Garner's Ghost, or "I (Still!) Can't Breathe" by Nyle Fort

Garner's Ghost, or "I (Still!) Can't Breathe"by Nyle Fort | @Nyle Fort | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I couldn’t sit still. Every time the sun rose, it felt like another black life fell victim to a trigger-happy cop, or some white man tryna’ act like one. But this time I had had enough. Honestly I said that same thing after they murdered Mike Brown, and Trayvon Martin, and Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Rekia Boyd, and Freddie Gray. Calling out their names as if I’m taking school attendance makes me sick to my stomach. I guess part of what it means to be black, for me at least, is to never have had enough of having enough. They kill us: “I’ve had enough.” They kill us again, and again: “I’ve had more than enough!” Yet having had enough is never “enough” to satisfy the gluttonous appetite of a white racial supremacy hungry for white power.
It’s the same old story. White cop gets scarred. Black body gets killed. Or, in other words: White lives matter, Black lives don’t. I’ve heard this story from the day my chocolate-hued black body was born into this exceptional white supremacy. It’s a 500-year-old tale of racial terror and generational trauma. The characters change; the plot thickens; but it’s the same old story – from the transatlantic slave trade to the prison industrial complex, from Emmett Till to Eric Garner.  
I was hustling to finish PhD applications when I saw his lifeless body plastered across the TV screen. Some white news reporter mentioned loosies. I couldn’t stop thinking about his mama, and my mama, his children, and my unborn. Do I really want to bring black lives into a world where they will struggle to breathe? How will I tell them, my babies, that death is their birthright? But these are the questions of a philosopher, and anti-blackness leaves little time for Socratic methods.
“I can’t breathe.”
He cried out, as a gang of NYPD officers bullied his burly (black) body to the ground. The chokehold ban, which had been in place since 1993, clearly didn’t apply to scary-looking black men. And even if it did, it wouldn’t have mattered. Eric (who shares my middle name – a name I received in memory of my brother who was killed in a bar fight) was already fucked. This innocent country put him in a chokehold far before he was accused of selling loosies, far before his body had grown into adulthood, and far before Eric would learn to navigate the concrete jungle that is Black American life. Indeed, before he was formed in his mother’s womb, Eric’s worth had been determined, his fate set by an utterly anti-black “democracy” built on stolen land, indigenous genocide and African slave labor.
“Eric Garner. Mike Brown. Shut it down! Shut it down!” we yelled at the top of our weary lungs. My winter coat was drenched. Our collective tears mixed with the heavy rain had me feeling like God was about to bring the next great flood. But this was no Sunday school lesson. This was real. Garner was gone. Ferguson had popped. Cleveland was on edge. And in a few months, Baltimore would burn.
Meanwhile I had applications to submit. At this point I could care less about grad school. How could I? Niggas were dying. Everyday. And I needed to be where the action was -- in the streets.
"I can't breathe."
"I can't breathe."
His ghost whispered in my ear as I sat at my computer, struggling to edit my personal statement. Fuck this man, I thought to myself as I abandoned my applications and walked towards Newark Penn Station, frustrated. I need to be around black people. If being born black meant living to die, then I figured we should at least die together.
"Loosies, loosies, loosies," homie with the dingy red fitted cap said real low key as I stood on the corner, waiting to cross the street. I always said I wouldn't do two things when I grow up: drink coffee or smoke cigarettes. I still haven't tried coffee.
I took a drag of  the Newport 100; the same cigarette I watched my brother Chad smoke in visiting rooms across New Jersey; the same cigarette I tried for the first time in Ferguson cuz’ I was stressed out, and I was told it calms your nerves. But the buzz it provided could never numb me from the sober reality of lynched black bodies. I really hope 'oh boy' selling these don’t end up like Garner. I knew he would, yet wouldn't. Certainly he'd die. And, like Garner, his death will likely have something to do with being black in a fundamentally anti-black society - even if indirectly. But, unlike Garner and Mike Brown and Freddie Gray and so many others, his death will be much less spectacular, much less sensational. The kind of death that never makes mainstream news or inspires national protests. The kind that happens so often, so subtly that one must see structure to understand its meaning.
Before I could finish my thought, my hands were shaking from the rush of untaxed nicotine and the fact of being a new nigger in Obama’s America. My virgin lungs couldn’t take any more smoke. I placed my headphones over my ears, turned up J. Cole, and coughed my way to New York City.
“I can’t breathe.”
“I can’t breathe.”
“I can’t breathe.”
What will it take for black folk to break free from the yoke of white supremacy? God, I wish I knew. More than a black president. I know that much. More than clever #hashtags. More than marches. More than speeches, and revolutionary rhetoric devoid of revolutionary struggle. More than me getting a PhD. And more than fed up millennials with good intentions, like me, chanting:
“I can’t breathe.”
“I can’t breathe.”
“I can’t breathe.”
“I can’t breathe.”
More than what most of us are willing to sacrifice. More than what our colonized minds currently allow us to collectively  imagine. More than me writing this in order to stay alive. If I’ve learned anything in my few years as a wannabe freedom fighter, it is this: there ain’t no pill, no easy way, no magic in the quest to be free. All that’s promised is sweat and struggle. And if you’re lucky, a beloved community that will love you through the ugly and beauty of it all.
“I can’t breathe.”
These were Eric’s last words in life. But they won’t be his last in death. Garner’s ghost will forever haunt America, and any idea that we live in a post-racial society. His blood continues to cry out from that sacred Staten Island street corner to every corner of this nation, whispering:
“I (still) can’t breathe..”
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Nyle Fort is a Master's of Divinity candidate at Princeton Theological Seminary, a youth pastor, freelance writer, and grassroots community organizer based in Newark, New Jersey.