Several years before the mere mention of a quaint municipality in St. Louis county became a flashpoint for the conversation on the broken relationship between black people and law enforcement, St. Louis native Jabari Asim was using his work as a talented wordsmith to express the aforementioned dysfunction.
Two of his recent fiction works, “Only The Strong Survive” and “A Taste Of Honey,” tackle police violence against black citizens in Midwest cities that pay tribute to black men and boys being the constant target of police violence and criminalization in St. Louis.
“We’ve been dealing with brutal police, and the killing of unarmed black people at their hands, since there have been police,” told The American ahead of the release of his book “Only The Strong” back in 2015. “I hope that people will have a sense of history and understand that what happened in Ferguson is a culmination of events that started decades ago.”
In his latest book, a collection of essays entitled “We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival!” Asim uses nonfiction to tackle the subject – and many others related to the black experience.
The acclaimed work was released last month and was praised by the likes of The Washington Post, ESSENCE Magazine and Publishers Weekly.
Next Wednesday (November 28) the noted professor, editor, author, poet and playwright and current Emerson College Associate Professor will return home to discuss the bookas part of a collaborative presentation by the St. Louis Public Library and Left Bank Books.
“We Can’t Breathe” is a collection of eight essays where Asim lends his life experience of growing up among the racial complexities of St. Louis and juxtaposes them against the racist vitriol that has infected our nation from its inception.
“I’m a huge fan of essays. I read them like most people read the sports pages,” Asim told Adrian Walker, a Metro columnist for The Boston Globe during a conversation about the book just a week after its release at the Harvard Bookstore. “I thought it was time to dip my toe in that water.”
The rich, broad vantage points of the lens through which he sees the world has Asim giving references to Keenen Ivory Wayans’ black cult classic film, “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka,” to quoting 18th century Benjamin Franklin.
In his essay “The Elements of Strut,” Asim chronicles his exchange with a beat cop who noticed him as he minded his own business while absorbed by the music of his jazz playlist, that included John Coltrane and the World Saxophone quartet.
The cop asked him if he was doing laps as he was clearly in the midst of a brisk walk and made his second time around the block in Boston (where he resides) just before diving into the hustle and bustle of his day.
“I couldn’t tell if he was just being friendly, or if he was letting me know that I was under surveillance,” Asim said in the essay.
In the essay “Of Love and Struggle: The Limits of The Politics of Respectability,” Asim writes,
“The founding framers of this country had already staked a claim to the nation’s moral imagination- long before the hunger for captive black bodies reached fever pitch. They polished their enlightenment flavored philosophies about morality and the dignity of man, while building an economy on our ancestors’ backs – and making a concerted effort to cripple their spirits and minds. This was, of course, a long strategic process.”
“We Can’t Breathe” seamlessly weaves the skills he has developed as a noted journalist through lengthy tenures at The Washington Post, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The St. Louis American and the decade he spent as Editor in Chief for The NAACP’s Crisis Magazine with his work as a professor of higher learning.
Through its essays, he asks the big questions and encourages critical thinking while offer blistering critique of America rooted in the facts of a history constantly being forced to repeat at the expense of black people because of the ugly truths America refuses to face, let alone address.
“Do oppressed people have the irresistible impulse to forgive? Does forgiveness free us from some larger burden enabling us to cope with a larger struggle?” Asim wrote in “Of Love and Struggle.” “ Or perhaps it keeps the hot coal of anger from burning our palms, as Buddha would have it.
Loving our oppressors is so much a part of the African American consciousness that to question it is to risk censure of the harshest kind. It’s a form of masochism – kissing the sword that has just sliced you open.”
Jabari Asim’s “On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival!” is available in bookstores and online nationwide. He will sign and discuss the work at 7 p.m. Wednesday, November 28 at St. Louis Public Library’s Schlafly Branch, 225 N. Euclid. For more information, call (314) 367-4120 or visit www.left-bank.com.
