Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coughin'/Coffin AirAdilifu Nama (bio)Rummaging through the early remnants of a society that is facing climatic transformations, a single microbe forced America to pause, ponder and grasp the meaning of mortality in the early spring of 2020. Such a characterization is much more poetic than necessary, yet it is a frail attempt to capture the grand scale of the psychological and economic disorientation that has assailed the world and continues to make suffocation a pervasive and global experience. Unfortunately, against a backdrop of pandemic savagery, a new spectacle of suffocation emerged to rival COVID-19's viral chokehold on humanity. On May 25th, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, went down the streets of Minneapolis to buy a pack of cigarettes at his local grocery store. Shortly afterward, a new barbarism was broadcast for millions to partake in primetime consumption. The world witnessed a white police officer place his knee on Floyd's neck as he lay handcuffed, face on the pavement. The medical stat line reads "suffocation to death" but, in reality, Floyd cried out for his mother while a white man murdered him in broad daylight, had his knee pressed against Floyd's neck for over nine minutes: nine minutes that feels like nine hours to see it unfold. Floyd's final moments consisted of cries for his mother, the woman who breathed him into being. She had already passed but his last breaths before he died was for his mother, and with that, the world was reminded that America was birthed out of violence.America, where petty settler concerns were repackaged as God's imperative to morally justify the eradication of the indigenous population and cultural molestation resulted in annual holidays of thanks for bounties stolen and scalps delivered. Despite this, for far too many Americans, the true "gung-ho" spirit of rugged American individualism and notions of exceptionalism is not in declarations of accomplishment but found in the radical real-estate politics of manifest destiny and a torture economy, commonly referred to as American enslavement. This system of wealth extraction enshrined the public ruin of Black bodies with public beatings to compel compliance, and later public lynchings to intimidate and psychologically terrorize Black folk into a forever state of political timidity. Public lynching was the booby prized bait-and-switch from a [End Page 140] Reconstruction paradise to an extra-legal purgatory of terroristic intimidation: a spiffed-up spectacle of human degradation inspired by the old American barbarism of Indian removal and witch burning.When it comes to American lynching, not only was it a morbid spectacle but, for some, a depraved keepsake for posterity. If one missed Black corpses dangling from sturdy tree limbs, and the grapevine could only deliver soured tidbits and not juicy details of the slaying, a picture was worth a thousand obscene words. The alchemy of flash powder mixed with white smoke created eerie postcards to purchase by the time you got to town. This was some of that ole time religion. How could it not get worse than that? But when it concerns the destruction of Black bodies, like a morbid merry-go-round, something wicked this way comes. New incarnations of public death practices are guaranteed to return with extreme prejudice, laying waste to Black bodies, minds, dreams, and futures. Live births are not shown on television, but when it concerns Black folk, live deaths are shown ad nauseam. And there will be reruns, brothers and sisters. This was the traumatic reality of the digital documentation of George Floyd's savage public execution. The reruns of his tortured asphyxiation.Although political injustices, massacres, and wars have ebbed and flowed, waxed, and waned over decades, Black folk have lived in a constant state of vulnerability of negation; for Black folk, there is no place for us to catch our breath, to grab a brief respite from race in America. This is a cornerstone of the Black Experience in America. The cost of being the wrong color can leave you breathless: at the park playing, in group homes, police detention cells, making a sojourn back to the crib after a quick Skittles run, jogging around town...