How can any of us breathe in an atmosphere of compounded injustice? How can we breath in an atmosphere of hypocrisy, when justice has never been blind? We live in a nation where a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, is shot because he has a toy pellet gun that wasn’t even pointed at police. Hard to breathe when video makes it absolutely clear that it was not necessary for Daniel Panaleo to place Eric Garner in a chokehold. Hard to breathe when a grand jury comes to an incomprehensible decision, one that defies common sense—and what we saw with our eyes.
Difficult to breathe when an elected official, Congressman Peter King, R-N.Y., chooses to blame Eric Garner’s health for his death. “If he had not had asthma, and a heart condition, and was so obese, almost definitely he would not have died from this,” King told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. King failed to note that use of the chokehold was banned by New York Police Department in 1993. Instead, there is no shame, no condolence in his insensitivity and ignorance. Can’t breathe.
Whether he is svelte or obese, carrying a briefcase or a bag of skittles, wearing a Hermes suit or a hoodie, behaving respectfully or rudely, a Black man’s safety cannot be guaranteed, especially when a White police officer is involved. The mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts and wives of these men hold their breath, cannot breathe, except to pray for the safety of their loved ones. Would the system be fairer if a White man walking down Park Avenue had the same fears? Would the protests look different if those who were massacred looked different?
Can’t breathe has become a metaphor for the African-American condition, juggling the space between hopes and despair, between progress and regress. Who would have thought police violence against African American men would so visibly escalate at a time when our nation’s leader is an African American man. Can President Obama breathe, or is he in a figurative chokehold when he parses words about the murders of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and little Tamir Rice? Our president faced protest when he criticized James Crowley, the White police officer who arrested Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his own house in 2009. Now, Obama offers measured words in response to the outrageousness of grand jury failure to indict.
Attorney General Eric Holder has been less measured in his comments. The day after the Staten Island grand jury exonerated Daniel Panaleo for his murder of Eric Garner, Holder announced Department of Justice’s findings of excessive force by the Cleveland Police Department. Perhaps the Cleveland consent decree will be a first step toward cleaning up excessive police action around the country.
Eric Garner did not have to die. He did not have to stop breathing. Did his last breath bring life to a movement, or did he gasp that last breath in vain?
(Julianne Malveaux is an author and economist based in Washington, D.C.)
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