The Linguistic Power of the Protest Phrase ‘I Can’t Breathe’

As tens of thousands of New Yorkers streamed up Fifth Avenue for Millions March NYC on Saturday, the air filled with a now-familiar repertoire of chants. “No justice, no peace.” “Black lives matter.” “Hands up, don’t shoot.” And of course, those three words that encapsulate so much: “I can’t breathe.”

Just a week ago, Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, announced that “I can’t breathe” topped his list of the most notable quotations of 2014. I had consulted with Shapiro as the list took shape. Just as he was finalizing the picks on December 3, a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner. By the next morning, it was clear that “I can’t breathe” were the words that would be most remembered from this troubled year.

Ben Zimmer

Ben Zimmer is the executive editor of Vocabulary.com and theVisual Thesaurus. He writes the language column for The Wall Street Journal.

Garner spoke these words over and over again as the air left his lungs last July, an ineffably dreadful moment shared with millions thanks to a video taken by 22-year-old Ramsey Orta on his cell phone. The video was inescapable, and once watched, could not be unseen. And those pleading words, “I can’t breathe,” could not be unheard.

Since the grand jury’s decision, “I can’t breathe” has become a peculiarly powerful rallying cry. Compare it with the other popular slogans in the recent demonstrations. “No justice, no peace” is a more traditional statement of anger over institutionalized racism. Dating to New York protests in the 1980s and revived after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, it sets up a dire promise: without racial justice, we will not have peace.

“Hands up, don’t shoot” verbalizes the gesture that Michael Brown reportedly made before being killed by Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson, and the “hands up” gesture itself has become a wordless indictment of racial iniquities in the justice system.

Like “hands up, don’t shoot,” “I can’t breathe” focuses on the precise moment of a tragic death from the victim’s perspective. The verb “breathe” is so basic to our shared language, as it has been since it emerged alongside the noun “breath” in Middle English. (“Breath” and “breathe” originally had to do with smells before replacing older English words for the air drawn in and expelled from our lungs.)

The words find Garner on the precipice between breath and death, pleading for the one thing he needed to live. But what makes “I can’t breathe” even more potent is the first word: the simple pronoun “I.”

To intone the words “I can’t breathe,” surrounded by thousands of others doing the same, is an act of intense empathy and solidarity. The empathy comes from momentarily stepping into the persona of Eric Garner at that instant the life was being choked out of him. It is a kind of rhetorical tribute to inhabit his subject position, taking on the pronoun “I” and repeating the words he helplessly repeated eleven times.

As an expression of solidarity, “I can’t breathe” is easily modified into the more inclusive “We can’t breathe.” Now it is not just about empathizing with Garner’s dying moment but about mobilizing that moment into social action. The “I” becomes “we,” and in turn the “breathing” becomes more metaphorical. At the New York rally, signs like “Justice can’t breathe” and “Our democracy can’t breathe” extended the metaphor of breath well beyond the physical realm.

Those first-person pronouns, “I” and “we,” have long been linguistic instruments of protest. The civil rights movement brought us “We shall overcome” and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I am a man.” The pronouns work to say, “I am the same as you,” and “we are all in this together.”

Perhaps the most famous use of “I” as an expression of mass empathy is a fictional one. In the 1960 film “Spartacus,” Spartacus is protected by his fellow slaves when they all shout “I’m Spartacus!” to shield him from being singled out by the Romans for punishment. “Spartacus” screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who had been blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, created a scene with powerful resonance for those who refused to “name names” in the McCarthy era.

The scene also inspired real-life gestures of solidarity, as when people wore “I am Salman Rushdie” buttons in 1989 when Rushdie faced a fatwa against him from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. More recently, we have heard “I am Trayvon Martin,” “I am Michael Brown,” and “I am Eric Garner.”

First-person pronouns have also expressed empathy across national boundaries. John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963 was his attempt to identify with the plight of the citizens of Berlin. (The German audience appreciated it that way, and did not, as the popular story has it, think that he was calling himself a jelly doughnut.)

After 9/11, Americans were the targets of empathy, as when the French newspaper Le Monde titled their front-page editorial, “Nous sommes tous Américains” (“We are all Americans”). And in English, the “We are all…” trope emerges whenever sympathy is needed for victims of some tragedy: “We are all Hokies” after the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, “We are all Bostonians” after the Boston Marathon bombing, and so on.

Writing in Time in 2012, Jeffrey Kluger warned that the “We are all X” phrasal template often “allows us to affect a bit of purloined heroism, put it on the credit card of someone else, and feel pretty darned good about ourselves in the bargain.” Could “I can’t breathe” run that same risk, as it becomes endlessly repeated, showcased in Comic Sans on T-shirts in NBA warmups?

Undoubtedly. Converted into a glib hashtag, #ICantBreathe can bear all the hallmarks of social-media “slacktivism,” an easy assertion of identification with the oppressed. But such is the fate of any successful slogan. That’s especially true in the age of hashtagification, when today’s vibrant meme is tomorrow’s stale cliché. Still, “I can’t breathe” has retained its visceral punch. It has outlived Eric Garner. It breathes.

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/ben-zimmer-on-i-cant-breathe/