“Fuck Your Breath”

We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are 'isolated.' They are the canaries in the coalmine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere.

— Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in dissent, June 20, 2016,

There is a misperception that police are the problem and that their failures, their lack of training, and their abuses create crime, but the truth is the police are the solution to crime, and criminals are the problem.

— Attorney General Jefferson B. Sessions III, in opposition to court-ordered police reforms, October 12, 2018

I

Recently, I heard a woman recount a conversation with her young son, who, seeing the protest signs aloft, had asked her, softly: do the police ever kill children?

And she didn't want to make him afraid. But she didn't want to lie.

~

[The Negro] is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene.

— James Baldwin, 1955

~

I am a child of the 1980s, which means that I am among the last Americans to experience a youth unmediated by social media. It means also that for nearly all of my youth, video-records of daily life were scant, because the equipment was expensive and cumbersome. All of this means that, when I was very young, the only people who knew what happened when cops collided with Black people were cops and Black people. No one else because cops reside in a smug silence and no one listens to Black people.

~

We do not listen. Instead, we speak, dropping verbs and actors until the language becomes neutered, imprecise and innocuous, faultless. There are shootings and deaths, but no one powerful ever kills anyone.

Even the syntax of grand juries is awkward. I keep wanting to write that they are acquitted, those rare officers who fall so far as to face charges. But, of course, they aren't. Because acquitted means a trial, acquitted means cross-examinations and defense attorneys and public records and closing statements, things that never did happen, things that never will happen.

II

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, and those who study policing know: we don’t study history.

— John Miller, October, 2017

Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence & Counter-terrorism for the NYPD, former Assistant Director of Public Affairs for the FBI

First, the undercover police hidden within the chanting crowd would brandish weapons, spinning with barrels pointed, then the armored formation would move in, but for a while the helmeted mass just stood a block south of the march, legs spread wider than hips, as choppers illuminated the asphalt buffer in fits and starts.

Helicopters pounded the air above, weaving their searchlights like drunks high-beaming across a narrow bridge. College students and senior citizens stopped traffic, chanting ERIC-GARNER-MICHAEL-BROWN-FUCK-THE-POLICE-SHUT-IT-DOWN; the young smashed store windows, the old stared down the phalanx of riot-geared cops holstering tear gas and rubber bullets. A nearby deputy chief had been pulled aside and sternly whispered to when he suggested water cannons.

~

After scoring 46% on his written police exam and being deemed unfit in his first month as a patrolman due to a noted "lack of maturity," and an "inability to perform basic functions as instructed," at a different police force, Timothy Loehmann was hired by the Cleveland Police Department.

"Human beings are not born recognizing a threat – it is something that must be learned." That is what special Agent Kimberly A. Crawford wrote in her federal report on the murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot down in a park in spectacularly sudden, instinctual fashion during Thanksgiving break by the inexperienced, recently dismissed, and quadruply-rejected officer.

Despite an otherwise clear history of abject professional failure, Loehmann, Crawford determined, had succeeded in learning to recognize threat. And in so doing, it became his idea of the young Black boy's body, the special agent explained, reinforced by his training, which told him unequivocally that the child must die.

~

In the light of day, children and teens wearing homemade I CAN'T BREATHE shirts moved through the debris, a scattering of tear gas canisters, torn signs, and lost bandanas. Hundreds got up from their desks and marched out of the high school mid-day, arm-in-arm, to shut down MLK. As they stomped past the recessing elementary school, a dozen Black children joined the march on the playground side of their chain-link fence, tiny fists in the air. On the opposite side of the playground, white children cowered near the brick building as a call and response ensued. The high-schoolers marched forward, yelling: HANDS UP! And Black fourth-graders ran alongside, responding in their high-pitched child voices: DON'T SHOOT!

~

That the child was a child, special agent Crawford insists, is irrelevant. That is the reality, and Loehmann is to be judged, she reminds us, on the basis of his idea alone. That the gun was a toy, she contends, is irrelevant. That is the reality, and Loehmann, Crawford says, is to be judged simply and exclusively on the basis of his idea. An idea that, she concludes, rendered the child's death "reasonable."

~

I had read special agent Crawford's report, along with that composed by the prosecutor's office, a month before Loehmann's grand jury proceedings, and so when it was announced that no trial would take place, I was not surprised by the failure of prosecutor McGinty to successfully indict, and by failure, of course, I mean refusal. For while he admitted in his public statements that the child's death was "unfortunate," he maintained that it "was not, by the law that binds us, a crime." The prosecution, leaning on the idea-laden tangle of practical reasoning, succeeded in defending the defendant, defining "reasonable" not through any lens of truth, but through the murky haze of desire and belief, as prosecutors are want to do when the defendant is their collaborator and the non-crime committed against a Black body rendered forever silent in the face of defamation.

In the end, McGinty, who told the grand jurors that Loehmann was innocent of all alleged crimes, did not even go through the motions of holding a vote. The proceedings never even rose to the level of mere formality, and the transcriptless exchange between officials ended in an unceremonious dismissal.

Perhaps McGinty truly did find Tamir’s death "unfortunate." Certainly many have maintained that it was, indeed, "unfortunate." That Loehmann was even permitted to wear a badge, many agree, was certainly "unfortunate." All of it terribly, woefully "unfortunate." But no matter. You see, "unfortunate" is not the same as "unreasonable," and McGinty knew that the rules of white supremacy, the rule of law one might say, dictate that Loehmann mustn't be punished. For him to be punished, for him to even stand trial, a sacrificial lamb on the altar of public justice, would suggest that the white idea he fired at was weaker than the reality of the Black child who fell.

And the fact of no trial, not ever, when one of your children is murdered in front of your other child, the latter restrained, the former rendered no aide, must be something like living the rest of your life without ever exhaling again.

III

The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart - idea of thing, reality of thing - the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness…

— Jamaica Kincaid, 1991

When Rodney King was beaten, I was eight years old, but by the time his attackers were acquitted, I was ten and had just crossed through that threshold of compassion that protects Black boys until the age of nine, at which point, studies have found, they cease to be seen as innocent in the eyes of white onlookers.

~

Rodney King was eleven years old (an age safe for me, a little white girl, but not for him) when Robert Torsney, a white NYPD officer responding to a call on Thanksgiving Day, encountered fifteen-year-old Randolph Evans returning home – unarmed – after walking his grandmother to the bus stop. Two feet away from Randolph, Torsney unholstered his weapon and shot the Black teen in the head. Later, pleading a momentary psychosis, Torsney was acquitted of the ninth-grader’s murder, spent one year undergoing psychiatric treatment, and then walked free.

~

I was ten years old, not much younger than Tamir or Randolph will ever be when I watched from a distance of 3,000 miles as Los Angeles burned. The images would crash into each other in the moments before sleep. For Officer Loehmann, who was himself only four years old when the riots erupted, I imagine the visual onslaught of fire and glass must have lingered and blurred in a tableau even more surreal. For both of us, I imagine, the images existed as a kind of language as much as physical form, like the proposed plaques warning next millennia’s children of the nuclear waste underfoot.

~

When Rodney King was four years old, he might have watched on TV as Buzz Aldrin planted an American flag on the surface of the moon. And he might have seen something else to make his eyes grow wide because that same day, in York, Pennsylvania, 100 miles from where I grew up, a race riot was nearing its peak. Charlie Robertson, an officer in the city’s all-white police force, led members of a united force of rival white gangs in a rousing “White Power!” chant. The next day, these gangs gathered on rooftops and in windows, shotguns loaded, waiting. A Black family heading to buy groceries approached to shouts of “The niggers are coming! The niggers are coming!” The woman driving began to panic, and the car stalled. Lillie Belle Allen, the driver’s sister, emerged to take over the wheel, screaming “DON’T SHOOT!”

As Lillie Belle Allen raced toward the driver’s seat to help her panicked sister restart the car, their frightened parents looking on from the backseat, more than 100 rounds rained down. Lillie Belle was dead. No one arrested. No one charged. A silence enveloped the community for more than thirty years. Then finally, in 2002, some of those responsible confessed to what was done. And decades after Allen's death, a trial was held. Rodney King was 37 years old when an all-white jury acquitted Charlie Robertson, who was no longer a police officer, but the city’s mayor. Lillie Belle Allen had died. Mayor Charlie Roberston again walked free.

~

Everything that happened on the tape happened for a reason, not unreasonable reasons, not evil reasons, but the right reason.

— Defense Attorney Ira Salzman, April 8, 1993

There are different forms of rationality. The one juries are tasked with employing, abductive reasoning, is, like deductive and inductive reasoning, truth-oriented. It is a form of rationality theoretically serving one master. But this is complicated, of course, not only by the fact that jurors are human, but by the fact that the rationality defendants invoke and perform is a different form of rationality altogether. Practical reasoning has divided allegiances. Truth is not anathema, but it yields to desire and belief. When defense attorney Salzman talked about "the right reasons," he was invoking no essential truth, but a constellation of idea and want.

~

"We must not pretend…" the Justice writes. Not cannot, for surely we can. Through our shameless, ceaseless pretending, white Americans have been collectively engaged in perhaps the single largest gaslighting project in human history. We have; we do; we will. But we mustn't.

~

"Is this reasonable?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven D. Clymer asked the jury, showing them the video of Rodney King’s beating again and again, in full speed, and in slow motion. "Is this the way you want police officers to behave? Is this the way you want police to treat citizens in this country?"

In the final question, he omitted the most important word: Black, as in Is this the way you want police to treat Black citizens in this country? He omitted it, but I imagine the jury heard, the whole word slipping in like a silent letter. Like the silent Ks in Know, in Kneel, in Knife.

They retired to their chamber and returned with an answer: YES.

IV

…That the idea of something and its reality are often two completely different things is something no one ever remembers; and so when they meet and find that they are not compatible, the weaker of the two, idea or reality, dies.

— Jamaica Kincaid, 1991

"Look at these men," defense attorney Salzman implored the jury. The four men who had slammed their batons against a kneeling, unarmed man thirty-three times, were, he argued "sacrificial lambs… foisted on the public altar of justice."

Look at these men!

They looked to me, as a child, so different from Rodney King, whom I continued to think of as the defendant, though he sat in the seat reserved for the victims of crime.

Look.

"They are not Robocops!" Salzman continued, "They are human beings. They have fear, they hurt, they feel pain, they bleed, and they die, just like the rest of us."

There was, in Salzman's performance, an unsurprising tone of disbelief. What he was being paid to do – defend the right of police officers to beat a Black man – was something so rarely deemed necessary, as such a right is ordinarily taken as a given. Only two decades into the 21st century, the LAPD alone has shot more than 1,500 people, killing 886. Zero trials.

They have fear. They hurt. They feel pain. All of these statements have been effectively, systematically, countered when “they” have been Black. Only the last has held true: they die.

~

When Tamir Rice was five years old, researchers at the University of Florida conducted the first laboratory study investigating the oft-ignored third leg of the Fear stool: Freeze. Prior to this, much examination of Fight and Flight, but the only scholarly work to look at Freeze had been done in retrospect from the testimonies of rape victims – soft, anecdotal science. Motivated by this "paucity of research," the investigators wanted to acquire the first quantitative data on Freeze.

To do this, they needed to initiate in participants a feeling of threat so visceral as to spur an involuntary, evolutionary-based response. Their solution? Carbon dioxide. Test subjects donned a mask releasing low levels of the tasteless, colorless, odorless gas into their lungs, making them feel as though they couldn't breathe.

This was, of course, years before Eric Garner's last words: I can't breathe. Years before Deputy Joseph Byers told a dying Eric Harris: Fuck your breath. While the same experiment conducted today would likely cause some controversy at the Internal Review Board, at the time that the research was proposed, placing a human subject in the position of feeling that I can't breathe surely must have felt politically neutral. Race neutral.

They did not know that taking someone's breath would soon become an international symbol of police brutality and American white supremacy. What they did know is that taking someone's breath would create in that human being so desperate and overwhelming a fear as to trigger unconscious, uncontrollable, bodily pleas. They knew of a threat the body was born to recognize.

~

When Rodney King was eight years old two plainclothes NYPD officers began to chase a Black man and his son, a fourth-grader who had only just passed through that threshold of compassion fitting the description – Black, male – in a nearby robbery. Having no idea they were being pursued by police officers, the father and son feared they were about to be robbed, and they ran until shots rang out. When Rodney King was eight years old, one of the officers stood over ten-year-old Clifford Glover’s body after he was shot in the back and said in a moment recorded by his police radio, die you little motherfucker.

~

If you try to pretend you don’t see the immediate reality that formed you I think you’ll go blind.

— James Baldwin, 1984

~

I am a child of the 1980s, which means that since I was in elementary school, Rodney King has never floated far from the surface of my mind. For much of my youth, he loitered always just below consciousness, always there was the way his body would rise up in futile pantomime of escape as the next baton swung for his head. I was much smaller then, but eyes grow quickly, nearly reaching adult size in the first few years of life, so the part of me that first encountered the grainy video of his beating was not much different then than it is now. What was different was my pulse, which pounded more impatiently. Different were my hands, which hung tiny off wrists like sunflower stems, then reached to cover my eyes (which of course only left me alone, in the dark now, with the ghost of Rodney King’s beating). Different was my fledgling memory bank – still constructing a filing system, and not yet having allocated a place to store such things.

I have since identified such a space, a file that once fit within a taped-shut shoebox in my mind, now expanded to the size of a room, cold and sterile as a morgue. I crack the door, trying to understand Why?

Because Officer Randall Kerrick’s idea of Jonathan Ferrell – the 24-year-old he compared to a “zombie” when testifying about the 10 bullets he discharged into the unarmed Black man’s body – was stronger than the reality of Jonathan Ferrell as he sought help following a car accident, Jonathan Ferrell died, and Randall Kerrick walked free. Because neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman’s idea of Trayvon Martin – “something’s wrong with him,” he told the 911 dispatcher, “these assholes, they always get away” – was stronger than the reality of the unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin died, and George Zimmerman walked free. Because Officer Darren Wilson’s idea of Michael Brown – “it looked like a demon,” Wilson testified, speaking of the unarmed teenager he killed – was stronger than the reality of Michael Brown, Michael Brown died, and Darren Wilson walked free. Because Officer Michael Slager's idea of Walter Scott – the unarmed father of four guilty of possessing a broken tail light who was shot five times in the back as he fled – was stronger than the reality of Walter Scott, Walter Scott died, and Michael Slager walked free. Because Thomas Shea’s idea of Clifford Glover – “I didn’t notice the size, nor nothing else, only the color,” the officer said of the unarmed ten-year-old he killed, “I was very, very scared” – was stronger than the reality of the fourth-grader, Clifford Glover died, and Thomas Shea walked free. Because Officer Michael Brelo’s idea of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams was stronger than the reality of the unarmed Black pair when he climbed atop their car hood, stared down their Black bodies through the windshield, and fired 15 rounds through the glass, the last onslaught of bullets after more than 100 were discharged into their vehicle when officers mistook a backfire for gunshots and began pursuit (Brelo’s lawyers explaining to the jury that he “perceived that the [unarmed] occupants were shooting at him,” his white imagination inventing not only a gun where there was none, but nonexistent bullets hurling towards his white body), Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams died, their Black bodies riddled with lead like Lillie Belle Allen’s.

Michael Brelo walked free.

These assholes,

they always

get away.

For the white supremacy that every white American quietly protects demands that white ideas remain stronger than Black bodies. That the latter will always buckle.

That in America, white fear of Black children can justify extermination.

This is the law that binds us.

V

The overwhelming human response to fear, researchers have learned, is Flight. For a long time, Fight was considered in the field of social psychology to be preeminent, until scientists realized, their empirical insights always pitifully delayed, that most Fight was mere precursor. That in order to flee, often one must first thrash into existence a path.

~

Some meditation teachers try to convince us that our joy is a balm for the world, that we should all embrace our own happiness, luxuriate in safety and peace, that this will reverberate, tilting the global scales ever so subtly away from pain. And there are times when I want to believe this. Times when I almost do. But mostly I believe that the world deserves nothing less than my anger. That part of my offering toward peace must come in the shape of rage.

~

We breathe out to release carbon dioxide. The out-breath is, in this way, not to sate, but to purge. For it is the steady build-up of that poisonous gas in the lungs that eventually forces a drowning person to open her mouth, desperate to exhale, but instead creating an opening for the water to rush in.

When he was 47 years old, after suffering enormous emotional pain for the two decades following the relentless beating that gave him sudden, unwanted celebrity, Rodney King died at the bottom of his pool. His lungs empty of air, full of water.

No one can breathe in this atmosphere? An inspiring statement of solidarity, but white Americans, by and large, seem to be breathing just fine. And so I can't shake the urge to turn to the white woman drawing calm, confident inhalations as she complains within earshot of children in the wake of another officer-involved shooting – always a murky noun. Complains, not of the loss of life, but of the innocent windows that may be broken in eruptions of fury and despair, her loyalty always with, if not the killer, then the wealth she hopes to claim, the property. Her disdain reserved for the grieving and the dead. I can’t shake the urge to look her in the eye and spit as much as say: Fuck your breath.

For, without this inhumane allegiance to things so much easier for her to see than Black pain, Black life, without her, McGinty could not absolve Loehmann. Without her, Loehmann could not strike down Tamir. Without the endorsement of her and millions like her, those white ideas would cease to be stronger than the living, breathing Black men, women, and children whose reality they snuff.

VI

What was I doing? Saying to myself, it's going to be over, it's going to be over, it's going to, just hang in there, just hang in there, it's going to be over soon.

— Rodney King, July 23, 1991

History does not repeat itself. People choose to keep repeating it.

— Debra Grier, daughter of Lillie Belle Allen, August 2017

For centuries, miners carried caged canaries into coal mines, their fragile skeletons supporting a body that was all feather and lung. The birds would sing a melody that miners knew meant safety. Silence of course meant danger, impending death in a cavern filled with tasteless, colorless, odorless gas. It is unknown how many yellow songbirds died saving us.

I have known, vaguely, as most of us do, of this history. Justice Sotomayor's near-literal usage represents one of the more apt such analogies I've encountered in years, but those sacrificed canaries have indeed had a second life as an over-used, under-considered metaphor for everything from a dip in IBM stock to a rain-parched grassland. What is less well known is the next contribution we extracted from canaries; as they were being slowly phased out as our mine shaft sentinels, they were relocated to scientific laboratories for neurological study. Just as they had given us a timely glimpse of our own deaths for centuries, they too would give us a new knowledge of the functioning of our minds. For generations, some scientists, as confident in their own hypotheses as they are in truth, held tight to the belief that we are born with every neuron we'll ever have, that the entire physical framework of our brains, in which they recognized our selves, was created in utero, and that one way of understanding life post-birth was as a slow and steady dying off. Any ability of the mind to continue to regenerate throughout life was dismissed as fantasy. Our brains, they insisted, were born to die, not to grow.

~

Nearly a decade ago, the college at which I taught sent me home early, cancelling classes in anticipation of demonstrations on the afternoon the verdict was to be announced in the trial of Johannes Mehserle, the officer who shot an unarmed, restrained Oscar Grant in the back as he was held face down on the tile of a BART train platform on New Year’s Eve. I had been on BART that night myself, and, like many, felt horror and sadness when I saw the video of Oscar Grant’s death. It seemed to me then so unfortunate that the young father was dead. And as I headed past the courthouse on my way home that afternoon, I found myself hoping that whatever the outcome, on the streets that night there would be Peace. I knew his death was unfortunate, but in that moment I had wished more for peace than I had for justice. And in that wish resided my calm, white breath. In that wish resided fuel that keeps white ideas strong, stronger even than the reality of Black bodies. Tamir Rice was eight years old when I wished for peace on the streets of Oakland, a wish that would be my hand on the scales, tilting it ever so subtly toward his death four years later.

~

I am a child of the 1980s, and it wasn't until that decade that the last canaries were retired from their deadly forced labor in coal mines. It also wasn't until that decade that the long-held dogma of a dying mind was shaken, eventually abandoned in the face of the first incontrovertible and scientifically observed regeneration of neurons, witnessed by Fernando Nottebohm in the tiny brains of canaries. For they weren't all feather and lung. Every spring, their neurons would regenerate, the very structures of their brains transforming year after year to compose new songs. The scientific community was floored and had little choice but to adjust to this new awareness of possibility.

I wonder if the miners had long known that each canary's song was unique, composed by the canary anew each spring, never to be repeated. Or if this assertion of identity and creativity would have been too much to acknowledge in an animal held in bondage.

~

When we focus on the unimperiled breath, the breath of the meditation pillow, the yoga mat, it is easy to mistakenly treat each release as a discrete, isolated thing. But each exhale is part of a single irregular chain beginning with that first celebrated scream and finally ending, perhaps peacefully in sleep, perhaps in a rush of fear and hurt and pain.

Just yesterday I attended an infant choking class with my newborn son. "When your baby is choking," the pediatrician began, "the first thing to do is not panic." As long as the child can breathe, you do nothing but encourage her to cough, but once all sound ceases, you know breath has stopped, and you must act quickly, decisively, alternating back and chest thrusts until the object is expelled or the baby loses consciousness. If the latter happens, you quickly regroup, lay your child on the floor, and begin CPR. "You've probably heard," the pediatrician says, "that we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide." The new and expectant parents in the room quietly nod. "Well this is true," she continues, "but we don't breathe out only carbon dioxide. There's also oxygen in our exhalation. Enough oxygen to save your baby. Breathe out, don't push the air, just breathe normally into your baby, your lips sealed around her nose and mouth."

One pregnant woman raises her hand and asks, "but if her throat is blocked, will she even be able to get any air with the CPR?"

The pediatrician nods. "She might not get any," she says, "this is true. But she might get a little. So you must do it. Even a tiny bit of breath can help save her."

~

Our breath does not arise in each moment spontaneously. The air expanding your chest in this moment is a continuation of yesterday's breath and a hopeful precursor of tomorrow's. And that air, it is not yours, it is ours, Black and white.

A man seated beside his pregnant wife asks the pediatrician, "when do you stop?"

She looked at him silently for a moment before responding: “You don't."