Chokeholds, or “lateral vascular neck restraints”, have been banned by many American police departments since the 1990s. This is sometimes hard to remember because there have been so many deaths since then, using precisely this technique. Chokeholds look like a kind of judo manoeuvre: an arm thrown around the neck followed by a slow squeezing pressure applied to the carotid artery. It can quickly disable an adversary, although more than a few seconds of applied pressure can kill. As in judo, a knee to the neck accomplishes much the same end.
The police chokehold is a sensitive issue among African Americans. The history of black death by suffocation evokes an ugly history that is not limited to lynching with nooses. Many do not remember that Rodney King was not only beaten with batons, but that one officer, Theodore Briseno, put his foot on King’s neck to hold him down. Perhaps because King did not die, that small fact is lost in today’s discussions.
But this week has been all about the dead. Eric Garner died in 2014 and his name usually begins the litany. He was arrested for selling “loosies”, or unwrapped single cigarettes. Officers threw him to the ground, applied a chokehold and held him down until he died. We know this incident well because angry crowds gathered, begging officers to let him go as Garner cried out 11 times: “I can’t breathe.” We know this because bystanders took lots of pictures.
Garner’s name is chanted like a mantra in the long, sad sequence of more recent deaths of black Americans, deaths by many means. Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown. That sequence now culminates with the name of George Floyd. Arrested on suspicion of passing a counterfeit $20 bill, Floyd was thrown to the ground where he succumbed after nearly nine minutes, with the full weight of police officer Derek Chauvin’s knee held on his neck. Again crowds gathered. Warnings were shouted as Floyd’s life slipped away. Clear pictures were taken.
The world has exploded since then. Floyd’s death has been a lightning rod for demonstrations around the planet. While much attention has centred on the behaviour of the four police officers at the scene — and particularly upon Chauvin’s carelessly cavalier demeanour throughout — the harm should not be thought of as limited to these officers’ behaviour, nor ought it be confined to the question of police reform. Here, for example, is the initial charging document for Floyd’s death, issued by the Minneapolis medical examiner: “The autopsy revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation. Mr Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease. The combined effects of Mr Floyd being restrained by the police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death.”
This is an astonishing description, a shameful circumlocution.
But of course Floyd did die by asphyxiation. That much is so obvious that the medical examiner’s report reads like systemic bureaucratic corruption, indicating more than simply the lethal indifference of a single “rogue” officer. Blaming Floyd’s death on “underlying health conditions” is a remarkably determined deflection of Chauvin’s agency.
In the end, Floyd’s family hired an independent coroner who confirmed lethal asphyxiation. And quickly thereafter, a final report was issued by Minnesota’s coroner, who logged the official cause of death as strangulation.
The linguistic effacement of agency often directs gaze in powerful ways, tells us where to look and where not to. For example, Kajieme Powell was a black man with mental health problems. In 2014, he took snacks from a convenience store and tossed them on the street, allegedly brandishing a steak knife. He called out to the police: “Shoot me, shoot me, shoot me, shoot me now.” They obliged him, 12 times over.
The police’s actions were explained with what has since become a fairly common appellation, “suicide by cop”, or police-assisted suicide. It is an interesting deployment of the passive. It eliminates official responsibility by recasting a trigger-happy officer as the extended will of the deranged, self-sacrificing Powell. He did it to himself. No one’s fault but his own.
This is a feature of the trope of black bodies killing themselves. It echoes the degree to which higher rates of Covid-19 infections among African Americans are often blamed on biological difference rather than the circumstances of their lives – the toll too frequently referenced as solely the product of “co-morbidities” such as obesity, asthma, bad choices, genetic “propensity”. But poverty creates petri dishes for the virus: black, poor and older people die at higher rates in America because their social circumstances have ghettoised them into tight, poisoned geographies, like bugs placed in a jar, with the cap screwed on tightly.
As we watch, two great tragedies unfold and intertwine: the toll of coronavirus, and the toll of extrajudicial deaths at the hands of state actors. One maps on to the other in a double helix of grief and despair. Americans are yearning to resolve the incoherence of this moment. This emotional tinderbox must be read against the backdrop of other events. We respond not merely to the misuse of police power but also to the bewildering federal mismanagement of life-sustaining resources amid a global pandemic: we watch the mishandling in every possible way, of food distribution, of subsidies and financial assistance, of medical equipment.
This perfect storm of collective smothering – a foot on all our necks – has made the image of Floyd’s death even more exceptionally powerful. It is legible to such a broad political spectrum because the resonance of “I can’t breathe” makes us cringe with sorrow, induces frightening political constrictions, yet doubles also as coronavirus’s power to make its victims literally gasp for breath.
It is such a fragile moment. Perhaps we sit on the razor’s edge of real reform. Or perhaps we will never find our way out of the linguistic maze that keeps turning the dead into deadly agents of their own demise.