Refusing to Die: Black Queer and Feminist Worldmaking Amid Anti-Black State Violence

On May 25, 2020, four officers of the Minneapolis Police Department responded to a call at a grocery store where George Floyd, a Black man, was suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill. In a widely shared video depicting the moments after Floyd's arrest, Officer Derek Chavin sits expressionless with his knee against Floyd's neck for nearly eight minutes.¹ He is aided by Officers J. Alexander Keung and Thomas Lane, who are applying pressure to Floyd's back and legs, respectively. Officer Tou Thao stands guard against enraged bystanders who witness and record the incident. Floyd, who is handcuffed with his face planted into the asphalt, pleads for his life. In fact, the world watched in horror, shame, and disgust as Floyd repeated the now-well-known refrain, "I can't breathe," because, as one might reasonably imagine, Chauvin's knee constricted Floyd's airways. As we have come to know in these situations, "I can't breathe" often goes unheeded and, therefore, functions often as a precursor to unwarranted Black death. Like an episode of déjà vu, George Floyd was pronounced dead later that night.

The worldwide backlash following George Floyd's death was swift and powerful. In fact, a litany of protests, riots, and pointed calls to hold accountable the officers responsible for Floyd's death sprang up amid the rallying cry of Black Lives Matter and resulted in the largest social movement in the United States.² What is more, the once unfashionable ideas of defunding and even dismantling the police gained mainstream currency. In response to the protests, riots, and looting that followed Floyd's murder, Minneapolis city leaders pledged to gradually dismantle the city's police department in favor of a Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention.³ In addition, to showcase their support for the Movement for Black Lives, other social and political institutions scrambled to distance themselves from their white supremacist policies and/or histories. For instance, the wake of Floyd's death saw the removal and/or replacement of Confederate symbols, including statues and building names, and the painting of Black Lives Matter on public roadways. Mississippi, despite passionate challenges from many of its own citizens, even changed its state flag, the last to display the Confederate symbol. These protests and the resulting symbolic display of support have come to delineate what many have called the United States's "racial reckoning," a term meant to index the ways in which the country has been forced to deal with its legacy of racism.

However, such elaborate displays of solidarity in this racial reckoning obscure much of the work in which activists were engaged prior to Floyd's death. In particular, reverberating calls, including a strident social media campaign, persist to arrest Officers Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankinson, and Myles Cosgrove of the Louisville Metro Police Department for their involvement in the March 13, 2020, killing of Breonna Taylor. Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old EMT, lay sleeping when police, who under the authority of a no-knock warrant, barged into her home unannounced and eventually unleashed several rounds that ultimately killed Taylor. In this article, we turn a critical eye towards this country's current moment of racial reckoning to query how the Movement for Black Lives limns a multiplicity of Black worldmaking potentialities and tensions, in particular because Black liberation movements have typically assumed a cisheteropatriarchal ethos, marginalizing feminist and queer concerns, and in so doing limited the radical potentiality of Black liberation. Although many people remain concerned that the social media campaign surrounding Taylor's death borders on becoming an "insensitive" internet meme whereby calls to arrest the officers involved in her shooting have been added tacked to the end of seeming innocuous posts, we contend that the campaign surrounding Taylor's death remains politically and rhetorically consequential because it captures the complexity of how, under the constant threat of anti-Black violence, Black people imagine more equitable worlds for Black women via Black feminist and queer (BFQ) worldmaking.⁴ By drawing on...