It’s hard for black Americans to catch our breath these days: from Michael Brown to Eric Garner to John Crawford to Tamir Rice to Walter Scott and now Eric Harris, we just keep getting the wind knocked out of us as we bear witness to death after unnecessary death of black men at the hands of the police.

Those who police us, however, can breathe quite easily.

Watching a “police officer” yelling “Fuck your breath” as a knee is placed on the head of Harris as he’s dying, watching a police officer shoot Scott in the back, it’s clear that the inhumanity on display is not an aberration. It looks too much like these men being hunted: part Doom, part Cops. The police stalk Harris down like an animal, and you can hear them breathing so clearly just before Harris is shot, before he says “Oh my god! I’m losing my breath!”, before the cops explain how little that matters.



“Fuck your breath.”

I’ve encountered that sentiment before, at a pro-police rally outside New York’s City Hall in December 2014. Off-duty cops and their supporters chose to taunt Eric Garner from beyond the grave with his dying words (“I can’t breathe,” said some people 11 times) and by wearing shirts which read “I Can Breathe.”

Steven Thrasher (@thrasherxy) If this isn't an ugly version of white privilege I ain't sure what is pic.twitter.com/iAvqxc5voW

Black Americans can’t breathe when we witness such sadistic glee, even though it’s just a restatement of an obvious, if painful, truth: they can breathe, and those of us who live under white supremacy as administered by law enforcement cannot. The cops, smug with all-but unassailable employment and pensions (for now), don’t care that black people can’t breathe when we’re being unconstitutionally stopped-and-frisked, subjected to illegal chokeholds, allegedly having evidence planted on us, or being told the depths of law enforcement’s apathy after being shot.

Then again, the ways in which we’re subjected to state-administered violence was always meant to keep us from feeling like we can breathe. Nobody cared that black people couldn’t breathe in the holds of slave ships or on plantations; they still didn’t care that black people couldn’t breathe as we moved from chattel slavery to sharecropping to industrialization. Maybe it’s not surprising that there’s no incentive now for most people to care that black people – locked out of the formal economy during de-industrialization and pushed into the informal economy to survive – can’t catch our breaths, whether literally under a policeman’s boot or not.

Black Americans’ respiratory issues won’t be helped by arming the police with body cameras in addition to guns and Tasers. The footage of Harris’s murder was captured by the type of camera of which President Obama wants 50,000 more. To what end? To better document the pornography of our genocide? To allow Tulsa officials to say with impunity that the next Bob Bates (the 73-year old pay-to-play volunteer cop who shot Harris) also meant to use a taser and not a gun? To write that off, too, as “a mistake,” with no further plans for investigation? (Tulsa law enforcement, it is worth noting, is charged to “protect and serve” a city which unleashed one of the most vicious attacks on black Americans in history; it also exists in a state which is trying to purge US history courses from public schools for teaching “what is bad about” America.)

This weekend, Black Lives Matter activist Cherrell Brown asked audience members of a conference on policing that I attended to close our eyes and imagine a place where we felt safe. No one imagined a place with cops, cameras, guns, or attack dogs. And yet, as Brown noted, we’re asked to believe that, to feel safe, we need more cops in New York City, more racially diverse cops, more cops wearing cameras – more law enforcement, not more safety.

More cops, more guns and more cameras might make many white people feel more safe, but just the thought makes it hard for black people to breathe, because we know that they’ll all be trained on us. Fuck your false sense of security; I just want to be able to catch my breath.