“I can’t breathe” A rant about oppression

 “I can’t breathe.”

  I’ve uttered those words so many times over the course of the last year. And sometimes a little medicine, a brief prayer, a brief rest were the only things required to remedy my loss. But for Eric Garner and George Floyd it meant that eight different men in two separate places at two different times had the power to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until they squeezed the breath out of them. Their breath wanted to move and flow freely through their bodies without prohibition and hate stopped them. And when the breath wants to move but can’t find its path, it stops. And when it wants to be used but ceases to find its purpose, it stops.

There is something to say about the power and beauty of breath. The way breath flows like free-flowing water when your content. The way breath contracts-stops-pauses when you’re frightened. The way you can’t seem to get enough when you’re anxious. The way it chokes through to their designation only to be blocked by a foreign intruder. This foreign substance can’t be medicated; it can’t be picked off; or prayed away. This substance is the physical form of hate. It looks like four cops holding down and crushing a man’s windpipes.

There is something to be said about breath, and more to be said about hate. Hate wants breath. You can’t dislodge hate. You can’t medicate or soothe hate. Hate wants to smoke out and suffocate anything that stands in its way. There is no deep inhale with hate. Hate is stale and stiff air. Hate is a bag over the head. Hate is a drive by shooting on a ten-year-old boy playing in the park. Hate is handcuffing a man in the back of van and driving so dangerously that his neck is broken. Hate is the hanging of a fourteen-year-old boy because he whistled at a woman. Hate is a woman walking of her own volition to a cop car and exiting the same cop car with a limp, lifeless body. Hate is the fire that extinguishes breath. For Black men and women, hate means the death of breath.

There is something to be said about the beauty and the healing power of breath but because of hate, George, Eric, Trayvon, Tamir, Sandra, Freddy, Michael, Brianna, and hundreds of others will never say it.