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ABSTRACT
On July 16, 2019, after Daniel Pantaleo’s non-indictment, Emerald Snipes-Garner, Eric Garner’s daughter, took to the steps of the New York Court House and demanded the impossible, that her deceased family members be alive. In this essay, I approach Snipes-Garner’s advocacy with a version of racial rhetorical criticism focused on how Black people rebuke racism. Attuning to Snipes-Garner’s impossible demand illuminates the usefulness of disruptive racial rhetorical criticism and illustrates how valuing Black life can interrupt “white time,” and create a “Blackened time.” This essay concludes by explicating how scholars can participate in demanding the impossible.
Acknowledgment
Darrian is an Assistant Professor at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. His research interests are race, rhetoric, and world-making. I would like to thank Betty Johnson. I would also like to thank Dr. Boylorn, the anonymous and semi-anonymous reviewers, and the editorial staff for their help with this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Pete Williams and Minyvonne Burke, and Adam Reiss, “NYPD Officer in Eric Garner’s Chokehold Death Won’t Face Federal Charges,” NBC News, July 16, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-city-officer-eric-garner-s-chokehold-death-won-n1030321, paragraph 1.
2 Wesley Lowery, “‘I Can’t Breath’: Five Years after Eric Garner Died in Struggle with New York Police, Resolution Still Elusive,” Washington Post, June 13, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/i-cant-breathe-five-years-after-eric-garner-died-in-struggle-with-new-york-police-resolution-still-elusive/2019/06/13/23d7fad8-78f5-11e9-bd25-c989555e7766_story.html, paragraph 4.
3 Emerald Snipes-Garner, “Daughter of Eric Garner Reacts Emotionally after Learning the DOJ Will Not File Charges against the NYPD Cop Involved in her Father’s Chokehold Death,” CBS News, July 16, 2019, https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fcbsn.ws%2F2keoCcn%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR34u3r8ueZO2rjc3o-qkqB0FiuIAf3Il-fjZDRFMo5sdq3fbsxAn2xZFDU&h=AT2rtU2-37jnWVVDmNu7eQnhiLgLVBD5NqLrjz_Q8mxPJMLKSXMakmZ3ItfWmvYY_Hkox9nEc1P6ttVXUPz0gjG7udXLkMLoJH41CeiqmxBua4vdC69sbl8fRPE8r0y47Q, 1:37.
4 Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 2.
5 Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 25–30. By episteme I mean an order of knowledge.
6 Emerald Snipes Garner’s sister, Erica Garner, died of a heart attack in 2017. After Eric Garner’s death, Erica Garner fervently argued for justice for her father.
7 Matthew Houdek, “Racial Sedimentation and the Common Sense of Racialized Violence: The Case of Black Church Burnings,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no.3 (2018): 280, doi:10.1080/00335630.2018.48603.
8 Logan Rae Gomez, “Temporal Containment and the Singularity of Anti-Blackness: Saying Her Name in and Across Time,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2021): 182, doi:10.1080/02773945.2021.1918504.
9 Darrian Robert Carroll, “#Palestine2Ferguosn: A Communication Created through Words,” Journal of Information Communication Ethics & Society 16, no. 3 (2018): 330, doi:10.1108/JICES-03-2018-0026; Charles Linscott, “All Lives (Don’t) Matter: The Internet Meets Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” Black Camera 9, no. 2 (2017): 104–8. https://www.mus.jhu.edu/article/659461; McKittrick, On Being Human, 25–30; Armond R. Towns, “‘What do we wanna Be’ Black Radical Imagination and the Ends of the World,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 78, doi:10.1080/14791420.2020.1723801.
10 David Li Ki, “NYPD Fires Officer Daniel Pantaleo for Chokehold in Eric Garner’s Death,” NBC, August 19, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nypd-fires-officer-daniel-pantaleo-chokehold-eric-garner-s-death-n1041336, paragraph 2
11 Collin Bjork and Frida Buhre, “Resisting Temporal Regimes, Imagining Just Temporalities,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2021): 178, doi:10.1080/02773945.2021.1918503; Matthew Houdek and Kendall R. Phillips, “Rhetoric and the Temporal Turn: Race, Gender, Temporalities,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 4 (2020): 371, doi:10.1080/07491409.2020.1824501.
12 Ersula Ore and Matthew Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation: Toward a Spatiotemporal Political of Breathing,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 4 (2020): 3, doi;10.1080/07491409.2020.1828709.
13 Houdek and Phillips, “Rhetoric and the Temporal Turn”; Bjork and Buhre, “Resisting Temporal Regimes.”
14 Amber E. Kelsi, “Blackened Debate at the End of the World,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 52, no. 1 (2019), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/721920.
15 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 6, doi:10.1080/15358593.2016.1183871. Building on Flores, by disruptive racial rhetorical criticism I mean a version of racial rhetorical criticism that is focused on the way that anti-racist advocates respond to and resist racist practices.
16 Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 6.
17 E. Chebrolu, “The Racial Lens of Dylann Roof: Racial Anxiety and White Nationalist Rhetoric on New Media,” Review of Communication 20, no. 1 (2020): 49, doi:10.1080/14791420.2020.1723802; Houdek, “Racial Sedimentation,” 280; Robert J. Topinka, Racing the Street: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology in Metropolitan London, 1840–1900 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 5–7.
18 Linsay M. Cramer and Andrew R. Donofrio, “Threatening Whiteness: ‘Angry Russell’ and the Rhetoricity of Race,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2021): 153, doi:10.1080/02773945.2021.1877802.
19 Rico Self and Ashley R. Hall, “Refusing to Die: Black Queer and Feminist Worldmaking Amid Anti-Black State Violence,” QED 8, no. 1 (2021): 124, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/801975; Matthew Houdek and Ersula Ore, “Cultivating Otherwise Worlds and Breathable Futures,” Rhetoric, Politics & Culture 1, no. 1, (2021): 87, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/801954.
20 Tiara R. Na’puti, “Oceanic Possibilities for Communication Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2020): 98, doi:10.1080/14791420.2020.173802.
21 Ore and Houdek, “Countertemporality,” 3.
22 Biko Mandela Gray, Black Life Matter: Blackness, Religion, and the Subject (Pirai: Duke University Press, 2022), 6.
23 Nomi Claire Lazar, “Utopian Rhetoric Has a Pleasure Problem,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2021): 200, doi:10.1080/02773945.2021.1918511.
24 Nancy Bentley, “The Fourth Dimension: Kinlessness and African American Narrative,” Critical Inquiry 35, (2009): 270–92; Habiba Ibrahim, Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 3; Kara Keeling, Queer Times: Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 56–60; David Marriot, Wither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 3.
25 Habiba Ibrahim, Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 3.
26 Ibrahim, Black Age, 2–5; Library of Congress, “The Murder of Emmett Till,” Loc.gov, https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/articles-and-essays/murder-of-emmett-till/. Emmett Till was a young Black boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955. Till’s death and his mother’s advocacy thereafter is oft cited as one of the engines of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
27 Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions 5, (2011): 22.
28 Hall, “‘Slippin,’” 344.
29 Stanford, “Eric Garner,” Stanford Green Library Exhibit supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement, https://exhibits.stanford.edu/saytheirnames/feature/eric-garner.
30 Daudi Abe, “Eric Garner (1970–2014).” Blackpast, July 21, 2016, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/garner-eric-1970-2014/.
31 Gino Canella, “Racialized Surveillance: Activist Media and the Policing of Black Bodies,” Communication Culture & Critique 11, no. 3 (2018): 380, doi:10.1093/ccc/tcy013.
32 Li Ki, “NYPD Fires Officer Daniel Pantaleo.”
33 Sharrona Pearl, “Staying Angry: Black Women’s Resistance to Racialized Forgiveness in US Police Shootings,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 3 (2020): 277–8, doi:10.1080/07491409.2020.1744208.
34 “Cop in Chokehold Death of NY Man Expresses ‘Condolences’ to Garner Family,” NBC News, December 3, 2014, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cop-chokehold-death-ny-man-expresses-condolences-garner-family-n260966, paragraph 4.
35 “Eric Garner’s Widow on Accepting Officer’s Condolences: ‘Hell No,’” CBS News, December 3, 2014, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eric-garners-widow-on-accepting-officers-apology-hell-no/, paragraph 2–4.
36 “Protests Erupt after Eric Garner Grand Jury Decision: Eighty-Three People Were Arrested in New York City Demonstrations,” ABC News, December 4, 2014, https://abcnews.go.com/US/protests-erupt-eric-garner-grand-jury-decision/story?id=27355323, paragraph 2.
37 Emerald Snipes-Garner, 2014. “‘Justice For All’ March,” C-Span, December 13, 2014, https://www.c-span.org/video/?323260-1/justice-all-march. 01:56:49-01:58:00.
38 Erica Garner, “(2014) Erica Garner: ‘Not a Black & White Issue’,” CNN, December 05, 2014, https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2014/12/05/ctn-don-lemon-erica-garner-race.cnn.
39 Oliver Laughland, Jessica Glenza, Steven Thrasher, and Paul Lewis, “‘We Can’t Breathe’: Eric Garner’s Last Words Become Protesters’ Rallying Cry,” The Guardian, December 4, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/04/we-cant-breathe-eric-garner-protesters-chant-last-words. paragraph 2.
40 Snipes-Garner, “‘Justice For All’ March,” 02:08:57.
41 Eric Levinson, “Activist Erica Garner, 27, Dies, after Heart Attack,” CNN, December 31, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/30/us/erica-garner-eric-death/index.html.
42 Vivian Wang, “Erica Garner, Activist and Daughter of Eric Garner, Dies at 27.” New York Times, December 30, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/nyregion/erica-garner-dead.html. Paragraph 10.
43 Martin Pengelly, “Erica Garner, Black Lives Matter activist, dies aged 27,” Guardian, December 30, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/30/erica-garner-dies-black-lives-matter-eric-garner-daughter. Paragraph 3; Wang, “Erica Garner, Activist,” paragraph 3.
44 Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 19.
45 Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “The Girls Obama Forgot.” The New York Times, July 29, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/opinion/Kimberl-Williams-Crenshaw-My-Brothers-Keeper-Ignores-Young-Black-Women.html, paragraph 2; Homa Khaleell, “#SayHerName: Why Kimberlé Crenshaw is Fighting for Forgotten Women,” The Gaudian, May 30, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/30/sayhername-why-kimberle-crenshaw-is-fighting-for-forgotten-women, paragraph 1; Armond R. Towns, “Geographies of Pain: #SayHerName and the Fear of Black Women’s Mobility,” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (2016): 122–4, doi:10.1080/07491409.2016.11768072.
46 Brakkton Booker and Rachel Treisman, “A Year after Breonna Taylor’s Killing, Family Says There’s ‘No Accountability’,” NPR, March 13, 2021, paragraph 21; Callimachi et al., “Fired Officer,” paragraph 1.; Oliver Laughland, “Sandra Band: Video Released Nearly Four Years after Death Shows Her View of Arrest,” The Guardian, May 7, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/07/sandra-bland-video-footage-arrest-death-police-custody-latest-news, paragraph 4; McLaughlin, “Dynamic History,” paragraph 2; Ore, Lynching, 1–5. As of 2023, no one in the Dallas police department has been held accountable for the death of Sandra Bland. And, as 2023 comes and goes, the family of Breonna Taylor asserts that there has been “no accountability.”
47 Emerald Snipes-Garner, “Fire Daniel Pantaleo For the Murder of Eric Garner Now.” Change.org, https://www.change.org/p/nyc-police-commissioner-james-o-neill-and-mayor-bill-de-blasio-fire-daniel-pantaleo-for-the-murder-of-eric-garner-now (accessed December 17, 2020). As of June 16, 2020, Change.org listed Snipes-Garner’s petition as having over 140,000 signatures.
48 Li Ki, “NYPD Fires Officer Daniel Pantaleo,” paragraph 2; Kirsten Savali, “NYPD Judge Recommends that Officer in Eric Garner Case Be Fired,” Essence, August 2, 2019, https://www.essence.com/news/judge-daniel-pantaleo-eric-garner-fired/, paragraphs 3–4.
49 Sally Goldenberg, “Records Show Increased Earnings for Officer Involved in Garner Death,” Politico, September 12, 2016, https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2016/09/officer-in-eric-garner-death-boosts-overtime-pay-105359, paragraph 4.
50 Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Forum N.H.I. 1, no.1 (1994): 42.
51 Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65; Wilderson, Afropessimism, 206.
52 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012), 1–15; Olga Idriss Davis, “In the Kitchen: Transforming the Academy through Safe Spaces of Resistance,” Western Journal of Communication 63, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 364–6; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 75–125; Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 4; Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019), 32; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 361–5; Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020), 139.
53 Snipes-Garner, “Emotional Reaction,” 0:32–40.
54 Gray, Black Life Matter, 4–6.
55 Snipes-Garner, “Emotional Reaction,” 0:37–40.
56 Snipes-Garner, “Emotional Reaction,” 0:38–40.
57 Alexander, “Can You Look At This,” 84.
58 Ersula Ore and Matthew Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation: Toward a Spatiotemporal Political of Breathing,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 4 (2020): 8, doi:10.1080/07491409.2020.1828709.
59 George Yancy, Look, a White: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 12; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Lanham: Bowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2014), 13–15.
60 Here and throughout, when I mention Black life as “invaluable” I mean to gesture toward the definition of invaluable as “indispensable” or “extremely useful.”
61 Snipes-Garner, “Emotional,” 0:55–1:07.
62 Fanon, Black Skin, 1–2.
63 Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York, New York University Press, 2020), 35–6.
64 Joshua Bennett, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2020), 175–182; Orlando Patterson. “Revisiting Slavery, Property, and Social Death,” In On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death, eds., John Bodel and Walter Scheidel (Oxford: Wiley & Blackwell, 2017), 291–316;
65 Diane Davis, “Rhetoricity, Temporality, Democratic Nonequivalence,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 51, no. 3, (2021): 202, doi:10.0180/02773945.2021.1918506.
66 Snipes-Garner, “Emotional,” 1:25–:35.
67 Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 2.
68 Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception: The Counterdoctrine of the Jamesian Poesis,” in C. L. R. James’ Caribbean, ed. Paget Henry and Paul Buhle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 67.
69 Snipes-Garner, “Emotional,” 1:37–45.
70 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 65; Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 1–10.
71 Lisa B. Y. Calvente, Bernadette Marie Calafell, and Karma R. Chávez, “Here’s Something You Can’t Understand: The Suffocating Whiteness of Communication Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 203, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.20202.1770823.
72 Eva Ulrike Pirker and Judith Rahn, “Afrofuturist Trajectories across Time, Space, and Media,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 37, no. 4 (2020): 293, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2020.1820542.
73 Frida Buhre and Collin Bjork, “Braiding Time: Sami Temporalities for Indigenous Justice,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2021): 228, doi:10.1080/02773945.2021.1918515.
74 Houdek and Phillips, “Rhetoric and the Temporal Turn,” 370.
75 Lauren Love, “University to Launch Several New Anti-Racism Initiatives,” University of Michigan Record, October 20, 2020, https://record.umich.edu/articles/u-m-to-launch-several-new-anti-racism-initiatives/; New York University, “Anti-Racism Education, Programs, and Resources,” https://www.nyu.edu/life/global-inclusion-and-diversity/anti-racism.html.
76 Sarah Schwartz, “Map: Where Critical Race Theory Is under Attack,” Education Week, March 23, 2023, https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06#:~:text=Since%20January%202021%2C%2044%20states,through%20legislation%20or%20other%20avenues. As of the time of writing, 44 states have introduced legislation to ban or limit the teaching of Critical Race Theory.
77 Paula, Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton Mcllwain, “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 255–7, doi:10.1093/joc/jqy003.
78 Erin C. McKiernan et al, “Point of View: How Open science Helps Researchers Succeed,” ELife, July 7, https://elifesciences.org/articles/16800, 1; Syavash Nobarany, Kellogg S. Booth, “Use of Politeness Strategies in Open Signed Peer Review,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 66, no. 5 (2015): 1057–60, doi:10.1002/asi.23229; Elizabeth Walsh et al., “Open Peer Review: A Randomised Controlled Trial,” British Journal of Psychiatry 176, (2000): 50, doi:10.1192/bjp.176.1.47. Recent evidence indicates that open peer review authors often employ more politeness strategies while maintaining rigor. Chakravaratty et. al. established that Communication Studies has a problem with producing rude and discouraging reviews for people of color when they talk about race and racism. More politeness strategies may be useful to reduce the likelihood of rude and discouraging reviews being given to scholars of color.
79 Communication Studies scholars have worked to begin to implement changes to the scholarly publishing within the discipline. For instance, through the hard work of many scholars the National Communication Association has established and began production of a new journal: Communication and Race.
80 Kirt Wilson, “The Racial Contexts of Public Address: Interpreting Violence during the Reconstruction Era,” in Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, ed. Michael J. Hogan and Shawn Parry-Giles (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Ltd, 2010), 211.
81 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 141.
82 Lisa A. Flores, “Towards an Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 452, doi:10.1080/14791420.2018.15256387.
83 Wilderson, Afropessimism, 34.
84 Ibrahim, Black Age, 8; Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (Project Gutenberg, 1895), chapter 2. A Red Record is a catalog of the names of victims of racial violence.
85 Scarlett L. Hester and Catherine Squires, “Who are We Working For? Recentering Black Feminism,” Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 345, doi:10.1080/14791420.2018.1533987; Michael Lechuga, “An Anticolonial Future: Reassembling the Way We Do Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 384, doi: /10.1080/14791420.2020.1829659.