4. Longed for Still: Antiracism, Uncaging, and Modes of Breathing Together

2020 Fluorescence of Black Lives Matter and/as Uncaging

As we entered various forms lockdown amid the emergence of the novel coronavirus, there was talk of the necessity, possibility, and desirability of living a “hermetically sealed” life. The ability to reach toward this ideal has been a mark of privilege. For example, in a virtual conversation with Arundhati Roy in May 2020, Naomi Klein called on her progressive audience to reject “the rich declaring independence from the rest of the world, and living a kind of hermetically sealed luxury existence.”1

The hermetic seal might be understood as a very particular kind of cage. In its technical sense, the term “hermetically sealed” generally refers to a total barrier to touch and air. Many manufactured goods are hermetically sealed in this sense: their final production steps taken in a space that is free of contaminants, and vacuum-packed with airtight packaging to maintain sterility. Examples range from ordinary canned goods to many medical and high-tech products. Yet as engineers of hermeticity note, “all enclosures leak, just at different rates.”2

It is not possible to actually achieve the total stoppage of airflow, even in the most sterile of contexts. If a container around an inanimate object might come close to hermeticity, the same is not true of any space occupied by human beings. Face masks obviously cannot cut off airflow completely. Sealed hospital rooms would be inaccessible to medical personnel and indeed hostile to the survival of organisms inside that rely on exchanges of oxygen and carbon dioxide. An environment without airflow is, literally, one in which humans (among other animals) cannot live.

Carcerality and the boundaries of the human organism that were being worked through in such intriguing ways in Anthony Hatch’s chapter on the metabolic cage in this book are also at stake in the elusive ideal of the hermetic seal in the context of Covid-19. Breathing is pivotal for sustaining life in all its many dimensions, and access to breath has become a powerful metonym for access to life in an era that has seen increased awareness of racial disparities in this respiratory disease on the one hand and the racialized impact of police violence on the other. This is why the phrase “I can’t breathe” has emerged as such a powerful characterization of both literal and metaphoric conditions in which Black communities struggle to live in a racist society. As Gabriel O. Apata has powerfully argued, “I can’t breathe” is a rallying cry for a historic moment in which “recent forms of racial injustice are characterized by an ongoing process of systemic and structural suffocation.”3

The differential imposition of suffocation along racialized lines is the primary way in which the boundaries of the human are at stake here. The caging and staging of racialized populations in the carceral milieu of Sydney’s Covid lockdown that Nadine Ehlers’s chapter in this book so acutely analyzes offers a stark instantiation of how racial inequality can be enacted through spectacular operations of difference and/as dehumanization. If all animals are vulnerable to suffocation, the differential imposition of that suffocation according to race is distinctly human.

There is also an additional way in which this phenomenon operates on the non/human boundary: intentionality in how we respond to that structural suffocation, individually or in community. The insistence that “Black Lives Matter” in a context in which Black lives are pervasively disregarded is continuous with the civil rights–era insistence “I Am A Man.” The earlier slogan, from the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike, had layers: “I Am A Man” contested the use of the demeaning term boy as a term of address for Black men, and it made a claim to human rights in terms of equality and dignity.4 The slogan “Black Lives Matter,” which emerged in 2013 in response to the acquittal of the vigilante killer of Trayvon Martin, extends beyond a masculinist frame. Its reference to “lives” evokes both biology and biography (a pair of bios terms that are usefully considered together).5 In both eras, the stark declarative statements make a compelling demand for inclusion in society.

Here we might remember the etymology of “conspiracy” as “breathing together.” In doing so, we wrest the term conspiracy from the monopoly of conspiracy theorists, to put it toward aspirational ends. In the conclusion of her important work On Black Breath, literary scholar Kimberly Bain calls on readers to conspire—Bain chooses “conspire” over “solidarity” because “unlike solidarity (which has no verb form unless transformed by the phrase ‘to be in’) conspire is in of itself a verb and in of itself demands action.”6 Urgently, Bain argues, “shared breathing” involves “sharing the burden of being at risk,” and conspiracy is “about taking on the risks of being vulnerable and open to others and the world, a vulnerability and risk that emerges with breathing and that certain bodies disproportionally absorb.”7

Bain’s work on Black breath is part of a recent fluorescence of theoretical engagement with breath, much of it coming from an environmental justice perspective, exemplified by a Thematic Collection in Engaging Science, Technology, & Society on “Breathing Late Industrialism.”8 Anthropologist Tim Choy, in his commentary “On Breathing Together” in that collection, argues that “the work of drawing breath together entails the proliferation of comparisons, contrasts, and connections.”9 Bringing a critique of the environmental conditions of late industrialism together with the antiracist plea “I can’t breathe,” Choy argues that the symbolic, theoretical, and material connections that come together in the histories of “respiratory thickening paired incommensurably yet viscerally with linguistic and textual repetitions of racialized respiratory violence.”10

An urge toward self-suffocation in the face of the risks of breathing together can be powerful but counterproductive. Sometimes a response to the caging of oppressive systems is an effort to build a cage of one’s own—for oneself or one’s household. We saw this a great deal in the pandemic: seeking to seal oneself off from the outside world as a way to be safe from infection. Thinking with the etymological connection between caging and caring that Amade Aouatef M’charek highlighted in her chapter from a different angle, suffocating confinement could feel like care. Yet living a hermetically sealed life is not only ultimately impossible; it also cuts us off from the possibility to care beyond the borders of the household. If temporary closures might have a utility, as a way of life, their construction and maintenance is antithetical to social justice.

As Black Lives Matter protests took to the streets in the 2020 fluorescence of that movement, they showed what is worth risking in an unjust world, and the necessity of breaking the hermetic seal. Otherwise, the seal threatens to render breath neither worthwhile nor even possible. The act of breathing together can be an act of defying capitalist impulses and resisting total control. Even as we must acknowledge the importance of preventing viral spread, we need porousness, not sterility, in both our domestic and political spheres. Rhythms of inhale and exhale are essential to breathing, itself vital for being, knowing, and resisting. Activism, even in pandemic times, depends on us breathing together. We have to break the seal, and go outside. We cannot forgo breathing together.

Grappling with Racism’s Cage

The hermetic seal is just one type of cage, and the fluorescence of the Movement for Black Lives is just one type of uncaging. The examination of the breaking of that seal offers one brightly illuminated perspective onto racial inequality and its contestation, and our analytical view can be enriched by putting this meditation into kaleidoscopic relation with considerations that might be more obscure. Stepping back a bit can help understand additional layers of what is at stake in racism’s caging—and the urgent potential for dismantling the cage.

Consider the etymology of the word “cage”:

cage (n.) “box-like receptacle or enclosure, with open spaces, made of wires, reeds, etc.,” typically for confining domesticated birds or wild beasts, c. 1200, from Old French cage “cage, prison; retreat, hideout” (12c.), from Latin cavea “hollow place, enclosure for animals, coop, hive, stall, dungeon, spectators’ seats in the theatre” (source also of Italian gabbia “basket for fowls, coop;” see cave (n.)). From c. 1300 in English as “a cage for prisoners, jail, prison, a cell.”11

So, etymologically, caging is enclosing and confining something, but also watching, through openings. Both the closedness and the openness of the cage matter: As they come to be distinguished from each other, a key difference between a cage and a cave is that those outside can see in (to the same extent those inside can see out).

That combination of containment and visibility is why, say, go-go dancers might be in a cage, performing from there for an audience surrounding them in more open spaces. Or “cage fighting”—mixed martial arts, in which the combination of enclosure and exposure seems to be part of the appeal of the form, while also contributing an animalistic quality to the sport (“human cock fighting”). Although go-go dancers or cage fighters might experience being caged might see the cage as a site of enacting liberation12 or manhood,13 being caged is also linked with being dehumanized. There is a tension in these kinds of cagings between physical expression and entrapment. Consider that go-go dancing emerged in the “swinging sixties”:

Unlike dancing with someone else, go-go presented opportunities for greater self-expression, individualism and improvisation. To some extent the dancer’s wild gyrations could be interpreted as an energetic response to newfound freedom and a desire for physical expression of the sense of liberation. On the other hand due to the physical containment of girls—whether in cages or on raised podiums, the frantic movements also resemble those of trapped birds, desperate for a way out.14

The illusory liberation of women in a sexist society can be seen through and with the cage.

One of the most illuminating theorists of caging as oppression is the philosopher Marilyn Frye, who is writing about primarily sexism rather than racism and yet thinking analogously can be fruitful. In her classic essay on “Oppression,” Frye articulates the systematic birdcage of sexism, in which she emphasizes the root of “oppression” as “press,” and goes on to use the terminology of caging in order to argue that we need to understand oppression as a structure as a whole rather than just one constraining element: “The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in—all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby trapped.”15 Frye continues, with a more extended consideration of the cage as a thing to think with:

Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way.

For Frye, the gaps between the birdcage’s wires that make it possible to see the bird in the cage can make it harder to see how the cage operates constrain:

It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.16

Frye herself goes on to describe how racism operates in a similarly systematic way to the birdcage of sexism, such that justifications for not being allowed to go to a public space or not being allowed to pursue a preferred line of work might be “because it’s not safe for girls” or because “there’s no work for negroes in that line.”17 In either case, “the ‘inhabitant’ of the ‘cage’ is not an individual but a group” insofar as “if an individual is oppressed, it is in virtue of being a member of a group or category of people that is systematically reduced, molded, immobilized.”18

This emphasis on imposition of the cage might spur an additional etymological reflection: The word “cage” is not only a noun but also a verb. To cage is to put into or keep in a cage. Etymologically the verb emerged from the noun: “to confine in a cage, to shut up or confine,” 1570s, from cage (n.).19 This has a distinctly nefarious cast.

The theme of “the cage” is the subject of Black feminist engagement by the African American poet, memoirist, and activist Maya Angelou, who engages with both the oppressive impact of the cage and also the vitality of maintaining imagination in the face of a world that constantly seems to shut imagination down. The title of her first memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is an evocative thematic for understanding both the oppressive character of caging and the urgency of uncaging.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969, is a gripping account of her childhood experiences of both racism and sexual violence.20 It is the most prominent of the several autobiographies that Angelou wrote, and was described by her friend and mentor James Baldwin as “a Biblical study of life in the midst of death.”21

The title of that Angelou autobiography comes from a line from a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872–1906), called “Sympathy.”22 Born less than a decade after the end of slavery and writing in the context of the crushing of Reconstruction, Dunbar was the most prominent Black poet of the age.23 In the iconic poem for which he is most remembered, first published in 1899, Dunbar writes, “I know what the caged bird feels, alas!,” and the final stanza “I know why the caged bird beats his wing” culminates:

Dunbar’s caged bird looks to heaven for salvation, whereas Angelou’s version is more explicit that the caged bird yearns to fly here on earth. She has her own poem, published much later than the autobiography, which contrasts the free bird with the caged bird in its verses, and its refrain is also its culmination:

Holding onto the capacity to sing of freedom is vital. Yet authentic freedom requires more than merely opening the cage, and for human beings, it cannot be achieved on a merely individual level but rather requires being in community. In the antiracism movements from Dunbar’s era through to Angelou’s and to Black Lives Matter, imagination and community are both vital components of contesting the constraints of racism’s cagings.

Imagination and community as liberatory resources are also articulated in the writing of Ruha Benjamin, who is one of the most prominent voices at the intersection of science and technology studies and African American studies today and so a particularly relevant touchstone for this book. The “liberatory imagination” aspect comes to the fore in Benjamin’s 2019 edited collection, Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and the Liberatory Imagination. In her introduction to that book, Benjamin engages with the themes of carcerality and with its contestation when she argues that “technology captivates” in two different ways: “capturing bodies” in the prison industrial complex and pervasive structures of carcerality and control; but also “capturing the imagination” in ways that can be, potentially, toward a liberatory imagination: “Ferguson is the future” and beyond.25 This dual aspect of how technology captivates offers an evocative engagement with the racism’s caging and aspirations toward uncaging.

Attention to the persistence of the liberatory imagination in the face of oppression becomes even more central to Ruha Benjamin’s 2022 book, Viral Justice, and that book also foregrounds the importance of connecting with community to contest injustice.26 One of that book’s most striking features is that it not only names injustices that need to end but also names what it wants to see more of, including gardens among other places for fostering and cultivating necessary sustenance. There are many beautiful examples given of people living viral justice, including the “gangsta gardener,” the Critical Resistance Anti-Policing Health Toolkit, Black doulas and midwives, and more.

These inspiring endeavors that Benjamin calls our attention to all illuminate the ways in which science, technology, and medicine are circuits not only of power and inequality but also of social justice movements that resist them.27 In a usefully grounded and concrete way, the activists who Benjamin draws our attention to exemplify prefigurative politics, which is to say that these activists embody and enact, within their activism, the socialities and practices they seek to foster for broader society.28 We live in an unjust world and no amount of work in our communities can evade that, and yet that is not a reason to let the unjust structures of the larger world set the terms of all of our relationships. As scholars and as activists, we can and should hold onto hope.

Necessary Hope

“Hope” is a common word, and yet a complicated concept. I have explored this before with regard to postcolonial science projects,29 and it is no less relevant for articulating antiracisms. Indeed, hope is an essential part of struggles for social justice, including antiracist social movements. As the educator and philosopher Paulo Freire argues:

I am hopeful not out of mere stubbornness, but out of an existential, concrete imperative. I do not mean that, because I am hopeful, I attribute to this hope of mine the power to transform reality all by itself, so that I set out for the fray without taking account of concrete, material data, declaring “My hope is enough!” No, my hope is necessary, but it is not enough. Alone, it does not win. But without it, my struggle will be weak and wobbly. We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water.30

Thus, hope does not let us off the hook, but rather means that we have work to do. Freire’s metaphorical reference here to the fish’s need for water is resonant with the theme of breath that has permeated this chapter. The water for the fish and analogous critical hope for us is necessary for both oxygen and forward movement.

Cheryl Mattingly makes an aligned argument that hope can be usefully understood “as a practice, rather than simply an emotion or a cultural attitude.”31 So hope here is not merely optimism, even as it is a refusal to submit to pessimism. Cheryl Mattingly also acknowledges that, “paradoxically, hope is on intimate terms with despair. It asks for more than life promises.”32 Hope is an engine on which capitalism operates, but it is also something more than its entrepreneurial elements. Our awareness of the pitfalls of hope is not a reason to abandon it. I think that we sometimes use pessimism to protect ourselves from disappointment. There can be a small satisfaction in having correctly predicted how bad things would be. But failing to cultivate hope inhibits our ability to engage creatively with the world—whether through poetry, activism, or otherwise.

Note that living with hope is also different from what Lauren Berlant has indicted as “cruel optimism,” which is when something that we desire is actually an obstacle to our flourishing—for example, in the longing for “the American Dream” that many are doomed to fail to achieve.33 Like that dream, the hope that progressives also need involves longing for something that we will never actually reach, but unlike that dream, it is doing so terms beyond the neoliberal entrepreneurial subject.

Indeed, the hope we need is necessarily in opposition to the American Dream. In her article “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming,” Kim TallBear decries pervasive Indigenous erasure even as she embraces Junot Díaz’s idea of “radical hope,” which puts “trust in the collective genius of all the people who have survived these wicked systems . . . I think from the bottom will the genius come that makes our ability to live with each other possible.”34 TallBear embraces this kind of hope as absolutely necessary: “I will myself to have this kind of radical hope. What is the alternative?”35 Later in the piece, TallBear aligns herself with Cornel West’s “multiracial alliance” even as she also goes beyond it, both because he himself too often participates in Indigenous erasure and because that multiracial alliance does not go far enough: “I stand in alliance with relatives—both human and other-than-human—who suffer across the planet from the violence that is the American Dream.”36

Like TallBear I am well aware of Cornel West’s shortcomings, and yet the hope that I believe that we need to foster is rooted in what Cornel West has beautifully characterized as “prophetic pragmatism”:

Prophetic pragmatism is a form of tragic thought in that it confronts candidly individual and collective experiences of evil in individuals and institutions—with little expectation of ridding the world of all evil. Yet it is a kind of romanticism in that it holds many experiences of evil to be neither inevitable nor necessary, but rather the results of human agency, i.e. choices and actions. This interplay between tragic thought and romantic impulse, inescapable evils and transformable evils makes prophetic pragmatism seem schizophrenic. On the one hand, it appears to affirm a Sisyphean outlook in which human resistance to evil makes no progress. On the other hand, it looks as if it approves a utopian quest for paradise. In fact, prophetic pragmatism denies Sisyphean pessimism and utopian perfectionism. Rather, it promotes the possibility of human progress and the impossibility of human paradise.37

Hope need not be a hope for a utopia; there can and should be hope for a better world. Holding onto necessary hope, we might return to the theme of breath: in medicine, aspiration is the action or process of drawing breath, and in our social world, it is essential to liberation.

Taking advantage of the fact that we can see glimpses of freedom through the wires of racism’s cage, we need to hold onto a liberatory imagination. Even after taking account of so many interlocking injustices that antiracism scholarship illuminates—or perhaps especially after doing so—we need to think and act as if it is possible to open the cage.

Acknowledments

In addition to being deeply informed by extended conversations with the coauthors of this volume and feedback on a presentation at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies, this chapter owes a deep debt to Nassim Parvin, who was my original interlocutor on the topic of the hermetic seal.

Notes

1. 1. Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy, “Into the Portal, Leave No One Behind,” Haymarket Books Online event, May 19, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0NY1_73mHY, 51 mins.

2. 2. K. J. Ely, “Validating Hermeticity in Welded Implantable Medical Devices,” in Joining and Assembly of Medical Materials and Devices, ed. Y. N. Zhou and M. D. Breyen (Woodhead Publishing, 2013).

3. 3. Gabriel O. Apata, “‘I Can’t Breathe’: The Suffocating Nature of Racism,” Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 7–8 (2020): 241–54.

4. 4. Steve Estes, I Am A Man!: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

5. 5. Alondra Nelson, “Bio Science: Genetic Genealogy Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry,” Social Studies of Science 38, no. 5 (2008): 759–83.

6. 6. Kimberly Bain, On Black Breath (Unpublished PhD diss., Princeton University, September 2020), 211–12.

7. 7. Bain, On Black Breath, 211–12.

8. 8. Chloe Ahmann and Alison Kenner, “Breathing Late Industrialism,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6 (2020): 416–38.

9. 9. Timothy Choy, “Breathing Together Now,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6 (2020): 587.

10. 10. Choy, “Breathing Together Now,” 586.

11. 11. Online Etymology Dictionary, “Cage,” n.d. (accessed January 3, 2023), https://www.etymonline.com/word/cage.

12. 12. Georgina Gregory, “Go-Go Dancing—Femininity, Individualism and Anxiety in the 1960s,” Film, Fashion & Consumption 7, no. 2 (2018): 165–78. https://doi.org/10.1386/ffc.7.2.165_1.

13. 13. Christian A. Vaccaro et al., “Managing Emotional Manhood: Fighting and Fostering Fear in Mixed Martial Arts,” Social Psychology Quarterly 74, no. 4 (2011): 414–37.

14. 14. Gregory, “Go-Go Dancing,” 197.

15. 15. Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Crossing Press, 1983), 4; emphasis mine.

16. 16. Frye, The Politics of Reality, 4–5.

17. 17. Frye, 7.

18. 18. Frye, 8.

19. 19. Online Etymology Dictionary, “Cage.”

20. 20. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Virago, 1984 [1969]).

21. 21. Thesslay La Force, “In Memoriam: Maya Angelou, 1928–2014,” Vogue, May 28, 2014, https://www.vogue.com/article/maya-angelou-in-memoriam.

22. 22. Reprinted in La Force, “In Memoriam.”

23. 23. Gene Andrew Jarrett, Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird (Princeton University Press, 2022).

24. 24. Maya Angelou, Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? (Random House, 1983).

25. 25. Ruha Benjamin, ed., Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and the Liberatory Imagination (Duke University Press, 2019).

26. 26. Ruha Benjamin, Viral Justice: How We Build the World We Want (Princeton University Press, 2022).

27. 27. Cf. Anne Pollock and Banu Subramaniam, “Resisting Power, Retooling Justice: Promises of Feminist Postcolonial Technosciences,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 41, no. 6 (2016): 951–66.

28. 28. Guilherme Moreira Fians, “Prefigurative Politics,” The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2022. https://doi.org/10.29164/22prefigpolitics.

29. 29. Anne Pollock, Synthesizing Hope: Matter, Knowledge, and Place in South African Drug Discovery (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

30. 30. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” trans. Robert R. Barr (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014 [1968]).

31. 31. Cheryl Mattingly, The Paradox of Hope: Journeys Through a Clinical Borderland (University of California Press, 2010), 6.

32. 32. Mattingly, The Paradox of Hope, 6.

33. 33. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011).

34. 34. Junot Díaz, quoted in Kim TallBear, “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming,” Kalfou 6, no. 1 (2019): 34.

35. 35. Tallbear, “Caretaking Relations,” 34.

36. 36. TallBear, 38.

37. 37. Cornel West, “On Prophetic Pragmatism,” in The Cornel West Reader (Basic Books, 1999), 166.