The recent Black Lives Matter protests and the movement's fierce response to centuries-old systemic racism in the United States sprang spontaneously from the shock effect of videos showing George Floyd pinned by the neck for nine and one-half minutes under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer while he lamented again and again, “I can't breathe.” He repeated these words twenty-seven times before expiring. In 2014, Eric Garner, also African American, died pronouncing these same words while being held in a chokehold by a New York police officer, also white. In his farewell address to the British people delivered in London on March 30, 1847, Frederick Douglass declared, “Every bayonet, sword, musket, and cannon has its deadly aim at the bosom of the negro: 3,000,000 of the coloured race are lying there under the heels of 17,000,000 of their white creatures” (1982b, 22). Recalling the well-known cry of the...

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