Breaking the Code of Silence

In the summer of 2014 police in Staten Island used a chokehold to kill Eric Garner, a 43-year old African American man who can be heard pleading on a video made by a witness to the incident: “I can’t breathe.” A few months later, police in Ferguson, Missouri shot and killed Michael Brown, an eighteen year old African American teenager who at the time of his murder was unarmed, and, according to witnesses, had his hands held up in a gesture of surrender. A few months after that, in Chicago, Laquan McDonald was shot sixteen times in a firestorm of bullets. The revolutionary chants of Black Lives Matter activists: “I can’t breathe,” “Hands Up Don’t Shoot,” “Sixteen Shots,” emerge from the circumstances of these killings. This paper investigates the ways in which the articulation and repetition of these phrases, heard and viewed in conjunction with witness videos, might provide a way for Black citizens to talk back to authority, assert their rights, and question the boundaries of the law, without repercussion—or at least with minimized risk to themselves. Arthur Jafa’s 2016 video, Love is the Message, the Message is Death(2016), set to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” serves as a comparative artworld example.