From “All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep: Hope – And Hard Pills to Swallow – About Making Black Lives Matter” By Andre Henry
The killing of Eric Garner, in the summer of 2014, ripped a tiny hole in the thinning fog of white lies that enveloped my common sense at the time. Mr. Garner had just broken up a fight while on his way to Buffalo Wild Wings in Staten Island when two police arrived on the scene and accused him of selling loose cigarettes. Garner insisted he hadn’t been selling “loosies” that day, but the officers continued to hurl accusations at him, until Officer Daniel Pantaleo grabbed Garner by the neck and pulled him to the ground in a chokehold – a move that had been banned by the NYPD. “I can’t breathe,” Garner protested, as more cops appeared on the scene and piled onto his body. Eleven times he protested: “I can’t breathe.” Those were his last words.
I was more than grieved when I heard about Garner’s death. There was something deep inside me that took it personally. It was like those movies where someone breaks out of a trance momentarily. The little Andre loved drawing pictures of the American Revolution and writing songs about Black history broke through the gaslighting fog; He was livid. I sat in my darkened office at the church with my guitar in my trembling hands and began to sing about what Garner’s death made me feel, as tears left salt at the corners of my mouth:
O say, can you see?
We’re all not safe in the land of the free.
It was the first time I’d ever tried to write a song about racism since the sixth grade, and the first time I can remember really feeling free to call bullshit on America’s lie that racism was long gone, though I only felt so free in that one private moment. I wouldn’t perform that song for another three years, and I wouldn’t begin even saying what I’d expressed in that song for another two.