The breath of my people is choked, strangled...
My children.....
My children can not breathe....
...The lynching of black Americans is still taking place in the 21st century. Cone targets America’s criminal justice system “ … where nearly one-third of black men between the ages of 18 and 28 are in prisons, jails, on parole or waiting for their day in court.” Cone continues:
“Nearly one-half of the more than 2 million people in prisons are black. That is 1 million black people behind bars, more than in colleges. Through private prisons and the ‘war against drugs’ whites have turned the brutality of their racist legal system into a profit-making venture for dying white towns and cities throughout America. … Nothing is more racist in America’s criminal justice system than its administration of the death penalty. America is the only industrialized country in the West where the death penalty is still legal. The death penalty is primarily reserved, though not exclusively, for people of color, and white supremacy shows no signs of changing it. That is why the term ‘legal lynching’ is still relevant today. One can lynch a person without a rope or tree.”
They have made the Cross of my death into the Lynching Tree.
Now, Roman soldiers wear uniform blue.
Now, Pontius Pilates in three piece suits wash their blood stained hands clean of responsibility.
Now, speakers in the square turn their eyes away
as my people and I hang from the cross,
the lynching tree -
struggling against the prison bars,
the choke hold,
the bullet holes.
We cannot walk while breathing
We cannot shop while breathing
We cannot drive while breathing
We cannot protect our children while breathing
We cannot play while breathing
We cannot laugh while breathing
We cannot learn while breathing
We cannot teach while breathing
We cannot work while breathing
We cannot grieve while breathing
We cannot dream while breathing
We cannot be successful while breathing
We cannot be poor while breathing
We cannot be ill while breathing
We cannot be healthy while breathing
We cannot sing while breathing
We cannot pray while breathing
We cannot rage while breathing
We cannot love while breathing
We cannot breathe
You see, we’ve been waiting for dozens, hundreds, thousands of indictments and convictions. Every death hurts. Every exonerated cop, security guard, or vigilante enrages. The grand jury’s decision doesn’t surprise most Black people because we are not waiting for an indictment. We are waiting for justice—or more precisely, struggling for justice. We all know the names and how they died. Eric Garner, Kajieme Powell, Vonderitt D. Meyers, Jr., John Crawford III, Cary Ball Jr., Mike Brown, ad infinitum. They were unarmed and shot down by police under circumstances for which lethal force was unnecessary. We hold their names like recurring nightmares, accumulating the dead like ghoulish baseball cards. Except that there is no trading. No forgetting. Just a stack of dead bodies that rises every time we blink. For the last three trayvonsgenerations, Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart, Eula Love, Amadu Diallo, Oscar Grant, Patrick Dorismond, Malice Green, Tyisha Miller, Sean Bell, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Margaret LaVerne Mitchell, to name a few, have become symbols of racist police violence. And I’m only speaking of the dead—not the harassed, the beaten, the humiliated, the stopped-and-frisked, the raped.
We can't breathe