I refuse to watch another atrocity on video
The amount of death that I’ve seen is unnatural for a person my age. It would be easy to pass this statement off as a hazard of my job. I’m an educator in an area of town that’s been plagued by violence for years. I’ve wept at the loss of life of at least one student for six years straight. It’s much worse for the students I serve in the Third Ward. Death has turned many of them cold because they haven’t had the privilege of being shielded from the pain of violence in its many forms.
This is the same community that was home to George Floyd, a black man who was killed while in the custody of Minneapolis police. He was beloved by his community. Now, images of his lifeless body have traveled the world, sparking protests, tears, outrage and empty apologies. This is a cycle that continues to repeat itself. Each time it happens, it feels like a bandage being ripped off of a gaping wound. It never heals.
Death is an inevitable part of life but seeing someone’s life being stripped from them, violently, in a video on social media, is not normal. Passively watching a murder take place on a newsfeed has to signal some level of numbness. I’m trying to avoid becoming callous to it. I don’t want to become desensitized. It should hurt me, and you, every time we see someone senselessly killed. It should be uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that it forces us into some sort of action.
When stories of brutality make their way to me through the media, I take a deep breath and quickly decide if I have the emotional capacity to witness yet another atrocity. The thought is traumatizing. There are times when I would watch in an effort to engage in meaningful dialogue, but I rarely make it through an entire clip. It’s too much. I watched the video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck until he died from beginning to end. I won’t watch any more.
A level of human decency is absent when the news loops video of someone being killed, or the moments leading up to their death. The deceased don’t get the opportunity to opt into being a hashtag. They don’t get the courtesy of being able to decline to have their trauma splayed across screens around the world. Their families are forced to constantly relive the pain of seeing their loved one writhe in pain, and cry out for help, without being answered. It is a gross state of being for us.
Simultaneously, I understand the importance of both recording and showing the videos to as many people as possible. For some, seeing a lifeless body will be the only way that they believe the countless stories shared before to be true. This is especially critical when they don’t share similar experiences with the people crying foul. If it’s not laid out explicitly, clearly, in broad daylight, it will never be real. There’s an immense problem with this.
It should not take you seeing another black body lying lifeless for you to have empathy for the oppressed. It should not take you seeing another body riddled with bullet holes for you to understand that racism is not only real but that it permeates many of the systems that run our country.
Witnessing black death is nothing new. Lynchings in town squares were a form of entertainment. Those carrying out the killings did it brazenly. There was no cloak of secrecy; in fact, the lynchers were often heralded as heroes. Communities would gather around and watch as bodies swung in the breeze, leaving behind gaping holes in families and communities on the other side of the tracks. So we have to ask ourselves when the latest video appears on the screen, are we watching the same old spectacle of lynching adapted to the digital world we now live in?
But citizen journalists who record and share these videos of modern-day lynchings are necessary because unconscious bias and racist ideologies have been so deeply interwoven into the systems that our society is built on. The systemic racism that chokes the freedom of black people will continue whether they are documented or not.
As I have gotten older, I understand that there are certain things that I can’t control. While I will always love being a black woman, I have to acknowledge that there is a specific weight that finds its roots in my hue. I was raised to believe that I could be anything that I wanted to be, regardless of what anyone says about my limitations. But believing what I want about myself does not protect me from the perceptions of others, nor does it protect me from how their bias causes them to react toward me.
Each time a new video is released, a representation of the worst of those reactions is on display. Each new video surprisingly tells the same story, that a perception motivated by fear can end in violence. Inevitably another video will be released, but I’ve seen my last one already.