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NY Times Sunday Book Review, Nov. 19 2017
‘I Can’t Breathe’: Eric Garner’s Life and Death
By JAMIL SMITH
I CAN’T BREATHE
A Killing on Bay Street
By Matt Taibbi
322 pp. Spiegel & Grau. $28.
“Homicide” is too simple a word for what happened to Eric Garner on that
Staten Island sidewalk three years ago. Many of us would personally
testify to the term’s technical accuracy, having watched, ad infinitum,
the horrifying video of the 43-year-old grandfather and loose-cigarette
dealer gasping for air as a New York City police officer, Daniel
Pantaleo, uses a chokehold and wrestles Garner down to the pavement.
Saying that the chokehold killed Garner feels incomplete. Politics, race
and money play roles in nudging us all to our fates, and Garner’s demise
on July 17, 2014, involved all three. Assessing his end solely based on
what happened that day is tempting, given the video evidence. However, a
more thorough understanding is required.
Matt Taibbi, the author and Rolling Stone contributing editor, has
published a new book that properly depicts the Garner killing as a
consequence of our society’s ills. Its title, “I Can’t Breathe: A
Killing on Bay Street,” seems to imply a narrow focus on the Garner
killing, belying the book’s prismatic approach to both the people and
policies involved in Garner’s life and death.
Taibbi has recently come under renewed scrutiny for a 2000 book he
co-wrote with Mark Ames, with whom he edited an English-language
newspaper in 1990s Russia, in which they describe sexually harassing and
assaulting their female employees. Taibbi has since posted two apologies
on Facebook, saying that such passages in the book were intended as satire.
Satire or not, the criticisms will no doubt be disqualifying to some
readers. But one should not mistake a review of this book on Garner with
an endorsement of the author or his previous work. This time, as Taibbi
wrote in one of his Facebook posts, he found a story that “had to be
told without my voice, without linguistic cartwheels or jokes or any of
the other circus tricks I learned to use.” Indeed, “I Can’t Breathe” is
a work of deep reporting, as chapter by chapter, Taibbi introduces us to
individual players — from Garner’s fellow street hustlers in the
beleaguered Tompkinsville section of Staten Island to activists who
protested the grand jury’s refusal to indict Pantaleo (a man whom we
also get to know much better, as Taibbi unearths what he can of his
past). The story of the Garners’ tumultuous and often combative family
life is told by people who were there, including Garner’s daughter
Erica, an activist. In this book, humanization does not equal
lionization, and sympathy is never confused for pity. This applies to
everyone, in particular the book’s principal subject. Though he aims to
flesh out and contextualize what happened to Garner, this may be the
most critical look at the man himself. Every fault, compulsion and bad
choice is presented in full relief. Still, as Taibbi writes early on,
“Eric Garner may have created a lot of his own problems, but he was also
the victim of bad luck and atrocious timing.”
It is impossible to understand how society’s pressures and inequities
wore Garner down without examining an obsession with providing for his
family that went so deep that he ignored his own needs. But Taibbi’s
reportorial voice, often blunt and forceful, is most compassionate when
he is integrating political realities with facts about Garner and the
incidents depicted. Taibbi describes in full the horrors of
institutionalized poverty in neighborhoods like Tompkinsville, from the
real-estate scams that created them to the overseer mentality of the
police patrolling them. Crooked landlords and legal quagmires all shaped
Garner’s world.
Taibbi is smart to depict the structurally racist system of law
enforcement in this country as a character in and of itself. The
misguided and destructive “broken windows” policing tactic is portrayed
here as Frankenstein’s monster, built with good intentions without
thought to tragic consequences. “Right or wrong, the threat of being
stopped went from an annoyance to a thing that took over his life,”
Taibbi writes. Like the Moirai of Greek mythology, other people made
political choices that directed the course of Garner’s life and
accelerated its end. The first half of the book, as it progresses, feels
increasingly like a train without brakes that is rolling downhill. If
readers are unfamiliar with the fatalism and frustration that racial
discrimination, poverty and poor policing engender in men like Eric
Garner, Taibbi provides an able introduction.
Jamil Smith, a journalist and a radio host, is currently a contributing
opinion writer at The Los Angeles Times.
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