Mourning and Organizing
The Progressive Magazine
By: Sarah Jaffe
“I can’t breathe.”
The words are so simple, a plea for life, and yet when the country heard George Floyd say them in a cell phone video, as a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck, those words unleashed something.
We had heard them so many times before.
George Floyd’s words not only echoed those of Eric Garner, who was put in a chokehold and killed by New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo in 2014, but also those, conscious or unconscious, of the millions of COVID-19 patients—now more than 100,000 of whom have died of the virus in the U.S. alone. The grief and rage of the people of Minneapolis, Floyd’s neighbors and family and friends, as well as people watching around the world, has been compounded by the fact the virus was already killing black Americans at a horrifyingly high rate.
As historian and author Ibram X. Kendi tweeted, “It feels like black people were running for their lives from racist terror only to run into the murderous face of COVID-19, only to start running for their lives from COVID-19 only to run into the murderous face of racist terror.”
