“I Can’t Breathe:” The Invisible Slow Violence of Breathing Politics in Minneapolis

Abstract

Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, his utterance, “I can’t breathe,” reverberated internationally as the world population grappled with the twin specters of life-threatening COVID-19 respiratory morbidities and mounting years under increasingly polarized racist regimes. Despite crisis fatigue, national and international outpourings of solidarity trended on social and mainstream media. However, in this moment, the legacy of structural and slow violences against the living, breathing Minneapolis–St. Paul communities of color were obscured. This article addresses transdisciplinary breathing politics in this mid-sized American city to integrate atmospheric indicators (concentrations of criteria pollutants including particulate matter and gaseous pollutants), traffic indicators (Minnesota Department of Transportation permanent traffic monitoring station data), and social indicators (community responses in newspaper and Twitter archives), ultimately making visible how Floyd’s utterance reflects much deeper patterns of stratified urban public health risks and socio-environmental airscape politics. Bullet Points of Findings Breathing politics are racialized in Minneapolis, demonstrating stark differences in traffic and air quality across neighborhoods. Through content analysis, it is shown that social media platforms like Twitter can be rich historical records for tracking local public discourse, providing valuable insight to the ways people talk about and conceive topics like environmental justice, breathing politics, and urban equity. While hashtag activism on social media flourished in 2020 to address anti-Black racism, it was neither a “tipping point” nor did it show a discernible impact on the nature of environmental justice discourse about breathing politics, despite the steep rise of #ICantBreathe. Integrating social, economic, and environmental indicators has the overarching benefit of addressing complex, lived systems.