We all knew this was coming.

Government officials locked down the city of Louisville, foreshadowing what the government knew would spark outage; a verdict that cleared all involved officers of Breonna Taylor’s murder. Cameron’s word engendered an overt insult to black intelligence in charging one officer with a shooting a wall and “endangering neighbors” while a black woman is dead. Here, the black community learns that the soldiers of white supremacy and Taylor’s neighbors matter more than the black life seized in the line of white supremacist duty.

Besides the total butchering of facts to fit the frame of this white settler colony, what I found most disturbing about Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s address was his implicit indictment of Kenneth Walker, Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend as the catalyst for the bloodshed that fateful night in March.

Cameron’s recounting of the “facts” contended that the officer’s entry followed a knock one need not be present to know did not happen, and the bullets lodged into Taylor’s body as self-defense and in response to Walker’s fired shots.

Based on this distorted information, Cameron’s address suggests that Walker, not the sea of bullets launched from the six officers that entered her home in the middle of the night, is to blame for Breonna Taylor’s death. Thus, his words resurrect the “they did it to themselves” narrative that deems blacks to blame for the social and systemic terrorism wielded against them. Additionally, this white settler space seeks to veil its racism by employing one black man to villainize another. The result is, of course, the sheer opposite.

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The social and systemic domestic terrorism that Taylor’s case betrays makes it hard to sleep- literally–as blacks must dodge bullets even in their dreams. This truth and suggests that the only peace for the African in America outside a black nationalist space is after death, another white supremacist controlling ideology manifested most commonly through the bible. Vindicating officer, and governmental culpability in Taylor’s murder, and deeming their actions “self-defense” despite being in Taylor’s home, elucidates any house on white nationalist abducted soil as home to white supremacy. White supremacy hones the right to stand their ground any and every place, deeming black murder just as ubiquitous.

A country that continues to blame the black collective for dying from the bullets ejaculated from the (not so) concealed weapon of anti-blackness or white supremacy, illustrates the social reproduction of the callous acts that brought the African to America. This truth is not lost on their descendants. This repetition illuminates its implementation as essential to the stagnancy of white supremacy. Specifically, we, the black collective, must continue to die if white nationalism, or America, is to continue to live.

Yet, this news proves heavy on the hearts of Black America, not because of lack of anticipation but because we have come to anticipate that which is continuously implemented to destroy us. To continually encounter how unprotected we remain in a house we built, is spiritually depleting but it also posits a black nationalist agenda as essential.

Taylor’s loss, her physical transition in March, and this judicial loss, marks a loss for Taylor’s family, her community of friends, coworkers, and the black community at large, but sends an especially cruel message to the young black girls (children at large, but especially little girls) in America. America hands the little black girl Taylor’s verdict as a legacy, a promise as to what they can become and what space remains open in American History for their embodiment. The legacy is a bullet-ridden corpse in a coffin that embodies the promise of American domestic terrorism. Daniel Cameron, who gleefully does the master’s work, posits that the best black youth can be is a mouthpiece to kick the chair from beneath their collective selves. He does the master’s work in illustrating the height of white power is to get blacks to strive to be a tool to repair the house of white hegemony. Forget about learning that there is no Santa, no Easter Bunny, or Tooth Fairy, little black girls and boys, through the countless killers who murder black people and escape indictment, learn that there is no justice.

It is our job to collectively alter this narrative.

So while we may feel sad. While this socially reproduced truth and trauma will incite a pain too prodigious for this white settler language, we are not to be defeated. We must, however, defeat the flames incited to torch us into submission.

Furthermore, we have tried to weather these flames with the water of resistance, but, to paraphrase a cliche phrase from the black archive, “ no more water… fire next time.”