| Abstrakt: |
After failing to indict officers involved in the shooting death of Breonna Taylor, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron explained, “My job as the special prosecutor was to put emotion aside and investigate facts.” The positivist values emphasized by Cameron (i.e., objectivity, validity, thoroughness, and truth) have consistently been referenced as the gold standard of research and been used to justify White supremacy and deny Black humanity. In this article, I use Unapologetic Black Inquiry (UBI) to analyze Cameron’s remarks. UBI values Black defiance and dissident knowledge to center Black humanity and liberation, and provokes questions such as: Who produced knowledge and narratives in the Breonna Taylor case? What was their purpose in creating this knowledge? What are the assumptions about Blackness embedded in this narrative? In answering these questions, I challenge the presumed superiority of objectivity, validity, thoroughness, and truth in knowledge production, discuss how these values deny Black humanity, and explore the liminal space and dis/comfort Black women may experience when their humanity is denied. |
