Last year, the Breonna Taylor case stood in the national spotlight. And when the officers involved in her death were not charged with murder, it made a lot of people question the integrity of the justice system.
Criticisms over what happened are understandable and fair. What makes less sense is takes like this one from Harvard pre-med student Kyla Golding:
I took an inorganic chemistry exam the same day that a grand jury failed to charge two police officers with the murder of Breonna Taylor. That day, my body inhaled molecules of white supremacy as they seeped out of my computer from that proctored Zoom room. They entered my bloodstream and catalyzed a metabolism that would allow for the invasion of my body by a violently infectious life form. A chronic pain, caused by the perpetuation of lethally unjust practices and compounded by the silence and avoidance between myself and my educators when it comes to Black women’s lives, would make its way through and onto neighboring cells within my physical being. The presence of the germ of white supremacy would cause a steric hindrance within me, slowing down and even preventing the reactions of learning and healing that I desperately needed for myself and from others in that moment. The exam began, and I haven’t been able to show up mentally or emotionally in a science class since.
When white supremacy invades the bodies of those of us who dare to be Black, female, and breathing, it reproduces as a crippling affliction that accompanies us everywhere — physically, psychologically, and spiritually. The weeks I had spent preparing for that exam could never amount to the time and energy I have spent mourning Breonna Taylor. The time I would spend understanding electrons and balancing reactions would never amount to the years I have spent watching those whose skin was saturated with melanin like mine lose their lives. I held study sessions for myself alongside silent prayer recitations for the justice I knew would probably never come. And still, I showed up to my exam — in all my Black womanness — despite the heartache that would be ignored, unseen, and unacknowledged.
I could have asked to take that inorganic chemistry exam another day, but it would have required me to release my breath to plead for the need to catch it. I could have put my racial trauma on display to beg professors, teaching fellows, and preceptors to consider a Black woman’s funeral worthy of an excused absence, but I couldn’t bear the harrowing reality that I was mourning while white America was not. In the months to come, the symptoms of the infection of white supremacy — transmitted across bodies from professor to pupil, peer to peer, educators to learners — in the pre-med academic space sent me into a prolonged battle with recurring pain as I struggled with trying to fight, while also trying to survive.
If you’re rolling your eyes right now, you’re not alone.
This chick is resigning pre-med at Harvard because she chose to take an inorganic chemistry test on the day no indictments were handed down in the Breonna Taylor case and now she is traumatized by inorganic chemistry Zoom classes. Yes really.https://t.co/hsjsZQR4ex pic.twitter.com/1wNSZhC0d3
— NecroNoamicon (@neontaster) October 25, 2021
I'm even willing to entertain the idea that the verdict was so important to her that there was a chance she'd be too upset to take the test, but she chose to not ask to move it because that would require asking for something from a whitey and we can't have that.
— NecroNoamicon (@neontaster) October 25, 2021
What Kyla is really saying here, in her self-aggrandizing ode to social justice, is that she should never be taken seriously.
Unfit for the real world. https://t.co/Sw6wipuwkY
— Manderz65 (@haolegirl1965) October 25, 2021
Definitely unfit for medical school.
She failed the test lol “ my body inhaled molecules of white supremacy as they seeped out of my computer “ aka medical school is hard! pic.twitter.com/ZMSghyIbwj
— Corpsman mom (@wendy414911) October 25, 2021
Let us take what she says seriously. If white supremacy is an actual transmittible virus, germ, whatever, how could she ever treat anyone white as, by her formulation, they would infect her. https://t.co/cvWyradJ7F
— alexandriabrown (@alexthechick) October 25, 2021
Anyone who thinks you can inhale white supremacy through Zoom has no business being anywhere near the medical field.
— Swank Sinatra (@SwankierSinatra) October 25, 2021
You probably shouldn't be a doctor if *that* is so traumatizing to you.
— Polkabecky (@polkabecky) October 25, 2021
This is very good news. She's clearly not cut out to be a doctor.
— Tad (@TadBril) October 25, 2021
Her resignation from the pre-med program is future patients’ gain.
Her now-non-existent patients dodged a bullet.
— Jane the Actuary (@JanetheActuary) October 25, 2021
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