Early Thoughts on "Fuck Your Breath"

Image captioning credit unknown.

[Note: This post is an expansion of a series of Tweets I posted this morning and subsequently compiled on Storify. Since most of this site's small readership isn't especially active on Twitter, I'm extending it here.]

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So I awakened this morning to news of yet another lynching of a Black man by cops (and by "cops," as we have learned). It's not enough that I'm dealing with death on a very personal level right now; for people of color in this country, and especially for Black folks, it's impossible to escape it. I've seen the stat floating around to the effect that cops in this country are now executing Black men once every 28 hours; a few days ago, I saw a reference to that time span being reduced (!) to every 21 hours. More, there has apparently been exactly one — one! — day thus far in 2015 that not included a Black person dead at the hands of police. I haven't found the sources for any of these (right now, who has time to look?), but it's indicative of the situation that I find it not in the least difficult to believe.


Below is an expansion of what was my initial reaction to that moment when the hood slips, and everyone sees and hears that the honest response to "I can't breathe" is "Fuck your breath."

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"Fuck your breath."

Said by a white cop to a dying Black man who the cops were killing right then.

The shooter? A 73-year-old white insurance executive-become-"reserve deputy."

[Also, as we've since come to learn, a huge donor of money and flashy paramilitary "toys" to the police department, the former campaign manager of the sheriff during his last run for office, and one of some 130 such "reserve deputies."]

What the fuck does Tulsa need with a "reserve deputy," anyway?

American Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington

Postcard photo of the crowd at the lynching of Jesse Washington

Note: This post first appeared as a diary at Daily Kos on May 18, 2011. It was deleted without my knowledge, permission, or consent.  It was written by me, it is my intellectual property and work product, and I retain copyright. On the penultimate day of Black History Month and a day after the second anniversary of the lynching of another seventeen-year-old Black man, Trayvon Martin, It is posted here with very minor edits.

First, a warning. What follows below the fold are very blunt, very graphic depictions and descriptions of lynching in the United States. If these depictions will cause too much distress, do not read further.

Second, an admonition. The purpose of this diary is to bear witness. It is not "violence porn" offered for prurient interest. If that is your reason for reading, please move along.  I will not engage on this deadly serious topic in that manner.

Third, an apology. I have found it impossible to depersonalize this subject. What follows, then, is simply a deeply personal recording of my own attempt, now 98 years later, to remember Jesse Washington, and to accord his life and death the respect they deserve.  

Two Years On

Photo credit Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin

Two years on, and America's still standing its ground on the broken, bloodied bodies of dead young Black men.

Two years ago tonight.

Two years since another young Black man, just at the threshold of his life, was gunned down simply for being who he was.

Simply for being.

I cannot imagine the depth of the pain that Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin's mother, still feels every minute of every day. On Friday, she will speak at the University of Connecticut in Hartford, where she is expected to address not only her own son's murder in the service of racism, but that of Jordan Davis. 

Ms. Fulton has channeled her pain and her grief and what can only be her outrage into something important. With her ex-husband, Trayvon's father Tracy Martin, she has formed the Trayvon Martin Foundation, with a mission as follows:

The Foundation’s purpose is to create awareness of how violent crime impacts the families of the victims and to provide support and advocacy for those families in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin. The scope of the Foundation’s mission is to advocate that crime victims and their families are not ignored in the discussions about violent crime to increase public awareness of all forms of racial ethnic and gender profiling educate youth on conflict resolution techniques and to reduce the incidences where confrontations between strangers turn deadly.

It's important work. But Tracy Martin testifies that the pain has not lessened one iota, adding bitterly— and quite rightly — that the dominant culture cares more about retaining access to handguns than it does about the lives of young Black men.

As Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post put it last week, in a column entitled, not at all facetiously, "I'm Black, Don't Shoot Me":

I know it’s important that the next Zimmerman or Dunn be convicted of murder, if that’s what the evidence says. But I’m so very tired of funerals and trials. I want to know what we can do to keep the next Trayvon Martin and the next Jordan Davis alive.

I have no answers. I'm not even sure I have any questions. I know the answers to most of those already, as does virtually every Black person in the country. 

I think it's time I cross-posted a piece that I wrote three years ago, about the lynching of Jesse Washington. Perhaps tomorrow. It's like laying a transparent slide over an old sepia-toned photo and finding that, despite the fact that a century has come and gone, the images match up. The means may differ, but the ends are the same. Young Black men are lynched for being who they are.

Simply for being.

By the way, the questions are not rhetorical in the slightest. If you haven't read it yet, you need to visit a post at Daily Kos by one of my Spirit Sisters, shanikka:  Hey America! Can you please stop killing our (usually) innocent Black male children now?

Read it and weep.

And then get angry.

And then do something.

You can start here, by supporting the work of the Trayvon Martin Foundation. Then you can get active in your community. In your networks, online and off-. Among your family members and friends and coworkers.

We need allies. Because it's 2014, and still, "stand your ground" is nothing more than lynching. Sanitized, prettified, inverted and twisted and stood on its head, but it's lynching.

Our young Black men deserve better. They deserve lives. Good ones; safe ones; happy ones. They deserve simply to be.




Copyright Ajijaakwe, 2014; all rights reserved.