this out in...