Choking Us to Death by Brothers Writing to Live

Choking Us to Death by Brothers Writing to Live | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
"I can’t breathe,” onlookers heard Eric Garner say as he took his final breaths. 43 years old, black, and the father of six, Garner was placed in a chokehold and suffocated to death by NYPD officers in Staten Island this past Thursday. While it is important to note that the chokehold was banned as a police practice in NYC more than 20 years ago, it is imperative to name the fact that Garner's killing can be added to the growing list of black and brown people who have been shot or beat to death by police in the US. As the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s 2012 annual report revealed: “every 28 hours a black male, woman, or child is killed by someone employed or protected by the US government.”
A couple weeks before Garner was slain, a short distance from where his body laid lifeless, Spike Lee and his supporters celebrated the 25th anniversary of his hit film Do the Right Thing. In this film, Lee, among other things, dramatizes the plague of police brutality pervasive in urban black and brown America. In the film’s climax, a burly black male colloquially known as “Radio Raheem” is fatally choked by a white NY police officer. A fictionalized depiction of a concrete reality, Lee’s Radio Raheem is a symbol of the tension between police and black America, and the relationship between whiteness and black life.
Whiteness, as we use it here, is not a nonspecific term meant to serve as a general reference for white people, but rather it is an ideology of racial supremacy manifested through anti-black state practices, economic systems, laws, and behaviors. Since the purposeful creation of race in the modern world the system of racial supremacy has had a chokehold on the politically vulnerable. Like Garner, and like the fictionalized "Radio Raheem," too many of us non-white people in the US and abroad, cannot breathe.
From the institution of slavery and the colonization of indigenous land to prison proliferation and immigrant repression, white racial supremacy has systematically suffocated the lives of its victims across the globe. Consider the ways black and brown people have historically been rendered fugitive bodies and fungible commodities around the world. Consider the ways that criminalization, control and discipline have been the de jure practices used to curtail the freedom and mobility of black and brown bodies from the auction block to jail cells, from checkpoints to borders. These ills are the manifestations of white racial supremacy's pervasive grip that has limited America's ability to develop a collective social consciousness and true sense of justice-for-all.
And now, this past week, we have witnessed the results of a world suffering from a drought (of righteous laws, of equitable economies, of loving communities) because of the lust for asymmetrical power that racial supremacy breeds—from increased US-backed Zionist calls for the bombing of civilians in Gaza and government offices willfully failing to ensure residents of Detroit are allowed access to water and civilian death by police strangulation in Staten Island and the dehumanizing deportation and criminalizing practices used to "protect" the US-Mexican border. As we look across the world today we see the autocratic arm of white racial supremacy  wrapping its political muscle and economic strength around the collective neck of the oppressed. To be sure, the same metaphorical arm that choked Garner is the same criminalizing force that suffocates the political and social possibilities of our Mexican brothers and sisters on the border. The physical muscle of the NYPD police officer ending Garner’s life is merely an extension of the political muscle of a global form of racialized supremacy motivating the extermination of hundreds of Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
Perhaps “the arc of moral universe is long, bending towards justice”—as Dr. King opined—but the arm of white racial supremacy is lethal, flexing towards violence, and ending in death. More than physical death, structural racism suffocates the soul of democracy, it ceases the work of justice, it strangles the dream of a more beloved community. If we are to ever live fully and freely, as a people, as a nation, and as a world, white racial supremacy, and its various manifestations, must die. Indeed, it is our moral obligation to do justice and liberate ourselves from its death grip. 
Kiese Laymon, Writer & Professor at Vassar CollegeMychal Denzel Smith, Writer, Mental Health Advocate, & Cultural CriticKai M. Green, Writer, Filmmaker, & Ph.D Candidate at USCNyle Fort, Minister, Writer, and Community Organizer Marlon Peterson., Writer & Youth & Community AdvocateMark Anthony Neal, Writer, Cultural Critic, & Professor at Duke UniversityHashim Pipkin, Writer, Cultural Critic, Ph.D. Candidate at Vanderbilt UniversityWade Davis, II, Writer, LGBTQ Advocate, & Former NFL PlayerDarnell L. Moore, Writer & Activist