I Can't Breathe

"I can't breathe."

There are people out there these days who are protesting rules that require wearing masks during this pandemic. They think the law is pressing itself into their lives, restricting their freedom. Some complain that it's hard to breathe in those things.

The force of law, restricting their breath.

"I can't breathe."

Eric Garner was put in a choke hold after being detained by police for selling loose cigarettes. We know how it ended: Eric Garner died and the police officer walked free.

The force of the law, restricting his breath.

A year later, in Tulsa, Eric Harris was fleeing the police. He died when a volunteer reserve deputy shot him after he'd already been tackled. It was apparently a mistake: the volunteer meant to pull out his taser but instead pulled out his gun. As Harris was dying, he gasped out, "I'm losing my breath." The deputy responded, "F**k your breath." Perhaps they were the last words he heard before he died.

The force of the law, restricting his breath.

The other day a police officer knelt on the throat of George Floyd, who was suspected of forgery and resisted when the officers tried to arrest him. He gasped for breath, gasped out the words, "I can't breathe." Onlookers became involved, afraid for Floyd's life, asking the officer to relent. The police officer did not relent. Floyd was picked up by an ambulance but he died.

The force of the law, restricting his breath.

Stopping it. Ending it.

An utterly predictable ending in this most recent case. I saw the size of the officer who had his knee on George Floyd's throat. I know that if someone that size had their knee on my throat for thirty seconds or less, I'd almost certainly die. George Floyd looked bigger and stronger than me, so I'd give it a little longer. Still, this was a murderous form of restraint. A deadly form of restraint. Certainly not the only thing the officer could have possibly done under the circumstances with an unarmed man being arrested for a nonviolent crime.

Three black men who couldn't breathe. Three black men who lost their lives. And they are only a few among many.

Most police officers have not ended someone's life by cutting off their air supply, certainly not by kneeling on the suspect's throat. We need to point that out. But it isn't enough to point this out. We also need to ask how many, under identical circumstances, would do the same.

I hope the answer is not many. I think the police officers I know would be critical of what this officer did. We need to point that out. But pointing that out is not enough. Because we also need to ask how many police officers will circle the wagons and defend those in their ranks who cut off someone's breath.

I hope the answer is that far fewer will do so this time than has happened in the past. And if this is right, we need to point that out. But again, pointing that out is not enough. We need to ask other questions, broader questions:

How many in our society will look at what happened and say, "He shouldn't have resisted when the cops came to arrest him. It's his own fault." As if the death penalty is the right punishment--imposed without judge or jury, there on the scene, on the street, caught between a tire and the weight of a man's body concentrated through the knee and applied to the throat. As if that is what resisting arrest deserves.

How many will say, "The man was big and dangerous, and when he resisted they had to subdue him. They had no choice." As if, in a confrontation between an unarmed man outnumbered by armed police trained in various methods of restraint, there was no other possible choice but to kneel on his throat and keep kneeling on it even after he started gasping, even after it was clear that he was struggling to breathe, to live, to live one more moment if not another day. "No alternative. Gotta do it. Big black guy. Dangerous. Gotta put him down like a mad dog." How many say such things? And of those who don't say it, how many think it?

How many in our society, even if they do not think such things, are hesitant to speak against blatant inhumanity, homicidal inhumanity, for fear of alienating those in their circle of friends and family who do think such things?

This is not just about a single person committing a single homicidal act. That police officer who killed George Floyd is clearly responsible for his actions, but the rest of us are responsible for how we respond to those actions. The rest of us are responsible for shaping and reshaping our shared culture and society.

Do we shape it in ways that minimize the gravity of such crimes? Do we shape it in ways that help to form the hot thin soup out of which such crimes evolve?

Do we shape it in ways that result in Black lives being treated as less precious than white lives? Do we shape it in ways that, while virtuously condemning overt in-your-face racism, perpetuate a quiet refusal to consider how implicit biases and unconscious prejudices create a more dangerous world for our Black neighbors?

If so, then our voices are there, helping to shape the words of the officer who said "F**k your breath" to a dying man.

Or are we, instead, gagging along with Eric Garner, Eric Harris, and George Floyd? Are we encouraging the empathy that is required to see the humanity, the image of God, the face of God, in strangers who are dying on the street? Do we feel the everyday racism that our Black neighbors endure as a weight on our own shoulders, even if we aren't ourselves Black and even if we cannot fully inhabit or understand it? Do we endeavor to do so with enough persistence and compassion to at least try to envision what it is like to be Black in America and to see white police officers ending the lives of unarmed Black men only to be acquitted time and time again, and to see white vigilantes gunning down Black joggers and not be charged until there is a public outcry?

If so, then how can we not find ourselves vicariously gasping and crying out, "I can't breathe"?

Since I started by talking about face masks, let me return to that now--because I think there some lessons there.

Except in rare cases, a cloth face mask does very little to restrict breathing. People can wear it for hours and suffer no ill effects except for mild discomfort, fogged eyeglasses, and some chafing. These masks help keep asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 from unwittingly spreading it to others, by trapping the respiratory droplets that spread the disease before they can splash outward into the grocery store or the pharmacy. Any law or policy requiring you to wear such a mask is not intended for your safety. It is intended for the safety of those around you. But the policy only works if everyone does their part.

There are two lessons to draw from this. The first is this. Except in rare cases where medical conditions make mask-wearing harmful, those who complain that they can't breathe when they wear a mask are operating from a position of privilege. They are operating from a space of unfettered breathing, from a social space in which they are used to filling their lungs and breathing out across their world without a care. The restriction is nothing compared to the knee at George Floyd's throat. So if you think the mask is the law demanding too much, then so is the knee. If the mask calls for protests and rallies and hours of your time fighting in the name of human breath free of legal tyranny, than all the more so should the knee demand the same. Perhaps something even more dramatic, more sustained, than quietly taking a knee during the National Anthem at a football game.

And here is the second lesson: the mask requirement is about collective responsibility. It is a small thing, but if all of us collectively do it the outcome could be dramatic: people alive who would otherwise be dead; small businesses able to stay afloat which would die if another surge in the pandemic created the need for more sheltering in place. All of us do this little thing, and the burden of the pandemic will be eased from the shoulders of the minority who fall into the highest risk categories. We all do our little part, a tiny inconvenience, and people live who otherwise would have died--like my mother who is in her 80s, or my mother-in-law who is in her 70s and has diabetes.

This is about collective action: everyone seeing themselves as part of the solution rather than treating it as someone else's problem. That is what the masks represent. And that is what is required to change our society enough that our Black neighbors can breathe easier.

The problem of racism is in part a problem of overt racist people acting out their hate in the world. If and when police officers are identified as such overt racists, they should be fired. And when their acts rise to the level of crimes, they should be punished.

But the problem of racism is also a problem of hidden systemic forces and widespread patterns of thinking and acting that are most unconscious and, individually, probably not very harmful. Let's call this the problem of systemic and implicit racism. With respect to this problem, it is a mistake to single out the police as some special locus of systemic and implicit racism. That's just a trick some people play--people who aren't police officers, often white liberals--to avoid responsibility. The problem of systemic and implicit racism is everywhere, including in the system of higher education of which I am a part.

What we need is collective action and collective responsibility. What we need is a willingness to take action from our place of privilege, despite the chafing and the fogging of our glasses, so that someone lives who otherwise would have died.

In the case of systemic and implicit racism, the steps are less obvious and more complicated than simply putting on a mask before stepping into Walmart. It will be harder work. And just as there are those who refuse to wear a mask, there are those who refuse to do this harder work. But hopefully enough of us hear the anguished cry, "I can't breathe," deep in our bones. Deep enough so it aches. Deep enough so it stirs us to act.

The cynic will say, "I'm not holding my breath." But I am not a cynic. I am a person of faith, and I believe that every breath is a gift. As long we can breathe, we have the power to carry into our world the very breath of God. Let us use it well.

"F**k Your Breath": Mistakes in Law Enforcement

The other day, another police shooting of a black man made headlines--this one in Tulsa, so it hit close to home.

It was all captured on video: An officer tackled a fleeing suspect, Eric Harris. While he was ordering Harris to roll onto his stomach, a reserve deputy--a volunteer with full law-enforcement authority--decided to subdue Harris with his Taser. Except that he wasn't holding his Taser. He was holding his handgun.

You can barely hear the "sorry" on the video. It's swamped by Harris's cries: "Oh my God, he shot me! He shot me!"

But if you listen closely you will hear that soft "sorry," and it has an oh-shit quality to it. So I'm confident the Taser story is true. The guy didn't mean to fire his gun. It was a mistake.

A fatal one. Harris died later at the hospital.

Another feature of the story isn't included in the video (at least the one I saw and that's linked to above). At the end of that video, Harris can be heard saying, "I'm losing my breath." And then the video ends. But according to reports, a deputy responded to that fading plea with crude disdain: "F**k your breath."

It's impossible not to think about Eric Garner, a black man who died last summer from a police officer's choke hold, whose last words were, "I can't breathe." Was the deputy thinking about Garner? Was his dismissal of Harris's life breath an expression of a deeper and broader disdain?

I don't know. But I can't help but think about lying on the pavement, bleeding, dying, crying out in pain and horror, and hearing my life and human dignity swept away with "F**k your breath." Perhaps they were the last words Harris ever heard, the final punctuation of his life story.

The man who said those words committed no crime. There will be no charges filed. One man shot Harris by mistake, and may face charges. Another sent him into death with a final message: You don't matter.

Both acts trouble me, but the latter strikes me as more inhuman, even if its consequences were less dire.

I don't like to define people by their worst moments. The officer who said to a dying Harris, "F**k your breath," should not be defined by those words. What he said may have been horrible and inhuman. That doesn't mean he was.

I like to think that right now he is mortified. I like to think that he lies awake thinking, "How could I have said that? What must it have been like, to hear those last words just before he died?" Maybe the officer was caught up in the adrenal rush of the moment: the chase, the unexpected gunshot, the furious thought that this would never have happened if the suspect hadn't run.

Maybe it just slipped out. A different kind of mistake.

I've known numerous police officers over the years, all of them good people with a sense of civic responsibility. They recognize the weight of the public trust they've been invested with, and they're committed not to abusing that trust. I can't imagine any of them saying "F**k your breath" to an apprehended suspect dying from an accidental gunshot wound. And I like to think that none of them would ever mistake the firearm in their hand for a Taser, and so fatally shoot a suspect who--whatever his mistakes--didn't deserve to die.

But mistakes happen. Especially when strong negative emotions overtake us, we say and do things we wouldn't do in wiser moments. It was a mistake for Eric Harris to flee the police. So why did he do it? Maybe he was terrified. Maybe he thought, "I might become the next Eric Garner, the next black man killed by the cops." And so he fled. It's not uncommon for fear-driven behavior to actually bring to life the things we fear.

Police work is dangerous, and the moments when police shootings happen are some of the most high-stress, high-adrenalin moments in a police officer's work life. And such moments are the ones when mistakes are more likely to happen. The right kind of training can reduce their likelihood. Did the reserve deputy who mistook his sidearm for a Taser get the same kind of training that a regular officer receives?

I don't know, but the mistake I want to focus on is the other one: the anger-fueled obscenity, the dismissal of a life. I'm going to assume it was a mistake--that is, something said in the heat of the moment and later regretted, as opposed to the calculated, self-righteous dehumanization of a dying man.

My question has to do with the kind of training that reduces mistakes of that kind. In the heat of the moment, with emotions high and blood pounding in our ears, how much more likely are we to dehumanize those we see as our opponents and our enemies? And what kind of training can ensure that even in those moments, we remember the humanity of those who run from us or talk back at us or lash out at us in anger and frustration?

In some cases, the failure to really see the humanity of a suspect might lead to a crushing remark that discounts a human life in its final moments. In other cases, that failure could mean the difference between shooting a suspect and holding fire. Police should fire when lives are at stake--their own, another officer's, a civilian's. But one of the lives at stake in every police shooting is the one who is shot. That life needs to be given its due weight, too. How do we ensure it isn't discounted? How do we ensure that lives aren't cut short or damaged because, in the adrenalin-fueled moment, those lives aren't valued as they should be?

Much of the discussion about this has focused on race--as well it should. There is rampant evidence of subconscious racism operating beneath the surface of our thoughts, influencing our choices without our knowledge. This isn't a police problem. It's been documented in college professors, preschool teachers, Northerners and Southerners, rich and poor, black and white. (Yes, unconscious bias--against blacks--even influences the thinking of blacks through the phenomenon sometimes called internalized racism.)

While there is also overt racism at work in many corners of our society--as the federal investigation into the Ferguson PD makes plain--the bigger issue by far is the covert kind of racial bias that influences the choices of good people without their conscious knowledge. Such racial bias--especially if we aren't aware that it's at work in us--can increase our likelihood of making mistakes of the kind I'm talking about. Mistakes in which we think less of people than they deserve.

Such mistakes are a problem wherever they happen. But they become a bigger problem in high-stress moments. And they become a potentially fatal problem when guns are involved. This means that we will be more likely to see the problem play out in dramatic fashion among law enforcement, precisely because they are in high stress jobs that sometimes require decisions about using lethal force.

This does not mean that police are somehow especially racist. It isn't "their" problem and it isn't "theirs" to fix. Its our problem. It's ours to fix. The social forces that generate implicit bias don't originate in police departments. They come from everywhere. And if we are afraid of the effects that such biases will have on police officers who need to make life and death decisions and may be influenced by unconscious biases, then all of us need to tackle the sweeping social forces that perpetuate these biases.  (We also need to root out overt racism, and not just in police departments.)

But in the meantime, we need to offer resources to police officers who do not want to be influenced by such biases, who are committed to being fair defenders of the public good. The power they're invested with means that if anything, they need to be better than the rest of us when it comes to such things. And the police I know feel the weight of that and want to live up to that weighty trust. What tools and techniques can we offer that will help?

As important as the issue of implicit racial bias may be, it isn't the only source of the mistakes I'm talking about here. Can we imagine the recent events in Tulsa playing out with a white suspect? Of course. The kinds of scenarios that awaken fight-or-flight responses also fuel adversarial, zero-sum thinking: It's him or me. It's us or them. And as soon as another human being becomes one of "them," their humanity begins to be discounted.

This tendency appears to be rooted deeply in our human instincts. And police officers are asked to throw themselves into the very situations that trip these instincts. It's their duty as police officers to step into danger, to confront law-breakers in a way that's inevitably adversarial. Caught up in the emotional intensity of that conflict, the suffering of the adversary might trigger a flush of righteous animosity, spilling out in words like "F**k your breath."

It's only human. But it's a mistake. A tragic moment of staggering inhumanity. The police officers I know want to be the best they can be, even in those moments that have a tendency to evoke our ugliest selves. What kind of training will help?

It should be clear that I'm talking about something very different from the sort of training that will help a reserve deputy keep his head enough to realize that he's holding a handgun rather than a Taser. What I have in mind is something rooted in our capacity to see and respond to humanity in the face of conflicts and emotional forces that have a natural tendency to drive out such responsiveness.

But there are layers of problems here. Police officers have dangerous jobs, and their survival--their ability to make it home to their families--may depend on responses that are rooted in the same fight-or-flight instincts that fuel our propensity to dehumanize. What kind of training can offer the right sort of balance between preserving those essential survival instincts while nurturing our human capacity to see the humanity even in those we are in conflict with?

That's the balancing act we are asking our police officers to perform. And they're being asked to do it in a society where racial biases and other forms of prejudice are being written into our subconscious responses to our environments from an early age.

It should be clear that I don't have pat or ready answers. My aim here, rather, is to ask questions that acknowledge the deep problems and the tragedies we face without drawing good-guy/bad-guy lines, without oversimplifying, without pointing the finger at the other guy.

The Tulsa case is human. It is human because humans make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes are tragically wrong. It is also inhuman. Sometimes our mistakes lead us to fall short of our human potential, and to see our fellow human beings as less than human. When it comes to wrestling with such oh-so-human inhumanity, we need to be in it together, to ask what we can do to help each other be better than we thought we could be.

And that means we need to stop saying "F**k your breath," even to those who say it to others.