AmerICAN'T BREATHE: Red, White, Blue, Black Lives, and Unmasking Race in America

By Eddie Connor

Radical, relevant, revolutionary, riveting — AmerICAN'T BREATHE is the book that all Americans who care about the crisis in this country, race relations, and next steps for this nation will want to read!

In a polarizing time of social unrest and a nation gasping for change, AmerICAN'T BREATHE injects politics, prose, and prophecy into its pages.

In the spectrum of red, white, blue, and Black lives, this book breathes life into readers caught in the chasm of race in America. Provocative, personal, and poignant. Dr. Eddie Connor renders redress to the social construct of society, amplifying a clarion call for systemic change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781733281140

Eddie Connor

Eddie Connor is a man of passion, determination, and intellectual fortitude.  A noted author, motivational speaker, radio and TV host, Eddie continually impacts minds in perilous times, by expressing invaluable wisdom that elevates your life.  Eddie Connor shares his inspiring story of overcoming cancer in his books, "Purposefully Prepared to Persevere" and "Collections of Reflections: Symphonies of Strength, Volumes 1-3" 

Book preview

Author

CHAPTER 1

___________________________

A Nation on Life Support

I remember that cold and windy day, like it was yesterday on January 1, 1998 in Detroit, MI. I was watching a football game with my friend from Alabama. After experiencing persistent chest pains, my mother and his mom rushed me to the hospital. It literally felt like someone was stabbing me in my heart. I could barely inhale and take a breath. I was skipping breaths and they continued to get shorter. I recall saying to my friend I can’t breathe.

I remember asking why me and why now? It felt like I had a target on my back or in this case my chest. I was just a kid with a high top fade. My candy of choice was Skittles or Starburst. Michael Jordan was my favorite basketball player. Musically, Ma$e’s Harlem World and Biggie’s Life After Death album played incessantly in my Sony Walkman CD player. Yes, I was born in the pre-iPod era. My favorite classes in school were gym and lunch. Okay, history class was cool too. I was just a regular kid. Never in my wildest imagination, did I think I would be having a near-death experience.

I found myself skipping breaths, like the scratched CDs playing in my ears. I was just beginning life and now I found myself fighting for my life. For weeks, I was in the hospital on life support. I remember waking up in my hospital bed, in shock as I was connected to IVs and a ventilator.

Medically I felt like I was under arrest from the duress of x-rays, surgery, and even deliberating about what will happen next. I was informed by the doctor that a tumor was removed from my chest, lymph nodes, and larynx. I was finally able to breathe. However, I almost lost my breath when the doctor told me, I was diagnosed with stage four cancer.

I can remember going through chemotherapy and radiation treatment, realizing that I was treated differently than fellow white cancer patients. You would think that a person would get the most compassion, when they’re fighting to live and battle cancer right? Much the contrary. God bless our first responders, but some of the white nurses did not treat me well. Even in a cancer treatment center, I realized my skin was a sin. Not even a life-threatening illness made me immune from the ramifications of racism. While being a kid on life support and fighting to breathe, racism was still choking me.

AMERICANCER

_________________________________________

According to the Harvard School of Public Health, Dean Michelle Williams said, Racism is a public health crisis. How so you say? It impacts the economic sustainability, education, social and community context, health and health care, neighborhood and environment of Black people in America. Its interconnectedness affects a person’s overall health and well-being. Racism is a cancer that continues to choke the dreams and lives of Black men and women, in America and abroad. This cancerous systemic oppression has metastasized throughout the streets and nation.

Black men and women still have a target on their back, chest, and neck. What will it take to remove the malignant cancerous tumor of racism from our country? The abscess has infected the morale of America. Systemic racism and police brutality has blockaded the oxygen flow of freedom to breathe, from Eric Garner to George Floyd.

THIS IS AMERICA

_________________________________________

We are living in what many historians have regarded, as the worst time in America since 1968. Amidst all of the angst, upheaval, and uproar, it still doesn’t seem to be getting any better in this country. Black men and women are still being killed by those sworn to protect and serve, without any charges or convictions. Racist vigilantes are free to mete out punishment at their discretion. The wealth inequality gap is raging and a multiplicity of issues in our community need remediation.

This is America, where a zip code determines one’s life expectancy and quality of education. The disproportionate mass incarceration of Black bodies has crippled families. We are still seeing the manifestation of environmental racism, in zoning and public policy which paralyzes communities.

America is in a battle to decide what matters most. Is it bigotry or Black lives, capitalism or community? America suffers from an arrhythmia. This nation’s heartbeat of hope is weakening. Its breath of benevolence is blockaded by its self-imposed barriers.

Can you really call yourself The land of the free and the home of the brave, if you’re not brave enough to remediate and support those suffering? The unending suffering is from the ramifications of America’s original sin.

FIRST RESPONDERS

_________________________________________

This nation is on life support and the cancerous disease emanates from the pillaging, enslaving, raping, and subjugation of an African people. How can we be expected to cure, what we didn’t create? Where is the vaccine for this virus? Where is the radiation and remediation to racism for its cancerous pathology? The people who benefit the most from racism, must be first responders to uproot it through access, equality, and equity. Symbolic change will not bring substantive progress.

We need more than city officials who vote to paint Black Lives Matter on the streets. We need their vote to reform police departments, so Black lives will matter and be protected on those same streets.

Thank you ABC-TV but this is about more than a Black bachelor. We didn’t ask the NFL to play Lift Every Voice and Sing before a football game. Thanks for the Band-Aids that now match our complexion, but when will America stop bleeding on people who didn’t cut them? When will the horrendous hemorrhaging of hate come to a halt? Netflix you’re awesome. Yes, we enjoyed the entire African American movie anthology. However, beyond theatre we need corporations like yours to play an active role in dismantling the script of systemic racism. No, FOX-TV we didn’t even ask you to cancel the show Cops. We just want America to cancel, charge, and convict the bad cops. Stop placating and pacifying us. We want remediation and reparations, not a false sense of reality TV.

All of the smoke in mirrors shows symbolism but it lacks substantive change. Malcolm X declared, The white man will try to satisfy us with symbolic victories, rather than economic equity and real justice.

It’s indicative of the fact that America will entertain you, feed you, bandage you, and paint the streets for you as an anesthetic to soothe your pain. Oftentimes the anesthesia causes amnesia. It’s just to distract you from the real issues. However, will they ever stop killing you? We don’t need to be patronized, we need to stop being brutalized. We don’t need symbolic smoke screens. We need real systemic, substantive, and transformative change.

THE RACE OF RACE

_________________________________________

America was firmly founded on the premise of white supremacy and white superiority. This nation’s heritage harbors hate against minorities, particularly Black bodies. As Black people we have always been in a race and always been affected by race. We have to run faster, harder, and longer in a race that has so many barriers. How can you catch up and win a race, when white people have had a 400 year head start on an entire race of people? We were disqualified from the race, solely by the dehumanization and subjugation of our race. When we’re running, we encounter systemic and systematic barriers.

They tell us if we speak a certain way, dress in a particular manner, go to certain schools, or learn specific skills then even we could catch up and exceed limitations. These fragmented fallacies come with targeted hurdles, race baiting barriers, and systemic traps on the race track of life. We have been lapped and limited for 400 years. Then when it looks like we might be able to get off the ground, you burn our communities down.

How can we breathe, when we’re already gasping for air in a race that was designed to keep us losing? You assasinated our leaders. You broke the back of our economic base, bombing Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the massacre in Rosewood, Florida. You infiltrated our neighborhoods with guns and drugs, to aid in the assisted suicide of our people. You likened Black bodies to lab rats in the Tuskegee Experiment. You imprison our brothers and sisters for non-violent offenses. You criminalize us for smoking or selling marijuana, then you decriminalize it and make millions. You brutalize Black bodies and then shout blue lives matter. You kneel on our neck and shamelessly allude to the fact that we deserved it. How can we breathe when we’re being choked by the chains of racism, injustice, and inequity?

THE ENEMY WITHIN

_________________________________________

America views their hate as heritage. As statues are crumbling across the country, we must address the statutes of systemic racism, social oppression, and bigotry that kept them constructed. This nation is receiving a wake-up call to look at itself in the mirror. Don’t just glance and then put on a mask, to hide from your own ugly inequity. Look introspectively hard and deep at yourself. Will you ignore or answer the call for substantive and systemic change?

If this nation does not avail itself to be revived morally, spiritually, and systematically then it will be destroyed from the inside-out. America’s greatest enemy is itself. It will either be reformed from within or it will be destroyed from within.

After our enslavement, toil, and torment for 400 years, America should be relieved that Black people have chosen reconciliation over retribution. It’s time to move beyond ceremonial conversation into national action. Not mere protest but policy and systemic reformation.

THE INIQUITY OF INEQUITY

_________________________________________

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his final sermon on April 3, 1968, as a storm brewed outside of Mason Temple Church of God in Christ in Memphis, Tennessee. He said, The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. More than 50 years later and the state of the nation has worsened. America is not asymptomatic to the tyranny it has perpetuated. This nation is sick from the virus of racism that it caused. America must repent of its original sin, that being slavery.

If indeed America was sick then, it surely is on life support now. This country is in a coma and crisis, refusing to ensure protection and provision for all who live in this nation. Throughout Dr. King’s crusade for Civil Rights, he rendered a clarion call about the triple evils of society. He highlighted the perils of materialism, militarism, and racism. The aforementioned blinders are barriers that blockade us from building a beloved community.

The beloved community is not an ethereal utopian society, but one that invokes the practicality of equality and equity. In essence it was a global vision to mitigate poverty, homelessness, racism, discrimination, bigotry, and usher in a spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood. Dr. King spoke candidly about racism and launched a war on poverty via The Poor People’s Campaign. He spoke ardently against the inequities of people in impoverished communities. Dr. King alluded to America being the richest nation in the world, yet people go to sleep hungry every night. It boasts of being the land of milk and honey but people sleep on park benches. How can we purport to be the richest nation in the world and not take care of our own people?

ILLUSION OF INCLUSION

_________________________________________

The obtrusive and overt roots of racism have become an obnoxious alarm clock, awakening America out of its cultural coma. The ascension of President Barack Obama, being the first Black man to occupy the White House brought about celebrations extolling race relations.

Many ingested a societal sedative, only to believe that racism in America was officially dead. However, Black faces in high places is often used as a smoke screen of symbolism. It is designed to distract people from the persistent racism that permeates society. In fact, racism has never received an inscribed tombstone or a resurrection from the dead, because it has always been alive.

On the verge of an American race war, we have seen the unending assault on Black bodies at the hands of police. These tragedies have in fact awakened a sleeping giant, that being the conscience of Black America.

It’s quite unnerving to suggest that we live in a post-racial society. In fact we are living in a most racial society. We continue to see Black brothers and sisters killed at the hands of white police officers, sworn to protect and serve.

Slavery has taken on a new form, with the advent of the prison industrial complex. Voting rights are being repealed and amended with voter ID laws. Racism is bipolar, because it continues to transition from covert to overt and vice versa.

There is a new Jim Crow of illiteracy, interconnected to incarceration. In America’s past, lynchings occurred once every four days. Presently, Black males are victims of police brutality, every 28 hours. We continue to see modern-day lynchings of our brothers and our sisters continually.

Consequently, our brothers and sisters are instantaneously relegated to becoming social media hashtags, rather than heralded as social movement heroes. Tragically, we have become familiar with the names of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and a host of other victims of vitriolic racial violence. Our Black men and women are human beings, not just hashtags.

So, it begs the question, What is the value of Black life in America? More money is invested into the prison system rather than the education system. It is evident that incarceration not education is the focus in this nation. A disproportionate rate of Black males are a part of this incarceration nation.

We are witnessing an Illusion of Inclusion coined by Patricia Pope. Strides for cultural assimilation, does not negate the annihilation of Black bodies and communities. Our brothers and sisters are facing exclusion in society and expulsion in schools, more than ever before.

Have we made any substantive progress, since the Selma to Montgomery March of 1965? We crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge but have we been pushed back, only to find our people suffering from unending rage and racism? The historical inference of Bloody Sunday is felt and seen every day. Surely, there are more bridges that we must cross and barriers to overcome.

America must ardently focus on fixing the fragmented fissures and frailties in this nation. Social and systemic justice cannot be part and parcel. These yet to be United States have been built on liberty and justice for some or rather y’all, but not all.

Dr. King affirmed, Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. When we think of blind justice, it should be free of bias. The criminal justice system is arrogantly blind to meting out fairness and equity because of someone’s skin. The true aspect of blind justice must be indivisible and visible enough to be indiscriminate of race. This nation will continue to be on life support when Black, Latinx, Native American, and people of color suffocate on systemic racism and marginalization.

CHAPTER 2

___________________________

1619 to COVID-19

O say can you see, what is happening in our society? From sea to shining sea, I hope your eyes are open to see the suffering in this country. Simply because we are living in a chasm of chaos and crisis.