On the biopolitics of breathing: race, protests, and state violence under the global threat of COVID-19Pandemics are by definition public health threats so significant that they demand a coordinated global response that fundamentally alters the human, social, and economic dynamics of everyday life through heavily regulated restrictions of the movement of people, products, and capital. The primary goal of such interventions is to minimize the potential for the transmission of the pathogen within and across communities. Public spaces, transit areas, and the ordinariness of everyday life are fundamentally recalibrated so that the pathways of pathogen transmission are disrupted. Yet, it is in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in which ‘struggling to breathe’ is a key symptom, that the world has witnessed widespread protests against the killing of George Floyd, who like Eric Garner was suffocated to death as part of systematic violence perpetrated against African-American men by the US policing system