On Breathing

The day before Alex Pretti was murdered by ICE, reporter Jack Jenkins published a photo of Minneapolis Clergy-members kneeling in prayer and protest. As the Clergy-members were arrested for this act of civil disobedience, Jenkins captured something profound — their breath frozen mid-prayer in the bitter cold. The breath of prayer was thus made material or physical, and disruptive in its own right.

Breath, produced by the act of breathing, is often unseen. You and I are breathing right now and, unless we are outside in the cold, we don’t see our breath and we likely don’t consider the act of breathing as it happens. Yet, under the full force of oppression, breathing and breath can become revolutionary acts. Scholar Ashon T. Crawley writes of the ethical demand in the last words of Eric Garner; ““I can’t breathe,” also, the enactment of the force of black disbelief, a desire for otherwise air than what is and has been given, the enunciation, the breathing out the strange utterance of otherwise possibility.” Black life, Crawley and other theorists compellingly argue, is a life of suffocation; “If he could not breathe it was because of the violence of white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, a violence that cannot conceive of black flesh feeling pain, a violence that cannot think “I can’t breathe” anything other than ploy, trick, toward fugitive flight.”

While Crawley is writing here about the violence done to Black bodies, we can see clearly how these same systems of oppression led to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as well as the non-fatal shootings of Luis Nino-Moncada, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, and Yorlenys Zambrano-Contreras, and the murder of Geraldo Lunas Campos in ICE detention by asphyxiation. In Minneapolis, the full force of white nationalist violence is realized, in part, in the act of killing observers — taking away their life and, thus, their ability to breathe.

The Minneapolis Clergy whose prayer was made visible in their frozen breath are resisting this oppressive suffocation. As their prayer becomes suspended in the air, a brief rupture occurs. Reality — the constructed space of the street upon which they kneel, the interactions and power differentials between the Clergy and the arresting officers — is challenged. Otherwise possibilities become briefly visible. As breath disrupts, it also breathes into a new world and new ideas about collectivity, solidarity and justice. The act of breathing is thus not simply disruptive, it is generative.

Crucially, this individual Clergy-member’s act of breathing as resistance also occurred collectively. There were dozens of interfaith, multicultural Clergy participating in this act of civil disobedience — their prayer was collective and so, too, was their breathing.

Theorist Sara Ahmed writes that “feelings make ‘the collective’ appear as if it were a body in the first place.” With a collective, global body comes a collective skin — a collective space of sensation and emotion (where neither necessarily comes before the other): “To think of ‘the globe’ as ‘having a skin’ is to suggest that emotions are not simply directed to nearby others: a feeling for and with others can also occur when others are remote or distant.”

I am not in Minneapolis. There is a decent chance that you are also not in Minneapolis. However, even though those Clergy-members were arrested nearly 1,000 miles away from me, these images left a distinct impression and, in turn, feeling.

The day after Jenkins published these photos, Alex Pretti was killed by ICE. In Washington, D.C., almost 300 protesters converged outside of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters to protest his murder and renew calls for the abolition of ICE. It was bitterly cold. As protesters chanted, their breath also froze, making visible what was previously only audible — altering the physical environment of 12th street and making it so that, if only for a brief moment, the street itself was part of a collective body crying out for justice.

People wept. They chanted. They held candles. A glimpse of otherwise possibilities.

Afterwards, at home, I came across photos from across the country of people placing candles in their windows and on the street in an act of solidarity and mourning.

Fire, too, breathes. By its very nature, fire requires oxygen to sustain itself.

While the forces of white nationalism, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy attempt to suffocate, the act of breathing remains a revolutionary act. Where we breathe, we disrupt, we grow, we collectively breathe life into a new, just world.

In Minneapolis and beyond, we must keep the fire going.