THEY KEEP TELLING US WHO WE ARE
Black Music, American Law, and the Verdict That Forces Us to Ask Again: Do Black Lives Really Matter?
On a gray Friday in Columbus, a jury walked back into Courtroom 5B and said, in the polite language of the law, what American juries have told Black families for generations: when a police officer says he was afraid, that fear weighs more than our lives.
The clerk read it out: not guilty on all counts. No murder. No manslaughter. No felonious assault.
Former Blendon Township officer Connor Grubb stood still. The defense table loosened its shoulders. On the other side of the room, the family of Ta’Kiya Young—a 21-year-old Black mother, seven months pregnant with a baby girl she’d already nicknamed “tiny lady”—absorbed the quiet violence of the words.
In the hallway, Young’s grandmother broke down on camera, shouting through tears that he got to walk away while her granddaughter and great-granddaughter were gone forever. It was not just grief; it was recognition. Anyone who has been Black and paying attention in this country knew exactly what had just happened, even if they didn’t know her name until that day.
Once again, the oldest unresolved question in American life pressed itself to the front:
Do Black lives really matter here—beyond hashtags, beyond murals, beyond election-year slogans?
What the verdict actually said
On August 24, 2023, officers confronted Young in a Kroger parking lot on Columbus’s northeast side after store staff accused her of shoplifting bottles of liquor. Body-camera footage shows two officers at her car: one at the driver’s door, one in front of the hood with his gun already drawn. Young cracks the window, denies stealing, asks, “Are you going to shoot me?” She turns on her turn signal. The car starts to roll forward at a crawl. The officer in front—Grubb—plants one hand on the hood, raises the other, and fires a single shot through the windshield into her chest. Her Lexus rolls away and drifts to a stop as her body collapses. She and her unborn daughter are later pronounced dead at the hospital.
Prosecutors charged Grubb with murder, involuntary manslaughter, and felonious assault. A judge dismissed four counts related to the fetus, ruling there wasn’t enough evidence he knew she was pregnant, but allowed the rest to proceed.
At trial, the core question wasn’t whether a suspected low-level theft should ever end in death. It wasn’t whether a trained officer should choose to stand in front of a car and escalate the encounter with a gun already drawn. Legally, the question shrank down to this:
Did Grubb reasonably fear for his life when he pulled the trigger?
The defense argued that when Young’s car moved, Grubb believed he was about to be run over, making deadly force justified. The prosecution countered that he created the danger by stepping in front of the vehicle and that a slowly moving car in a parking lot did not pose a lethal threat.
Under the Supreme Court’s Graham v. Connor standard, an officer’s use of force must be judged from the perspective of a “reasonable officer on the scene,” not a civilian watching the replay on YouTube. That doctrine, now decades old, bends the law around police perceptions of danger—perceptions soaked in a culture that has long treated Black bodies as inherently threatening. Legal scholars have argued for years that this is why prosecutions are so rare.
The numbers are stark. Since 2005, roughly 20,000 people have been killed by police in the United States. In that same period, about 200 officers total have been arrested for on-duty murder or manslaughter—around 1 percent of fatal police shootings. Of those, only a fraction have been convicted of any crime, and just a handful of those convictions have been for murder.
Put differently: out of more than 20,000 people killed by police in two decades, fewer than four out of every 1,000 deaths have led to any criminal conviction for the officer involved—and almost none have been called what they look like from the outside: murder.
That’s not a bug in the system. That is the system.
So when the jury told the world that Young’s killing did not meet the threshold for criminal accountability, they weren’t handing down an anomaly. They were joining a chorus.
Columbus is not an exception. It’s a map.
Columbus has quietly become one of the country’s clearest case studies in how this pattern plays out.
In 2020, a Franklin County sheriff’s deputy killed Casey Goodson Jr., shooting him in the back as he entered his home with a bag of Subway sandwiches. Months later, Columbus officer Adam Coy shot and killed Andre Hill, an unarmed Black man, in a neighbor’s garage after mistaking his cellphone for a gun. Coy was eventually convicted of murder—making him the first on-duty officer in Columbus, and in all of Ohio, to be convicted of murder for killing someone while on duty.
Around those cases are others:
Ma’Khia Bryant, 16, shot within seconds of officers arriving at a chaotic fight outside her foster home.
Donovan Lewis, killed in his bed when an officer serving a warrant fired almost immediately after opening the door, later claiming he thought a vape pen was a gun.
Each incident had its own facts. Each sparked its own outrage. Each followed a familiar chain: encounter → escalation → lethal force → legal ambiguity → institutional defensiveness.
Coy’s conviction is treated as evidence that the system can work when it wants to. Young’s case is a reminder of how rarely it wants to.
After the verdict, attorney Sean Walton, who represents Young’s family, called it “an American tragedy” and emphasized that he did not blame the jury as much as the legal standard they were given. If the law is designed to privilege police fear over Black life, then the outcome, he suggested, is baked in.
The local police union, meanwhile, framed the acquittal as vindication—not just of Grubb, but of police power itself. The Fraternal Order of Police had called the indictment “politically motivated” from the start; after the verdict, it praised the jury and thanked them for seeing the case “for what it was.”
Read the two reactions side by side and you see the split-screen Black America has been living in for generations:
For the family, this was confirmation that their granddaughter’s life could be taken with impunity.
For the union, this was confirmation that the system still knows whose fear counts most.
They keep telling us who we are.
What the law hears vs. what we hear
Inside the courtroom, “reasonableness” is supposed to be neutral. Jurors are instructed to imagine themselves as officers, feel the adrenaline, and picture the split-second decision.
Outside the courtroom, Black communities are still asking a different set of questions:
Why is an officer’s fear unquestioned while a Black person’s fear of police is treated as irrational?
Why is the jury told to see the world through the officer’s eyes but never through the eyes of the person who ends up dead?
How many times can you watch this movie before you admit it has a script?
The legal system cares deeply whether an officer’s fear meets the threshold of “reasonable.” It rarely asks whether the underlying fear itself is the problem—fear trained by a culture that has coded Blackness as a threat for centuries.
That’s the piece the courtroom can’t hold. It’s also the piece our culture has been screaming about in the only court that consistently hears us: the arts.
The unofficial Black law library
Long before body-camera footage forced the country to look at what Black communities already knew, our artists had been documenting the pattern—song by song, verse by verse.
In 1996, Michael Jackson released “They Don’t Care About Us,” a raw, percussive indictment of police brutality and state violence. One video was filmed in a U.S. prison, surrounded by incarcerated men; another in Brazilian favelas. At the time, critics called it excessive, even inflammatory. In retrospect, it reads like a news bulletin that arrived twenty years early.
Two decades later, Common and John Legend wrote “Glory” for Ava DuVernay’s film Selma. The song won an Oscar, but more importantly, it connected the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to today’s protests in Ferguson, Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Columbus. In their acceptance speech, Legend reminded the audience that more Black men were under correctional control in 2015 than were enslaved in 1850.
Then there’s Kendrick Lamar—a one-man cross-examination in a hoodie.
His catalog lives at the intersection of confession, prophecy, and prosecution. Behind the gossip and memes around a track like “Not Like Us” is a deeper project: drawing a line between those who truly belong to a community and those who feed off it. When he urges people to unplug from TV broadcasts and social feeds that loop Black suffering on an endless reel, he’s not being anti-media. He’s being anti-propaganda. He’s telling us: If you don’t own the frame, your pain is just programming.
Taken together, these songs—and dozens more like them—form an unofficial Black law library.
They document patterns the court treats as irrelevant “prior incidents.”
They hold a memory longer than any news cycle.
They put the state on the stand and force it to answer questions it never hears under oath.
So when another verdict comes back not guilty, when another lawyer tells us an officer’s fear was understandable, we’re not starting from scratch. We’re hearing the ruling with Michael’s fury, Common and Legend’s lament, and Kendrick’s boundaries playing in the background.
The courts keep telling us who we are. The music keeps answering back: We already know. We’ve been knowing.
Beyond preaching to the choir
Critics sometimes say that essays like this “preach to the choir”—that the people who read them already believe the system is rigged, and the people who don’t will never make it past the headline.
There’s some truth there. Black readers don’t need more “awareness.” They need less premature deaths.
But here’s the thing about choirs: they’re not just there to be preached at. They’re there to sing.
Trials like Grubb’s are designed, almost by definition, to scrub out context. Jurors are told to look only at the seconds before the shot. Prior incidents, departmental patterns, the city’s history with police violence—most of that stays outside the door, treated as prejudicial.
Art, journalism, and community memory do the opposite. They lay cases side by side.
They say:
Here is Tamir Rice. Here is Philando Castile. Here is Sandra Bland. Here is George Floyd. Here is Breonna Taylor. Here is Casey Goodson Jr. Here is Andre Hill. Here is Ta’Kiya Young.
Now tell me again, this is about one bad decision in one parking lot.
The point isn’t just to persuade the unconvinced. It’s to give the already-convinced a shared story, language, and strategy—to turn solitary grief into collective clarity.
Which brings us to the real question: What now?
From protest to power: four fronts of the fight
If all we do after this verdict is march, post, and move on, we will be back here in a few months with a new name and the same arguments.
The work ahead lives on at least four fronts.
1. Wage asymmetric legal warfare
If the system understands anything, it’s cost.
Right now, the financial risk of killing us is low. Cities pay settlements; insurance helps cover it; budgets keep rolling. As long as fatal force is cheaper than reform, nothing fundamental changes.
“Asymmetric legal warfare” means:
Relentless civil litigation—not just against individual officers, but against departments and municipalities that tolerate patterns of abuse.
Targeted impact suits that force disclosure of training materials, internal communications, and disciplinary records—turning discovery into public education.
Coordinated legal strategies so that wins in one jurisdiction become templates for others, instead of isolated victories.
In Columbus, for example, Andre Hill’s family secured a multi-million-dollar settlement and helped push through “Andre’s Law,” which requires officers to render aid and activate body-cams. That’s not justice. But it’s a small example of making negligence expensive enough that departments have to change behavior, not just messaging.
This isn’t about believing the system will suddenly grow a conscience. It’s about making it too costly—for city budgets, for police unions, for political careers—to keep treating Black death as a line item.
2. Treat police violence as a public-health crisis
Every killing like Young’s sends shock waves through a community. Researchers have found that highly publicized police killings of unarmed Black people are associated with spikes in mental-health issues among Black Americans, including anxiety and depression.
That means trauma is not just personal; it’s population-level.
If we’re serious about survival, we have to build infrastructures of care:
Free or low-cost counseling specifically for families and communities impacted by police violence.
Grief circles and healing spaces led by therapists, clergy, and community elders after major cases.
Media practices that cover these stories without replaying Black death on loop for ratings.
Otherwise, “turn the TV off” becomes the only sane option—and our coping mechanism becomes a kind of forced disengagement from public life.
3. Build our own archives
The official record of police violence in this country is scattered and incomplete. Departments under-report. Federal databases are voluntary and patchy. Most of what we know comes from journalists, academics, and a handful of determined nonprofits.
We need Black-led archives that don’t just store information, but protect memory and agency.
That looks like:
Searchable, community-controlled databases where every use of deadly force is logged, tracked, and followed—not just the cases that go viral.
Timelines that show what happens after the headline: charges, pleas, trials, settlements, policy changes—or the silence.
Narrative profiles that keep our people human: not just mugshots, but voice notes, photos, dreams, favorite colors, the text messages they sent the night before.
In a better world, Ta’Kiya Young isn’t just a case number in a PDF. She’s a full profile: her dreams of becoming a social worker, her love of pink, her applications for housing, her vision of stability for her sons. Data that her family has a say over. A story no outside algorithm can quietly bury when the trending topic changes.
4. Own the platforms that tell the story
This is where protest meets power.
Every time a Black person is killed by police, our grief becomes content. Cable news loops the footage. Social media harvests the engagement. Platforms whose algorithms routinely bury Black creators’ work have no problem amplifying Black trauma.
If we don’t own the platforms, we are the product.
So the long-term answer to “Do Black lives really matter?” cannot just be: We hope the courts start treating us better. It has to be: We are building the digital, cultural, and economic infrastructure where our lives are non-negotiable from the start.
That’s the work I’m trying to do with Kin Worldwide—a Black-owned media and tech ecosystem being built out of Columbus and beyond. The goal is simple and radical:
Platforms where the energy of the barbershop, the block, and the boardroom converge.
Spaces where Black creators, journalists, lawyers, and organizers decide which stories lead—not distant editors chasing ratings.
Tools that help families control how their loved ones’ images and names are used.
A home for the “unofficial Black law library”—the music, the reporting, the oral histories—that keeps our memory sharper than any official report.
Kin isn’t the only effort like this. But it’s my stake in the ground, my answer to a country that keeps putting us on trial even when we’re the ones in the casket.
The point is not to build a branded bunker. The point is to build infrastructure—places where our dead are not reduced to exhibits and our living are not reduced to eyeballs.
The verdict isn’t the last word—unless we let it be
Ta’Kiya Young will never get to enroll in a social-work program. She will never sign a lease on the apartment she hoped would give her boys their own rooms. Her daughter will never wear the pink outfits waiting for her.
The court has spoken on what happened in that Kroger parking lot. The police union has claimed vindication. The news has mostly moved on to the next crisis.
But the story isn’t over unless we agree to end it here.
Black music will go on documenting the pattern. Black communities will go on carrying the grief. Black parents will go on having “the talk” that white parents don’t need.
The question is what we build in response.
Do Black lives really matter in America?
If you look only at the verdicts, the answer is: not enough to consistently outweigh a uniform’s fear.
If you look at what we are starting to build—legal strategies that raise the cost of killing us, archives that won’t forget us, platforms that we own—the answer can become something else.
The courts will keep saying “not guilty.”
We have to build the institutions that answer back.
That’s the work in front of us now: to turn the wail in that courthouse hallway into policy, into platforms, into power.
The state has given its verdict.