I Can’t Breathe: Suffocating Political Resistance to the Death of Eric Garner on Staten Island

• In Event: 452 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01. Mobilization and Social Movements

Abstract

Unlike the militant rebellions and uprisings following the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, the community response to the Eric Garner killing on Staten Island has been largely muted despite a population of almost half a million residents. What accounts for this? This research is based on a “complete-member" participant observer ethnography of the Staten Island branch of the NAACP from Summer 2014 to the present, in addition to informal, unstructured interviews with members and leaders of the civil rights organization. My research indicates that the suppression of a politically effective grass roots uprising against NYPD violence was, in part, due to the proliferation of a “politics of respectability” discourse by both the leadership and rank-and-file of the NAACP. By fashioning a discourse of Black criminality and casting it upon youth of color in the Tompkinsville, St. George, and Park Hill neighborhoods of Staten Island, NAACP officials successfully promulgated community fears of “riots”.

Author

• Neil Schuldiner, Brooklyn College/The City University of New York