George Floyd’s dying words — “I can’t breathe” — have echoed across hundreds of protests, and across time.
I can’t breathe — it was the very same thing another African-American man, Eric Garner, had said while being choked out by a police officer six years ago, on a Staten Island sidewalk. Now a similar incident occurs on a Minneapolis street, and you are led to wonder: Are we really getting anywhere? Is the racial divide so deep and wide that it cannot be crossed — that indeed, it will never be crossed?
“It is kind of the same,” Tamika Catchings said of the two incidents during a phone interview last week, “but I think this one was different.”
Different? Different how?
“More people than ever are outraged,” said Catchings, a retired WNBA player, newly minted Basketball Hall of Famer and general manager of the Indiana Fever, the team for which she played. “And I think one of the things for all of us is to be able to make change. You know, what is it that we have to do to make change and to create and sustain change?”
Catchings, 40, is a formidable woman. Daughter of Harvey Catchings, who spent the first four-plus of his 11 NBA seasons (1974-85) with the Sixers, she crafted a 15-year professional career (2002-16) in which she made 10 All-Star teams and was named WNBA Defensive Player of the Year five times. She also won four Olympic gold medals as a member of Team USA, and will be enshrined in Springfield as part of a glittering class that includes Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and the late Kobe Bryant, with whom she had been friends since their fathers — Harvey and Joe “Jelly Bean” Bryant — were closing out their playing careers in Italy in the mid-’80s.
(The enshrinement ceremony, originally scheduled for Aug. 29, has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Jerry Colangelo, chairman of the HOF’s Board of Governors, told ESPN.com’s Jackie MacMullan that it will now be held in the spring of 2021.)
Tamika also has an activist bent. Before her final game in 2016 she and her Fever teammates took a knee in protest of police brutality and racial injustice. That same year she joined NBA star Carmelo Anthony at a town hall meeting in Los Angeles to discuss violence by and against police. She formed a charitable foundation in Indianapolis early in her playing career that she continues to operate. And in the days since Floyd’s death she has been in conversations with others about “an action plan,” as she called it.
“I think Malcolm Brogdon from the Pacers continues to say it: It’s a marathon and not a sprint, right?” she said. “And I feel like we’ve been a part of this marathon for a long time. It’s a long marathon we’re running, but we’re still in it, right? That’s what I feel like.”
She also understands why it might feel like we’re all just running in place when it comes to racial equality.
“But,” she said, “I’m hopeful, because I feel like more than ever, more people are angered by it. And I’ll be honest, more white people or some white people are more angry than black people are for seeing this and witnessing it and realizing like, ‘I’ve seen it before, but for whatever reason … this time is different.’ It strikes at a different chord than it had the previous time.”
There are those who hear the phrase “Black Lives Matter” and respond by saying, “All lives matter.” And of course that’s true. Nobody with a brain or heart would ever say otherwise. But you see incidents involving Garner or Floyd or a dozen others and wonder if black lives are truly valued as much as others are, by all people.
And let’s remember, too, that the Garner/Floyd incidents (not to mention those like the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia) are just the ones caught on video — that, indeed, they represent the tip of the iceberg.
“It happens every day — not necessarily to that extreme, but there’s some form of racism that happens every single day,” Catchings said. “And some things are shown and a lot of things are not.”
Catchings declined to cite chapter and verse when asked about her experiences with racism over the years, saying only that as a professional she is extremely cognizant of her appearance and comportment, and that as a mentor to those in her foundation (as well as an aunt to her sister Tauja’s two sons) she makes sure to sound the right notes.
“We talk,” she said, “about even what we have to teach our young kids as they learn how to drive — if you get pulled over what that looks like: ‘Put your hands on the wheel.’ There’s just a lot of different things that we have to think of that not everybody has to think about.”
Her activism was sparked in no small part by that of her dad, who as a young man sliced open his knee when police turned on protestors during a civil-rights march in Jackson, Miss., in the 1960s. As she said, “My father fought, my grandfather fought, my great grandfather fought for freedom and for equality and even for the right to vote.”
Now she is only too happy to carry on, in the hope that someday this marathon will reach the finish line.
“Now it’s about being angry and wanting to make change,” she said, “and having that constant drive, almost to the point of wanting breath, wanting to breathe, wanting air.”
Wanting to breathe? Yeah, that is a refrain, tragically, we have heard more than once. Doesn’t seem like it’s all that much to ask.