"I Can't Breathe"

“Sometimes a metaphor turns into a meta-force. ‘I can’t breathe’ — the cruelly literal words of Eric Garner turned into a metaphor for the condition of black lives in 2014. When those words were repeated by George Floyd, the repetition of the same pattern of police brutality unleashed an immediate and unrelenting national uprising, unprecedented in its global solidarity for racial justice. Its meta-force will not be contained.

“Look at what the very phrase contains, working subliminally, with an eerie depth resonance: ‘I can’t breathe’ writes itself across mass demonstrations at a moment of mass death by a disease that kills by asphyxiation. We’ve known for weeks that COVID-19 kills with an obscene discrimination — African Americans are dying from the virus at three times the rate of white Americans.

“The fact that George Floyd tested positive for coronavirus does not alter the charge of murder. But the coincidence is rife with epochal meaning. It amplifies the mounting cry for a justice that would not just check police violence, but transform an economic system in which black and brown people disproportionately lack adequate medical care and live in asthma-producing neighborhoods with polluted air, zones of greater industrial pollution and fewer trees to absorb the excess carbon.

“In its specific American manifestation, but also at its origins, the virus presents not just as a medical but as an ecological crisis. Of course, at this moment the pandemic has fallen into the background of the demonstrations. The masked marchers are taking a knowing risk. But they are not being reckless; theirs is the courage of a priority. If the virus spreads from these mass gatherings, the tragedy of this epoch will be intensified. But the virus will not quell the meta-force of a race, a people, a world, running out of breath.

“Do the discriminatory brutality of the police and the racial impact of the pandemic together warn of the suffocation of our very world? A global eco-asphyxia? It turns out that breathlessness is no mere metaphor for the dangers of global warming. Many of us do not realize that there is a profoundly discomfiting materialization of breathlessness on the horizon. We may not know that phytoplankton — microscopic organisms forming the oceanic base of the food chain — produce at least half, and possibly 85 per cent, of the oxygen we breathe. The phytoplankton seem to be steadily succumbing to ocean acidification driven by climate warming. ‘I can’t breathe’ could be the cry of the entire human species by the end of the century.

“My point here is precisely not, ‘Never mind the issues of one race; save the human race.’ It is rather that the meta-force of breath will not go away. And neither will the resistance to the systemic mechanisms of suffocation, symbolic and material, that control much of what we call civilization. That resistance is becoming insistent. The more mindfully it can carry the intersections of race with ecologies human and nonhuman, the more powerfully the meta-force can materialize.

“This does not mean watering down the message of black lives mattering. It means supporting it on all sides — in its particularity. Political changes need the clarity of this particular crisis. They do not need us to get trapped in a zero-sum game of competing issues. But the choices of priority get devastatingly difficult. As a biologist and climate expert recently wrote, in view of the fact that already disproportionately more black and brown consider climate change a crisis than white people do: ‘Look, I would love to ignore racism and focus all my attention on climate. But I can’t. Because I am human. And I’m black. And ignoring racism won’t make it go away.’

“Being human right now will mean embracing the mattering of black lives along with the living matter of our planet. A growing mass of us must be — may already be — learning to hold the intersections, the planetary connections, in consciousness, the knowing-together that fosters a broad enough coalition, and therefore a deep enough transformation.

“At this point, another register of breath appears. Call it spiritual. A lot of us practice yoga, or some sort of mindfulness meditation. We know that breath is not some airy metaphor, but the rhythm of life itself. The aching force of ‘I can’t breathe’ can be felt in the pores of your body right now, with each inhalation, each exhalation. Slow them down. Take them deep. You may practice a yoga of world-solidarity with every breath. And in the Western traditions, there lingers still the Hebrew ruach, the Greek pneuma — both ancient words for ‘spirit,’ which mean first of all ‘breath.’ The old Holy Ghost comes haunting our politics.

“It just so happens that the Trump’s posing with the Bible to sanctify policies of police brutality took place on the day after Pentecost. Pentecost commemorates the moment when, as the Book of Acts tells it, the Holy Spirit as wind blew the disciples out of hiding and into the public to demonstrate. The pneuma, instigating planetary solidarity, breathed into them every known language.

“The meta-force of breath inspires and conspires. It can also expire. Is it the ‘Breath of Life’ itself — the very life of the manifold, mattering lives of the Earth — that now echoes the cry, ‘I can’t breathe’?” (Patheos).  

Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. She is the author of Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public and the forthcoming book, “Apocalypse After All?”