One of my favorite times of year is when winter turns to spring. It’s not January—but mid-March—that usually feels like the real New Year to me, as the sun seemingly shines brighter, and the days get longer. 

But I’ll never forget the transition from winter to spring of 2020, and how it was unlike any other I, and many others, had felt in our lifetime. The COVID-19 pandemic was swiftly sweeping the nation. Streets, in many neighborhoods around the country, were quiet after shutdown mandates were issued city by city. 

Some neighborhoods were not quiet, though. On March 13, 2020, 26-year-old Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by a group of police officers who’d conducted forced entry into her Louisville, Kentucky apartment.

Her death wouldn’t receive national attention for weeks due to the severity of the pandemic and the national shutdown that followed. But in late May, George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, paired with reports of the release of a 911 phone call Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, made crying for help on the night of her murder, evoked protests across the country.

Silence six years after Breonna Taylor’s death

For a moment, Taylor’s name was everywhere. Six years later, her anniversary came and went with little acknowledgment. A handful of influential voices, including Rep. Cori Bush and writer Jamil Smith, acknowledged the anniversary. But the widespread attention that once followed Taylor’s name was largely missing.

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, a 2023 Department of Justice investigation into the Louisville Metro Police Department found serious misconduct and widespread discrimination against Black residents, including unlawful stops, excessive force and harassment. One officer told investigators that Taylor “was a symptom of problems that we have had for years.”

She was not an exception; she was evidence. Furthermore, those problems have not gone away; there is simply less attention on them.

Part of that shift reflects the current political climate. We are living under an administration that campaigned on eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, many of which were widely adopted in 2020. The language of racial justice that once dominated public discourse is now openly contested.

At the same time, some of the policy changes that followed her murder have quietly been rolled back. As The Root recently reported, efforts to limit practices like no-knock warrants in the wake of Taylor’s killing have been weakened or reversed, restoring broader discretion to law enforcement with little public attention. The country did not only move on, it slid backward.

But the silence is dangerous, and it will continue to cost the lives of Black women across the country. 

A crisis that never disappeared

Black women continue to be killed at disproportionately high rates in the United States. Research shows that Black women face the highest homicide rates of any group of women in the country, a disparity that has persisted for years and remains deeply underexamined. A report from the University of New Mexico’s Health Sciences Center describes the killing of Black women as a “public health crisis,” pointing not only to the scale of the violence, but to how little sustained attention it receives.

And these deaths are often not random.

Many Black women are killed by people they know, including intimate partners. Others, like Taylor, are killed during encounters with law enforcement. Together, these cases reflect a broader pattern of vulnerability shaped by systemic inequality.

At the same time, the full scope of this crisis is difficult to measure.

There is no comprehensive system that fully tracks the violent deaths of Black women, making the crisis difficult to quantify and easy to overlook. Media coverage is inconsistent, and many cases receive little sustained attention. Even in moments of heightened awareness, Black women are often left at the margins of the conversation.

In the years since 2020, even that limited attention has shifted. Public engagement with issues of race, policing, and the Black Lives Matter movement has declined, according to Pew Research Center surveys. As that attention has declined, so has the urgency surrounding violence against Black women.

What happens when attention fades?

The conditions that made Taylor vulnerable have not disappeared. What has faded is the willingness to confront it.

Silence shapes what the public sees as a crisis and what it learns to accept as normal. When the deaths of Black women fail to generate sustained outrage, it sends a message about whose lives are worthy of protection, and whose stories are worth telling.

Remembering Taylor should not be limited to anniversaries, sure. And it should not depend on whether her name is trending. But it should demand a deeper reckoning with why Black women remain so vulnerable to violence and why that reality continues to go unnoticed. Because silence does not just reflect neglect. It helps sustain it.