On Black Breath traces a genealogy of breathing and Blackness in the United States. Deploying the concept Black breath as an analytic across multitemporal and nonchronological avenues, it recovers breath and breathing as foundational to the formation of “Blackness”—as both radical potential and as an object to be managed. Focusing on different phenomenologies of Black breathing (panting, coughing, gasping, sighing and conspiring) in social and cultural texts throughout modernity, I interrupt impulses toward the abstraction of violence against Black people and consider how mundane and invisible phenomena become the site of insidiously powerful regimes of control. On Black breath moves through dimensions of Black life and explores the unexpected corners of capitalism, race science, cultural production, political engagement, and coalition making.