We Can't Breathe Quotes

“If we’re looking for reasons for optimism, we can find it in knowing our opponents, despite centuries of concentrated, systematic effort, have failed to completely destroy our minds, our capacity to reason for ourselves. We can find it in our ability to have strong, smart, healthy children despite equally intense efforts to poison, incarcerate, murder and otherwise inflict them with fatal discouragement. I need no reasons beyond those to motivate my striving.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“We might realize that as long as there is hunger and other people have knowledge of it; as long as there is killing for sport; as long as there is predatory lending and for-profit policing; as long as citizens remain silent while watching their nominal leaders build fortunes on the backs of the poor and defenseless; as long as there is hoarding of material goods by human beings fully aware that other human beings are dying of lack; there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all morality.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“Is it immoral to adhere to a theology that emphasizes liberation over love, as some of our ancestors did? Is refusing to love unwise Supreme Court justices, duplicitous police and rabid Trump supporters morally indefensible? (I’m not against love by any measure, although I want to suggest that it is best reserved for those who love us in return, not for those who oppose us and in so doing deny our humanity.) How does urging black people to love their oppressors differ from telling a battered wife that her husband wouldn’t abuse her if he didn’t care for her so much? Until we examine such questions thoroughly and with input from a wide cross-section of African-Americans, we are ill-equipped to launch moral crusades, let alone take them seriously.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“Perhaps this is a moment for impassioned African-American critics to take up the mantle of their predecessors and examine the fraudulent underpinnings of American morality once again. To cast aside 'abiding faith' and interrogate the 'bombast and fraud' that Douglass identified in 1852. To question America’s fundamental pretenses, as Fannie Lou Hamer did in 1964.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“I see and appreciate the allies who march with us, rejoice with us, commiserate with us and join their voices with ours in a roar of outrage when injustices afflict us. So when I say it’s time for allies to do more I’m not dismissing the significance of their efforts thus far. But they are far from enough.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“To what extent does white silence come between people of color and equality? To what extent does it impede our children’s opportunity to embrace the American promise?”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“Human beings haven’t developed moral sophistication; we’ve merely gotten more practiced at developing rationales for our immorality.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“When one takes a slightly longer view of history, the futility of moral campaigns becomes even more evident. Consider, for example, the state of global civilization when Africans first arrived in Jamestown in 1619. At that time, church-led persecution, anti-religious violence, human trafficking, child labor and sexual assault were endemic. Four hundred years later, this still holds true. Human beings haven’t developed moral sophistication; we’ve merely gotten more practiced at developing rationales for our immorality.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“While honorable as a motive, moral suasion is ultimately insufficient as a tactic.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“With hypocrisy, greed and cruelty woven so tightly into the American fabric, a campaign to improve the country based on an ostensible moral consensus seems Sysiphean indeed.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“The Founding Framers had already staked a claim to the nation’s moral imagination long before the hunger for captive black bodies reached fever pitch. They polished their Enlightenment-flavored philosophies about morality and the dignity of man while building an economy on our ancestors’ backs and making a concerted effort to cripple their spirits and minds. This was, of course, a long, strategic process. It involved rape, starvation, sleep deprivation, forced labor, mutilation, poisoning of food and water, and denial of access to spiritual materials — techniques most of us will recognize as elements of systematic torture.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“Do oppressed people have an irresistible impulse to forgive? Does forgiveness free us from some larger burden, enabling us to cope with the daily struggle? Or perhaps it keeps the hot coal of anger from burning our palms, as the Buddha would have it? Loving our oppressors is so much a part of the African-American consciousness that to question it is to risk censure of the harshest kind. It’s a form of masochism, kissing the sword that has just sliced you open.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“In many instances of white Americans violently oppressing their black countrymen, the body is not yet cold before the dead person’s relatives are standing before cameras offering heartfelt platitudes about forgiveness. Do oppressed people have an irresistible impulse to forgive? Does forgiveness free us from some larger burden, enabling us to cope with the daily struggle? Or perhaps it keeps the hot coal of anger from burning our palms, as the Buddha would have it? Loving our oppressors is so much a part of the African-American consciousness that to question it is to risk censure of the harshest kind. It’s a form of masochism, kissing the sword that has just sliced you open.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“I seldom think in terms of good and evil. I rely on a simpler equation: there is our equality and those who would prevent us from realizing it. Still, I’m intrigued by the idea of cosmic reckoning, a moral universe in which the meek rise to power, the bad guys get punished and righteousness rolls down like a mighty stream. The emphasis on a moral universe as opposed to a moral earth is troubling, however. It seems to suggest that justice is to be attained not on this bloodstained ball of confusion but on some other plane of existence, a milk-and-honey realm where lynching victims and rehabbed racists will frolic arm-in-arm.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“The sight of prayerful Negroes in church clothes kneeling before bloodthirsty troopers has undoubtedly awakened sympathy in some previously hardened racists. However, little evidence suggests that spit-shined activism has ever swayed a crucial majority of white Americans.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“It remains a profound and perhaps interminable paradox that African-Americans are constantly striving to prove themselves worthy of citizenship in a country that has not proved itself ready for democracy. I’m intrigued and mystified by the enduring popularity of moral appeals and dutiful citizenship, especially while the movement for black lives has worked so hard to consign the politics of respectability to the dustbin of outdated ideas.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“If one dares to insert oneself into the ongoing narrative of white supremacy and police brutality, one needs to come prepared.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“The problem with sweeping generalizations is they risk excluding art and artists who should be inside, not out.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“The prospect of artists censoring other artists is more nauseating than having to suffer the output of creators whose reach exceeds their grasp.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“I don’t begrudge others the right to disregard disturbing images but I always want to see for myself, even at the risk of providing free diversion for gazers with sordid motives. The opportunity to witness fuels my awareness of my own precarious citizenship, informs my understanding of our police state and, at critical times, has strengthened my willingness to resist. I won’t insist that you look; neither should you demand that I don’t.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, would not allow a closed casket. What’s more, she permitted a photographer from Jet magazine to photograph the corpse. Anyone who’s seen the resulting image is likely to remember it. It may not hit you at first. You might think you’re looking at a geological survey, a star-charred chunk of meteor or a satellite photo of a distant planet. But then you notice a hint of nostrils, a trace of lips perched illogically atop the ruin, or you see a photo of Emmett helpfully juxtaposed, see him in the robust beauty of youth, the softness still apparent on the face of the boy becoming a man. Adulthood was right around the corner but Emmett never got there. Mamie Till wanted us to know why he didn’t.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“Reading the novel the first time, I felt as if I was peeking at a blackface party through a frat-house window. Reading it again produced the same sensation.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“It’s not hard to imagine Styron drooling over his sheets of yellow legal paper as he feverishly scribbled, shuddering from every burst of emotion that comes from writing nigger more than 240 times.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“In Gray’s unsolicited and unreliable editing of Turner’s story, Styron provides a persuasive metaphor for narrative combat at its most insidious: a white man putting words in a black man’s mouth.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“Reading Confessions, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that Styron is more familiar with the abject sufferers in Uncle Tom’s Cabin than with living, breathing black human beings.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“These days she is best known for 'Trouble So Hard,' in which she shows off an abundance of that soulful ingredient that non-black people often rely on to add accent to their music, like a blend of secret herbs and spices that makes chicken finger-licking good. Think Merry Clayton on 'Gimme Shelter,' Chaka Khan lending animation to Steve Winwood’s 'Higher Love,' the countless gospel choirs blessing everything from Foreigner’s 'I Want To Know What Love Is' to Billy Joel’s 'The River of Dreams.' In the video version of the latter, Joel cavorts stiffly like a low-rent Blues Brother, singing about his search for something 'taken out of his soul.' The all-black choir, garbed in church robes, helps him mourn 'something somebody stole.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“I want to say that I may not be able to describe exactly what blackness is but I know it when I see it. Or hear it. Or feel its irrepressible rhythm urging me to get on my goodfoot and dance my way out of my constrictions.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“The fact that blackness can incorporate such things as technique, practice and the conscious application of style while simultaneously transcending all those things makes it nearly impossible to pin down. As a result, it often infuses American life as more of a tantalizing abstraction than a concrete attribute, some intangible quality derived from black people’s history not on this continent but on this planet. Anyone who’s seen the Norfolk State marching band, a New Orleans second line or three black girls turning double-dutch knows what I mean.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“The fact that blackness can incorporate such things as technique, practice and the conscious application of style while simultaneously transcending all those things makes it nearly impossible to pin down.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“By ethos I mean the distilled experience of black life in all its myriad subtleties; a Jes Grew stew of sights, sounds, memories, movements and emotions marinated in blues, swing, bop, soul, funk, gospel and rap; a deep-blue blackness beyond category and bred in the bone, so high you can’t get over it, so wide you can’t get around it, so low you can’t get under it. So insurmountable, it would seem, that merely attempting to define it inevitably diminishes it.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival