“I can’t breathe” pleaded George Floyd as a Minneapolis police officer pinned him to the asphalt with his knee pressed against Floyd’s neck. “I can’t breathe,” he said again before he died.
I can’t breathe.
That’s also what Eric Garner said just before he died as a police officer put him in a chokehold.
I can’t breathe.
Those three words capture the weight of the systemic racism that crushes black people in the United States.
We must speak their names aloud. Trayvon Martin. Freddie Gray. Sandra Bland. Walter Scott. Tamir Rice. Aiyana Stanley-Jones. Michael Brown. Laquan McDonald. Philando Castile. Stephon Clark. Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. Botham Jean. Atatiana Jefferson. Rekia Boyd. Eric Garner. George Floyd. And on and on.
“The call to take up our cross is not a call to personal piety but a call to action in alliance with all who suffer under oppressive systems.”
We know too well how easily Christian Cooper’s name could have been added to that list. Most of us have seen the viral video of a white woman in New York’s Central Park weaponizing blackness to threaten him: “I’m going to tell [police] here’s an African American man threatening my life.” Reverting to that worn trope of vulnerable white womanhood, she offered a thinly veiled threat that would easily be understood in the context of many police interactions with black men.
I can’t breathe.
As the late theologian James Cone warned, those of us who embrace the cross cannot turn away from the lynching tree.
In his 2011 classic, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone noted that for most Christians in the U.S. the cross, as a symbol of salvation, has been “detached from any reference to the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings.” Instead, it has been turned into a “harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks.”
Cone linked the cross to the lynching tree – both symbols of power, terror and death.
“As Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence, many African Americans were innocent victims of white mobs, thirsting for blood in the name of God and in defense of segregation, white supremacy, and the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Both the cross and the lynching tree were symbols of terror, instruments of torture and execution, reserved primarily for slaves, criminals, and insurrectionists – the lowest in society. Both Jesus and blacks were publicly humiliated, subjected to the utmost indignity and cruelty. They were stripped, in order to be deprived of dignity, then paraded, mocked and whipped, pierced, derided and spat upon, tortured for hours in the presence of jeering crowds for popular entertainment. In both cases, the purpose was to strike terror in the subject community. It was to let people know that the same thing would happen to them if they did not stay in their place.”
I can’t breathe.
In Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, theologian Kelly Brown Douglas extends Cone’s arguments to the present day with her examination of “Stand Your Ground” laws and the murder of Trayvon Martin. “The cross reflects the lengths that unscrupulous power will go to sustain itself,” she observes, adding “the guns of stand-your-ground culture are today’s crosses.”
In the crucifixion, Douglas sees Jesus’ “solidarity with the crucified class of people.” By refusing to do anything to save himself, Jesus “divests himself of all pretensions to power, privilege, and exceptionalism, even as the incarnate revelation of God” and, in so doing lets go “of anything that would compromise his absolute alliance with those of the crucified class.”
For both Cone and Douglas, suffering is not redemptive. It is the result of sin, both personal and structural. Both the cross and the lynching tree inflict terror – on all black people – but the cross gives way to the resurrection and so, for Cone, becomes God’s critique of power, including white power. Douglas adds, “The resurrection in effect makes plain the ‘wrongness’ of the crucifixion, and thus of all crucifying realities. It shows that death does not have the last word.”
Rather than trying to make sense of the senselessness of suffering and death, she urges us to make meaning of the lives of those who have died: “What the resurrection points to … is not the meaning of Jesus’ death, but of his life.” The resurrection is evidence of God’s solidarity with the crucified class. “To restore to life those whose bodies are the particular targets of the world’s violence is to signal the triumph over crucifying violence and death itself…. we know that crucifying realities do not have the last word, and, thus, cannot take away the value of one’s life.”
I can’t breathe.
What is the meaning of George Floyd’s life? Of Breonna Taylor’s? Of Tamir Rice’s? Their deaths are not their defining moment; their lives are much more than a few headlines in a short news cycle.
“Cone linked the cross to the lynching tree – both symbols of power, terror and death.”
We are asked by the cross to see their deaths as a critique of white power. And those of us who are white are asked by the cross to stand in solidarity with the crucified class to dismantle the structures of white supremacy that sustains itself through the use, abuse and destruction of black and brown bodies.
And we are reminded by the resurrection that violence, destruction and death will not have the last word.
I can’t breathe.
The call to take up our cross is not a call to personal piety but a call to action in alliance with all who suffer under oppressive systems. Only by taking up this cross do we find our way to a resurrection that is just and peaceful and hopeful – not in the sweet by and by, but in this world – on the sidewalks of Sanford, Florida, and the playgrounds of Cleveland, Ohio, and the homes of Fort Worth, Texas, and the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
And in your town, your neighborhood, and mine.
Related opinion on this topic:
Cody Sanders | ‘We can’t breathe’: an apt Pentecost prayer for white Christians
Timothy Peoples | Ahmaud, Breonna, Christian, George, and The Talk every black boy receives
Paul Robeson Ford | Black people have the right to defend themselves by the same means their white counterparts do
James Ellis III | A lowdown, dirty shame: Ahmaud Arbery’s murder and the unrenounced racism of white Christians
Paul Robeson Ford | Ahmaud Arbery and a pandemic of injustice
From BNG’s opinion archives:
Amy Butler | James Cone and becoming black with God
Bill Leonard | ‘The Cross and the Lynching Tree’: A broken gospel
