The anti-mask movement knowingly warped ‘I can’t breathe’ into anti-vaccine protest slogans

Evidence

One of the glowing influencers who I follow, for instance, said she is tired of fighting for her “right to breathe”—a reference to her refusal to wear a mask in stores when they were mandated. A group of mothers in San Diego who didn’t want their kids to have to wear masks in school called their organization Let Them Breathe. It is difficult to imagine that these educated, upper-middle-class white mothers were unaware that their slogan echoed another—the cries of “I can’t breathe” that rose up from the streets in 2014 after a New York City police officer put Eric Garner in a chokehold and, after Garner uttered those fateful words, ended his life. They must have known that those same words roared up from the streets again in 2020, when George Floyd said them before he was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. Yet less than a year after the country was rocked by protests sparked by Floyd’s killing—and Ahmaud Arbery’s, and Breonna Taylor’s, and so many others before and after—here were those three words again, in only slightly altered form, being directed at public health policies designed to reduce transmission of Covid-19, which was still disproportionately ravaging Black communities. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 824

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘suffering as resource’ logic explored in ‘On Sacrifice’ — here suffering is not only claimed but its vocabulary is lifted from its actual victims.
• CANDY: The ‘Let Them Breathe’ San Diego mothers’ group name is grimly perfect shorthand for how a slogan reverses meaning.