Why I can’t watch
“We do want to warn you, this footage is disturbing.” And yet it plays. A white police officer kneeling on the back of the neck of a handcuffed black man who is lying prone on city pavement, pleading for breath, until he breathes no more.
A black man jogging down a suburban street intercepted by a long-gun-toting white man with whom the black man wrestles, until shots render the black man still.
You watch them all. Over and over again. I can’t anymore. The images of black men killed by white police or white vigilantes didn’t start last month or even the last decade. They long ago become what they are: normalized. There are photographs from the late 19th century of black male bodies, often mutilated, dangling from trees by nooses around their necks. There are pictures of lifeless black bodies sprawled on the ground during the World War I-era race riots. There is the 1967 photo of a 12-year-old black boy, collapsed in a pool of blood, on the cover, ironically, of Life magazine.
All the advent of cellphone cameras added to this historical spectacle is the real-time killings of black men and boys. Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, 18-year-old Michael Brown, Eric Garner, 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and more. We’ve come to fetishize the viewing of black men being executed through our incessant dissemination of their deaths.
I don’t doubt the evidentiary value that cellphone videos can have on historical lack of justice in the aftermath of police-involved shootings of black men. A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., said he shot Walter Scott, a black man, after Scott attacked him. A bystander’s video showed the officer, Michael Slager, shot
Scott in the back and killed him as Scott was running away. Slager got 20 years behind bars.
What concerns me is the side effect that these real-life snuff films looping on cable news and social media platforms — from can’t see in the morning till can’t see at night, as Malcolm X would say — have on the valuation of black life. For few among us seem to avert our gaze.
The audience for these paradigmatic videos rivals that of sporting events, which even Gil Scott-Heron, the piercing, spoken-word artist, did not imagine nearly 50 years ago. “There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay,” he rapped on “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
But the video of Floyd dying in police custody has been replayed and shared more than 100,000 times just from the Facebook page of Darnella Frazier, the 17-year-old who filmed it.
That comes with its own costs. A 2017 National Institutes of Health study noted that the psychological impact on black people of the proliferation of videos of us as victims of police lethality is that we see our lives as “disposable, and undeserving of dignity and justice.”
But what about the rest among us — those who govern, who teach, who control media and who, of course, police — who witness our degradation so routinely from a distance? I can’t help but think that we’ve been so dehumanized in their eyes that we’re little more than imaginary figures in some infotainment show promoted with that caution of the pornographic horror to come, “This video is hard to watch.”