• Didn’t Need, To Know
• Kimberly Bain (bio)

We’ve been here before.

Black breathlessness found an origin long before Black people were trafficked here. Captive Africans found little breathing room on slave ships, choking in the hold for weeks and months, bodies pressed tight, the air thick with a toxic blend of despair and sickness. Most died en route. Ships would be redesigned to accommodate cargo that needed to breathe, the contours of the hold—a technology and geography of enslavement—reshaped not in order to save human lives but to ensure capital investments.

I can’t breathe rings with such terrible clarity because it sits amidst a longer genealogy of Black breathlessness. We find it in the hold of the ship; in the yokes that chained enslaved persons together, a central infrastructure in the transportation of large numbers of enslaved persons; in the iron collars with bells that shackled the necks of fugitives from slavery; in the lynching rope that dragged many from their homes and strung them up for white supremacist glee; in the density of the toxic atmospheres that surround predominantly Black communities along Louisiana’s Allée du Cancer or in Philadelphia’s Grays Ferry neighborhood. I can’t breathe: in the hold of the ship, in the lining of the lungs; in the toxicity of the atmosphere, the vulnerability of the neck.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests bloomed with rage and grief across the United States. As protestors took to the streets and kneeled in memory, law enforcement officers in cities like Portland, Washington D.C., and Brooklyn kneeled too. The act—performed by hundreds of hyper-militarized law enforcement officers, weapons on their hips and the full power of a white supremacist state behind them—was nothing less than a restaging of Floyd’s murder; a performance of moral righteousness that sought to further empower that white supremacist state to act with impunity. What else could it be when protestors later found themselves tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed in the midst of a pandemic that specifically and viciously attacks the lungs? What else could it be but a furthering [End Page 239] of Black vulnerability to breathlessness? As el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz prophesied: “That’s not a chip on my shoulder. That’s your foot on my neck.” The foot—the knee for George Floyd, the chokehold for Eric Garner, the rope for Sandra Bland—on the neck.

If domination requires continuous renewal, the mundane, autonomous functions of the body stand as especially fertile grounds for implementing and sedimenting oppression. In the search for a suitable candidate to materially and ontologically connect domination and oppression with Blackness, breathing and its apparatus—the air, the nose, the mouth, the lungs, the neck—have emerged as a means for defining Blackness in the United States. Yet, it has never been the case that the relations that persistently produce, construct, and manage Blackness travel in one direction. Black people and our cultural productions have alchemized the violence of modernity time and again: “Transmutation or alchemization, the digestion and sublimation of antiblack violence, harassment, and predation,” Nathaniel Mackey observes, “has been one of the jobs of black music, black art, black cultural and social life in general.”¹ When Frederick Douglass imagines what freedom feels like in My Bondage and My Freedom, he describes an altercation with plantation overseer Covey:

Whence came the daring spirit necessary to grapple with a man who, eight-and-forty hours before, could, with his slightest word have made me tremble like a leaf in a storm, I do not know; at any rate, I was resolved to fight. . . . The fighting madness had come upon me, and I found my strong fingers firmly attached to the throat of my cowardly tormentor; as heedless of consequences, at the moment, as though we stood as equals before the law.²

Douglass conjures a moment of alchemization, in which he steps outside his past self and steps into a vision of himself able to grab Covey by the neck—able to cut off Covey’s words and take Covey’s very life within his hands. In...

• 没需要，要知道
• 金伯利·贝恩（生物）

我们以前来过这里。

黑人呼吸困难早在黑人被贩卖到这里之前就已经找到了根源。被俘的非洲人在奴隶船上几乎没有喘息的空间，在货舱里窒息数周和数月，身体紧绷，空气中弥漫着绝望和疾病的有毒混合物。大多数在途中死亡。船舶将被重新设计以容纳需要呼吸的货物，货舱的轮廓——一种奴役的技术和地理——重新塑造不是为了拯救人类生命，而是为了确保资本投资。

我无法清晰地呼吸戒指，因为它位于黑色呼吸困难的更长谱系中。我们在船舱里找到了它；在将被奴役者锁在一起的枷锁中，这是运送大量被奴役者的中央基础设施；带着铃铛的铁项圈，束缚着奴隶制逃犯的脖子；用私刑绳将许多人从他们的家中拖出来，并把他们绞死，以示白人至上主义的欢乐；在路易斯安那州的Allée du Cancer或费城的 Greys Ferry 附近，主要围绕黑人社区的有毒大气密度。我无法呼吸：在船舱里，在肺里；在有毒的大气中，脆弱的脖子。

在乔治·弗洛伊德 (George Floyd) 被谋杀之后，“黑人的命也是命”(Black Lives Matter) 抗议活动在美国各地爆发，充满愤怒和悲伤。当抗议者走上街头并下跪以示纪念时，波特兰、华盛顿特区和布鲁克林等城市的执法人员也纷纷下跪。这一行为由数百名高度军事化的执法人员执行，他们腰间有武器，背后有一个白人至上主义国家的全部权力——无非是对弗洛伊德谋杀案的重新上演。一种道德正义的表现，旨在进一步赋予白人至上主义国家权力而不受惩罚。当抗议者后来发现自己在一场特别且恶毒地攻击肺部的大流行中被催泪瓦斯和胡椒喷洒时，还能是什么？除了进一步发展还能是什么[结束第239页]对呼吸困难的黑人脆弱性？正如 el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz 预言的那样：“这不是我肩上的筹码。那是你的脚踩在我的脖子上。” 脚——乔治·弗洛伊德的膝盖，埃里克·加纳的锁喉，桑德拉·布兰德的绳子——在脖子上。

如果统治需要持续更新，那么身体的世俗、自主功能将成为实施和沉淀压迫的特别肥沃的土壤。在寻找合适的候选人以在物质上和本体论上将统治和压迫与黑色联系起来时，呼吸及其装置——空气、鼻子、嘴巴、肺、脖子——已经成为在美国定义黑色的一种手段. 然而，持续生产、构建和管理黑色的关系从来没有朝着一个方向前进。黑人和我们的文化作品一次又一次地炼金了现代性的暴力：“转化或炼金，反黑暴力、骚扰和掠夺的消化和升华，”纳撒尼尔·麦基观察到，“一直是黑人音乐的工作之一，¹当 Frederick Douglass 在My Bondage and My Freedom 中想象自由的感觉时，他描述了与种植园监督 Covey 的争执：

我不知道，八四十小时前，一个男人用他最轻微的一句话就可以让我像暴风雨中的树叶一样颤抖，而这种勇敢的精神是从哪里来的；无论如何，我决心战斗。. . . 战斗的疯狂降临在我身上，我发现我强壮的手指牢牢地抓住了我懦弱的折磨者的喉咙；不顾后果，此刻，就好像我们平等地站在法律面前。²

道格拉斯让人联想到炼金术的时刻，他走出过去的自我，进入自己能够抓住科维的脖子的幻象——能够切断科维的话，将科维的生命掌握在他的手中。在...