On Breath: George Floyd, Amy Cooper, and COVID-19

Sometimes I wake in the night gasping for air. It usually happens in a dream in which I am choking. It’s just allergies, but it’s terrifying. For the few seconds that feel like hours in dream world, I feel my life fading away. It’s hard to get back to sleep.

Breath is life. As so many of us stayed at home, donned masks, and stayed six feet away from each other, we watched four Minnesota policemen choke a Black man to death. In the full heat of the afternoon sun, while onlookers watched and recorded, George Floyd gasped out “I can’t breathe.” The officer who kneeled on his neck, crushing his airway, was unmoved.

Like so many officers before him, he considered using deadly force his right, he only saw this man as a criminal, and he believed he was doing nothing wrong. Why would he? Most officers who kill Black men and women receive no more than a slap on the wrist. Maybe desk duty. Maybe paid leave. Occasionally a grand jury summons. But for the most part, powerful people protect them from the fallout of their actions. What would be murder in any other context is explained away by a police officer fearing for his life.

This protection extends beyond uniformed officers to “citizen-protectors,” those men who choose to take the law into their own hands. Those so-called “good guys with a gun” who use self-awarded badges to harass Black men jogging in the street and Black boys buying candy at local shops. Gregory and Travis McMichael walked free for two months after pursuing and murdering Ahmad Arbery who was doing nothing more than jogging in his neighborhood.

Racial terrorism knows no bounds. It emerges in southeast Georgia, Minneapolis, even New York City where a white woman, angry about a Black man’s request to leash her dog, tried to weaponize the police knowing it could have deadly consequences. She was so focused on siccing the police on the man who dared to ask her to follow park rules, that she ignored her own dog choking beside her.

Americans are holding our breath, waiting for this virus to subside so we can walk out our doors, rip off our masks, and breathe fresh air once again. But Black Americans will hold their breath long after this virus ends. When daily life is cause for alarm, when walking, running, driving, barbecuing, and bird watching while Black all come at the risk of being hunted down by police or fellow citizens, breathing easy is not an option.

When I learned that shortness of breath was a symptom of the coronavirus, I was afraid. It is harrowing to think of people alone, gasping for air, as they take their final breaths. Breathless bodies piled up in make-shift freezer trucks because people are dying faster than undertakers can bury them.

The virus is scary, but it is not our biggest threat. The biggest threat we face is the one we pose to each other as we allow insidious notions of white supremacy to shape how we think and act. Whether we are the ones who attack or the ones who stay silent, white people are complicit in making this world unsafe for people of color. And when it comes to discussions of racism, of strategies for dismantling it, we shut down progress by taking up all of the air in the room.

Now is the time for change. We must hold our leaders and ourselves accountable. We must use our breath to shout from the rooftops that the racism that has plagued our country from its inception and continues to fester must come to an end. Until we unite against state-sponsored murder and state-enabled vigilantes, none of us should be able to sleep at night.