Breonna Taylor: We are guilty
On the final day of the Ten Days of Repentance, Jews recite two prayers of confession. But before asking for forgiveness, there is an acknowledgment of communal contrition with the first word of the first prayer: ashamnu. ‘We are guilty.’
We have committed these wrongs. We have done wrongs ourselves and as a group. We have been culpable and we are devastated by our guilt.
Throughout the Ashamnu and Al Chet prayers, the plural is used because while not everyone has committed every transgression, the entire community takes responsibility for all of our misdeeds.
For the killing of Breonna Taylor, ashamnu.
We Americans are guilty. We are responsible for her death.
In our founding as a nation, it was written that our unalienable right to life and liberty were to be secured through a government, instituted among us all, with its power derived from the consent of the governed.
We, all of us, have given the government our consent. Handed them authority and legitimacy and power. We entrusted the state with the monopoly on violence and the leaders entrusted the police with the authority to carry out that violence for the good of the people.
Breonna Taylor was killed by the police on our behalf. She was killed in our name. The agents of the state did this for us.
The police in Louisville, under the cover of darkness, took a battering ram to the door of an apartment. For us.
Two police officers, after their unannounced arrival was met with the most American of greetings — a gunshot — fired into the apartment. For us.
A third officer, Brett Hankison, then blindly shot through the windows of the apartment and into neighboring apartments. For us.
Breonna Taylor was killed after being struck five times. For us.
And because Breonna Taylor was killed in our name, $12 million, out of our collective pockets, was given to her family to compensate for her death.
We have been culpable. We have gone astray and we have led others astray.
This is not new. This is not the first time something like this has happened here. Not the first time the police have killed on our behalf.
America needs more than ten days to make a full account of the sins we have committed against one another throughout our history. America needs more than ten days to fully acknowledge the devastation of our guilt before we can ask for forgiveness.
But just getting those ten days for America’s repentance, while wholly inadequate to the scale of the task, would be a tremendous feat. Because we never get those ten days. Even this year — a year of nothing but exceptions to the norm, a year of long weeks, and never-ending months — we did not get our ten days. We barely even got one.
Instead, we got too many days when the people in power spoke about a horrible tragedy, but shrugged their shoulders and said nothing could be done. We got too many days when pleas for calm were just self-serving calls for maintaining the status quo.
We did not get even one day when Americans collectively acknowledged our guilt, our complicity in it all.
Perhaps tomorrow will be different than today. Because today’s chance was for Breonna Taylor and that chance is gone.
The announcement came on the fifth day of the Ten Days of Repentance: Hankison would be the only police officer charged for his actions on that night in March. And the charge of wanton endangerment was for firing multiple rounds into a neighboring apartment.
Breonna Taylor was killed by our representatives and in our name, but, as of now, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron has decided no person will be held responsible for her death.
Another victim, another Black victim of police violence, with no single perpetrator. Another sin with no single sinner.
We have sinned against each other under duress and willingly. We have sinned knowingly and unknowingly. We have sinned intentionally and unintentionally.
And we have sinned individually and collectively.
Pardon and forgive all our iniquities?
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore.