On evidence

Few can doubt that the 8-minute, 46-second video captured by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier of George Floyd’s death has played a crucial role in galvanizing the demonstrations against deadly police force. To be sure, the previous years, decades, centuries of Black resistance, organizing, and activism have laid the groundwork for present-day uprisings. But in this specific case, regardless of what happened before the camera started recording, it is clear that Floyd had been “subdued” and was not “resisting arrest,” so Derek Chauvin’s persistence in pressing his knee on Floyd’s neck, despite the latter’s calls for air and bystanders’ worries about his well-being, is undeniably excessive and cruel.

Without taking away anything from Frazier for recording the event and posting it to her Facebook page or from the demonstrations that have emerged as the video went viral, it is worth reflecting on this particular piece of visual footage — the killing of a Black man through the literalization of a metaphor of oppression — as the catalyst for the current demands for racial justice.

Dr. Koritha Mitchell’s book Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (2011), again, provides an important historical frame for thinking about this issue. She notes the relative lack of attention given to the plays she examines by Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Burrill, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Myrtle Smith Livingston, G. D. Lipscomb, and Joseph Mitchell compared to the lynching photographs displayed in the Without Sanctuary galleries, website, and $60 hardcover edition (2000):

Decades of antilynching activism and testimony from victimized black families did not move the nation’s leaders at the turn of the century, and today they are not the inspiration for the Senate’s historic gesture [of apologizing in 2005 for never passing an antilynching bill] or for the majority of lynching scholarship. Instead, white-authored photographs have become the evidence that simply cannot be ignored. (6)

Dr. Mitchell points out that the recourse to these visual artifacts as proof of white supremacist violence elevates their authority over the victims’ own voices, while also reinforcing the very narrative of racism that led to their existence in the first place:

[. . .] when we treat images of mutilated bodies as the ultimate evidence of lynching destruction, we reaffirm the authority of the mob. Ultimately, it is because they come from white perpetrators themselves that we have allowed the images to continue to trump testimony from victimized communities. By treating the pictures as records, we pretend that they offer an objective view, that they are less biased than the testimonies of those targeted by this terror. But the pictures are anything but objective. They represent a particular perspective, and they helped the mob to accomplish its work, during and long after the victim’s murder. The photographs did not simply document violence; they very much perform(ed) it. (6)

In line with the long history of the enslaved (and other people of color) being prevented from testifying against white aggressors and defendants, the photographs taken by mob participants posture as “objective” documents but in reality “decontextualize” the scene by “depict[ing] victims as isolated brutes with no connection to a family or community” as is fitting of a social ritual designed to exorcise “evil” from its midst (7).

Granted, the parallels between the period Dr. Mitchell is analyzing and today are not exact. Darnella Frazier (who is African American) did not videotape the scene so that she could take away a “souvenir” of the ritualistic “exorcism” (“Souvenir hunting would complete the drama with audience participation, but because the most coveted keepsakes [such as the victim’s bones and burnt flesh] were in limited supply, pictures became souvenirs” [7]; “the genre [of antilynching plays] helps reveal that real-life lynchings were tolerated because they were read as legitimate scenarios of exorcism. That is, mobs were believed to cast out the evil that blacks supposedly embodied” [17]). Rather, as Frazier herself has stated, she recorded the deadly incident as an act of witnessing and exposure. Despite these differences, though, they share some aspects, most notably, the devaluation of Black perspectives on the violence they have experienced — in this instance, the fact that prior Black criticisms of police violence have not brought an end to anti-Black policing.

It is possible that the calls to defund the police and reinvest in historically defunded communities may alter, if not completely abolish, the police’s customary roles. (There is obviously a lot of debate around this question, some of it stoked by fear and incredulity stemming from the privilege of not living in an overpoliced neighborhood, that I will bracket for now.) But as foretold by the divergent meanings derived from the lynching photographs — one perspective sees a family memento of a social outing; another sees a grisly death whose impact on the community entails “enduring losses, including psychological, emotional, and financial suffering” (Mitchell 7) — there is no guarantee that evidence of Black suffering will have the desired or desirable political or ethical effects.

Literary and cultural historian Saidiya Hartman raises this issue in the opening pages of her book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), by pointing to the range of effects that repetitive consumption of Black pain can have. While discussing the “‘terrible spectacle’ that introduced Frederick Douglass to slavery” in his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass — namely, “the beating of his Aunt Hester” (3) — Hartman declines from reproducing the whipping “in order to call attention to the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are circulated, and the consequences of this routine display of the slave’s ravaged body”:

Rather than inciting indignation, too often they immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity [. . .] and especially because they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering. What interests me are the ways we are called upon to participate in such scenes. Are we witnesses who confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the world-destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repression of the dominant accounts? Or are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance? What does the exposure of the violated body yield? Proof of black sentience or the inhumanity of the “peculiar institution”? [. . .] At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator. Only more obscene than the brutality unleashed at the whipping post is the demand that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or endless recitations of the ghastly and the terrible. In light of this, how does one give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence of the benumbing spectacle or contend with the narcissistic identification that obliterates the other or the prurience that too often is the response to such displays? (3-4)

Hartman elucidates the double bind of being compelled to show the brutalized Black body to “confirm the truth” of the abuse in the face of protestations of innocence or exaggeration, as noted in my previous post, while also confronting the limits of such expressions: the precariousness of empathy that arises from routinized desensitization, the prurient voyeurism that demands such spectacular displays as proof of racial oppression, and the obscene correlation and even equation between Blackness and violation that these endless recitations make possible. Whatever the incentive or consequence, the countless instances of Black suffering and death reveal a core truth: that racial difference and hierarchy is secured and socially reproduced through anti-Black violence.

While many commentators have pointed out that the videos captured on cell phones have helped to validate claims of anti-Black police brutality and vigilante violence, the ease and casualness with which these visual images are circulated through the technologies of the internet and social media have only increased the potential for the kinds of deleterious effects that Hartman outlines. That the videos of George Floyd’s killing and Ahmaud Arbery’s shooting have gone viral in the midst of a viral pandemic disproportionately impacting Black and Brown populations renders this convergence of multi-sided vulnerabilities all the more grotesque and horrific.

The reliance on visible evidence of Black pain and death to move the non-Black public to take notice and start to believe what Black folk have been saying since their capture on this continent has several problematic consequences beyond the possibilities of compounding trauma (for those who identify in some way with the victim) or eliciting sadistic pleasure (for those who objectify in some way the victim). First, it can obscure from view entire groups of people, most notably, Black cisgender women and girls, transwomen, transmen, and/or gender-nonconforming people. As Black feminist, cultural studies scholar, and OSU professor Dr. Treva Lindsey recently wrote in an essay for Bustle, “Hearing [Breonna] Taylor’s story [of being shot by police while sleeping in her own bed] immediately conjured memories of police killing other Black women and girls, such as Atatiana Jefferson, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Pearlie Golden, in their own homes, where no brave bystanders could bear witness and record their senseless deaths at the hands of police. Not even their homes could offer safety from fatal violence initiated by those paid by our tax dollars ‘to protect and serve.'” The lack of recordings, coupled with the engrained patriarchy of American culture, contributes to the “comparative lack of mobilized outrage for the killing of Black women and girls,” which in turn constitutes “an injurious erasure.”

In addition to this gendered erasure, the dependence on visual corroboration radically diminishes the scale of oppression to the one incident. The scope of justice is thus concomitantly reduced to holding the one perpetrator (or four perpetrators) to account. Finally, this point begs the question: how many incidents does it take before “a few bad apples” becomes understood as a pervasive, systemic problem? What threshold does the body count need to surpass before we’ve entered into a crisis of epidemic proportions?

Rather than end on these sobering notes, I’d like to turn to an essay titled “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning” that poet and editor Claudia Rankine published in the New York Times Magazine in the wake of the killing of “Susie Jackson; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton; DePayne Middleton-Doctor; Ethel Lee Lance; the Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr.; the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney; Cynthia Hurd; Tywanza Sanders and Myra Thompson” in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., on June 17, 2015, by a self-identified white supremacist. Rankine’s piece echoes some of Drs. Mitchell’s and Hartman’s claims regarding the historical and contemporary ubiquity of Black killings:

We live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here. Dying in ship hulls, tossed into the Atlantic, hanging from trees, beaten, shot in churches, gunned down by the police or warehoused in prisons: Historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against.

She goes on to note that there are no self-evident ways for African Americans to deal with this everyday proximity and vulnerability to mortality by comparing the different decisions taken by Mamie Till Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till who was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955, and Lesley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown who was killed by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, regarding their sons’ slain bodies. The former insisted on an open casket funeral in their home city of Chicago and “‘disidentified’ with the tradition of the lynched figure left out in public view as a warning to the black community, thereby using the lynching tradition against itself. The spectacle of the black body, in her hands, publicized the injustice mapped onto her son’s corpse.” The latter, by contrast, whose son’s body was left out in the street for four hours as an intimidating act of racial terror, had “little desire to expose her son’s corpse to the media. Her son was not an orphan body for everyone to look upon.”

But for all the mass protests that Michael Brown’s death incited in Ferguson and around the world, and for all the militarized response that came rolling down the streets and was beamed into our living rooms and devices to suppress those uprisings, what Rankine ultimately emphasizes about the Black Lives Matter movement is not so much its efforts to occupy public space and disrupt business as usual (as important as those tactics are) but its reenvisioning of mourning as a political and ethical strategy: “The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness.” To engage in a “sustained state of national mourning for black lives” would entail on the part of all Americans (and humanity) an “internalized change” of “recognition” for the grievability — and thus, human value — of all Black lives. Such an ethics of recognition through collective mourning might “break a momentum that laws haven’t altered.” Against the potential for the deceased Black body to effect shock, numbness, identification, or voyeurism (“a spectacle for white pornography: the dead body as an object that satisfies an illicit desire”), Rankine suggests that cross-racial subjective “feeling for another” could very well lead to social transformation: “Grief, then, for these deceased others might align some of us, for the first time, with the living.”

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