Ma’Khia Bryant, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Erica Garner were all viewed as big Black people when their lives were stolen by the state. The biggest and Blackest of us are being targeted and killed.
On April 20th, woven in-between the breaking news of Derek Chauvin’s conviction in the murder of George Floyd, TikToks of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant made their way onto our Instagram feeds. Her face was now precious enough to be turned into shareable graphic art and her life was important enough to be the subject of thoughtful prose on Twitter.
See, I’ve been a fat Black girl with a bad attitude since I was a child. To be clear, I wasn’t just your standard fat baby. Everyone loves a fat baby. I was a fat baby, toddler, teenager, and now adult. Ma’Khia Bryant was a child who spoke like a child, and thought like a child. But from the moment that police officer fired into a crowd of adults to murder her, I watched as our world refused to understand her as a child.
Individuals carry out countless offenses against fat Black bodies on a daily basis and it’s killing all of us slowly but surely. It’s devastating that the final offense was Ma’Khia Bryant being killed by the police. The biggest and Blackest of us are being targeted and killed. Therefore, we must center the voices of the biggest and Blackest if you intend to see the other side of liberation.
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Ma'Khia Bryant's Journey Through Foster Care Ended With an Officer's BulletCOLUMBUS, Ohio — The voice on the 911 call is a teenage girl’s, and it is quavering, as if she has been crying. “I want to leave this foster home,” she tells the dispatcher. “I want to leave this foster home.” When two police officers arrived at the home in Columbus, Ohio, they reported later, they met an agitated ninth grader, Ja’Niah Bryant, who told them that the fighting at 3171 Legion Lane was getting worse and worse. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times They said there was nothing they could do. Twenty-three days later, Ja’Niah called 911 again, telling the police that she and her older sister were being threatened by two young women who used to live at the house. Officers arrived in the middle of a melee outside the house, and one of them fatally shot Ja’Niah’s 16-year-old sister, Ma’Khia Bryant, who was lunging at one of the women, brandishing a steak knife. The shooting, which occurred moments before a jury in Minneapolis convicted Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd, released a new wave of anger over shootings by the police. To calm the furor, the Columbus police quickly released body camera footage, which showed some of the fight outside the house and, they said, demonstrated that the officer had acted to protect the other woman. But Bryant’s tragic death was also preceded by a turbulent journey through the foster care system, which had cycled her through at least five placements in two years — after her own mother was found to be negligent — despite efforts by their grandmother to reunite the family. Ohio places children in foster care at a rate 10% higher than the national average, and child welfare officials here are considerably less likely than in the country as a whole to place children with their relatives. Black children, like the Bryants, account for nearly one-third of children removed from homes — nearly twice their proportion in the population. A review of Ma’Khia Bryant’s pathway through foster care shows that it fai
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