We Still Can't Breathe: The Derek Chauvin Verdict
I’ve had writer’s block for the past year. Ever since the world witnessed George Floyd’s viral lynching at the hands of smug-faced police officer, Derek Chauvin, things have been different for me.
This wasn’t the first time the world witnessed police violence against Black people, but something about the chilling way George called out for his mother; the way he pleaded with Chauvin to let him breathe; the nonchalance with which Chauvin picked pebbles from the tread of a police car tire and even mocked the smell of George’s feet in the seconds before he snuffed out George’s life, made this feel different.
George’s 20 or so cries of “I can’t breathe” during his own suffocation, although sadly a familiar retrain, felt like it meant something different this time.
“I can’t breathe” has become a Black Lives Matter rallying cry since around 2014 when the world watched police strangle Eric Garner to death for selling “loosie” cigarettes. Indeed, those of us with the intestinal fortitude to watch the entire nearly 10-minute video of George’s murder know those were his last words, his last gasping plea for life.
The refrain is literal in that police are actually strangling Black people to death with impunity, but also metaphorical in that the weight of America’s anti-Black racism and oppression continues to suffocate us. We are drowning in it. It’s everywhere we turn and apparent in just about every encounter we experience. We can’t escape anti-Black racism because it is an intentional aspect of American society. It’s been baked in, both literally and metaphorically, since this country’s inception.
Jason Armond - Getty Images
I think back to the kidnapped Africans, stacked on top of one another, lying flat in rows in the belly of slave traders’ ships, soaked in urine, feces and vomit. They literally could not breathe and an estimated 2 million died during their journey to this land.
I think of the enslaved people like my grandfather’s grandfather, who performed grueling manual labor at gunpoint and by threat of torture; those who were assaulted and raped by their so-called masters; those who fought to escape and were killed for it. They were not able to catch their emotional, physical and mental breath for their entire lives. My ancestors.
I think of those thousands of Black men and women who were tortured, lynched, and terrorized during Reconstruction and Jim Crow; the “strange fruit” hanging from the poplar trees, as Billie Holiday sang it.
I think back to my dad telling me stories of his dad, my grandpa’s, torture at the hands of police after being arrested and jailed for leading a civil rights demonstration—in 1970. I was 8 years old when my dad described how the officers jammed a dinner fork up my grandpa’s nose and down in throat until he choked and bled nearly to death.
He couldn’t breathe either. None of them could.
You’ll note I’ve referred to George’s death as a lynching. This is not hyperbole. Many misunderstand the term to refer simply to a hanging. But a lynching is defined as an extra-judicial (without the legal process) killing for a perceived wrong and, most often, with the intention of terrorizing the victim’s community.
That last part is really important.
From that moment back on Memorial Day 2020, the Black community has not been able to breathe because of the intentional trauma Derek Chauvin inflicted on not just George and his family; not just the bystanders, pleading with the officers; but the whole of Black America.
I saw myself in George. I saw my dad. I saw my two younger sisters. I saw my God son. I saw the terrorization of Blackness.
Julio Cortez/AP, Philonise Floyd, Attorney Ben Crump and the Rev, Al Sharpton, from left, react after a guilty verdict was announced.
Many of us have struggled and suffered in silence over the last year, affected by this murder in ways too many to count. My professional life was affected. I neglected my friendships. My activism and organizing felt futile. I couldn’t even formulate the written words, here, to describe the hollow feeling, the echoes of injustice and pain we could all feel in our chests.
On April 20, 2021, nearly a year after the horror first began, a jury did what is typically unthinkable in America: it found former police officer and George’s murderer, Derek Chauvin, guilty with the potential of a 40-year sentence.
It wasn’t until the very moment the jury announced that I realized this previously unresolved “case”—George’s life; Black America’s reasonable presumption, based on experience, that Chauvin wouldn’t be held accountable; the generations of pain and suffering his lynching represented to Black America—was the thing that had been wrecking not just my emotions and mental state, but my productivity, creativity, and willingness to engage on the issues over the past year.
That said, I need to make one thing abundantly clear. While the verdict was, I suppose, a positive result in this case (to the extent anything even tangentially related to a lynching can be considered positive), it was the correct outcome.
Chauvin’s guilty verdict should’ve been predictable. It should be the automatic assumption that killing a Black person for no reason means the killer will spend the rest of their life behind bars.
Moreover, the Chauvin verdict isn’t the end of our struggle. It’s a potential new beginning.
With this verdict, Black Americans got to see a small sliver of accountability within the historical scheme of America’s grand tradition of anti-Blackness.
If Black America has been unable to breathe since our ancestors were kidnapped and brought to this land, the Chauvin verdict provided us a single gasp, a one-time inhale, filling our deprived souls with the tiniest reprieve, before the pressure was reapplied, literally moments later.
We can only hope this single instance of accountability will contribute to a culture shift and a true examination and ultimate deconstruction of American policing, a system originally designed to hunt down those very same enslaved ancestors who suffered in suffocation their whole lives.
