Public Parking
A journal for storytelling, arguments, and discovery through tangential conversations.
Images of Awareness: some reflections from a year of civil protest
Tuesday, January 12, 2021 | Jennifer Torwudzo-Stroh
Do you remember the first time you saw Breonna Taylor‘s face? Or, perhaps more aptly, do you remember the first time you saw her likeness? None of us can really say we’ve ever seen her face because the vast majority of us never knew her. But I can tell you with certainty when I made my first social media post about Taylor: on June 4, 2020, in my Instagram stories, I reshared a Change.org petition called “Justice for Breonna Taylor.” At the time it had 2,949,394 signatures with the goal of reaching 3,000,000. The link to the petition was accompanied by  the now-familiar picture of Taylor at her graduation. In the image, she’s immortalized as a young Black woman, smiling broadly, her face bare, her hair arranged in black and red twists and woven into a crown on her head. She’s clad in a uniform with a bouquet of yellow flowers cradled in her arm and her recently awarded certificate displayed prominently in her hand for the photo. Behind her is the Louisville seal and four standing flags, the Stars and Stripes the most identifiable among them. Her gaze is level and she stands poised and proud of her achievement.