You can speak when you can’t breath.
When the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police was in the news, I quietly wondered, “If he can’t breathe, how can he speak?” I kept my doubts to myself, not even voicing them to my wife.
It turns out that you can speak when you cannot breathe. More precisely, it takes less air to speak than it does to sustain life. Doctors A. C. Law, G. E. Weissman, and T. J. Iwashyna explain the physiology of this in A Dangerous Myth: Does Speaking Imply Breathing?, in language that can be understood by a high school graduate (Annals of Internal Medicine, vol. 173, no. 9).
When I became aware of this, I shared it with my choir. If it takes more breath to live than it does to speak, maybe it also takes more breath to live than it does to sing. So we must breathe adequately to sustain our lives, and not only to produce sound. Did you ever begin to feel faint when singing?
The moral culpability of the police officers who caused Floyd’s death depends on whether they understood, or should have understood, that it takes more air to survive than to speak. Did they know this? Should they have known? If so, should they have just known it, like everybody knows that running makes you tired, or was somebody responsible for teaching them that? And who would have been responsible? It was not common knowledge at the time; it probably still isn’t. But was it common knowledge, or should it have been common knowledge, among police officers? I hope these issues were adequately explored in court, but I have not the interest or the time to read the trial records to find out.
Do Black Lives Matter? It is obvious that Black Lives Matter:
Some people have thought that we should not say, or not emphasize, “Black lives matter,” because all human lives matter. Well, of course all human lives matter. But the thing is, not all human lives have been equally respected. Black lives have not been equally respected with white lives. Unborn human lives have not been equally respected with grown-up human lives or with the lives of human children. And elderly, sick, and suffering human lives have not been respected equally with healthy, young human lives.
Black lives matter.
Unborn human lives matter.
Suffering human lives matter.
All human lives matter.
Published 2025 July 28.
A. Harrison, April 11, 2026, writes:
I thought your take on the George Floyd incident was very interesting. The part about being able to talk without breath. Is that what it was? I also admired that you pointed out indeed all lives matter but that it’s important to acknowledge Black Lives Matter too. There’s been such a long history of discrimination and racism that have caused serious damage for that community. A lot of people get offended by the phrase Black Lives Matter and just want to say all lives matter, but that’s not acknowledging reality and history which is that very often black lives are not treated as having equal value to white lives. Anyways, I really enjoyed reading that.