As It Were: Maybe the revolution shouldn’t be televised


Police violence against Black people is nothing new, but never in American history has such graphic evidence of it been so readily available for consumption. You can’t hide from these videos — they’re all over social media. They are shared and reshared by people of all demographics, usually with captions demanding attention. Ostensibly, the goal in sharing these videos is to incite public outrage in hopes of facilitating meaningful change in a system that is resistant to even fractional reform.

The mediums of coverage and ease of dissemination might be new, but the public documentation of racist violence has a long history as a United States tradition. Perhaps the most notable example of this is the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, held an open-casket funeral for her son who was beaten beyond recognition, famously declaring, “let the people see what they did to my boy.” His image was widely published across African American newspapers and galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.

Just as Till was not the first or last victim of lynching, Till-Mobley was not the first or last person who understood the power of documented injustice to push forward racial justice. In the late 19th century, journalist Ida B. Wells heavily documented lynchings across the South. Over a century later, the infamous video of the Rodney King beating brought racist violence against Black people to the forefront of U.S. popular consciousness once again. 

Video evidence has enormous potential to hold bad actors and the state accountable for their actions. There is no equivalent to qualified immunity for victims of police violence, so, troublingly, it is not the fact that unarmed men are being shot in the back or choked to death that captures the public’s attention — it’s the videos, pictures and narratives. The public demands to see the worst, final moments of a victim’s life, to listen to a victim on the floor calling for their loved ones and narrating their own death. Only in the face of damning evidence is the deaths of Black people deemed worthy of inspection. The dissemination of these videos is, on some level, a necessary evil in the typically futile, public pursuit of justice.

But that does not fully rationalize the constant barrage of videos and images of Black deaths that populate my timeline (often slipping through algorithms designed to hide sensitive content). These images are important, but they deserve to be treated with dignity and sensitivity, not casually thrown on the feed alongside thirst traps and pictures from Sunday brunch. Compounding the problem, the prevalence of these videos on one’s timeline makes them unavoidable, often traumatizing unsuspecting users. This is especially harmful for Black people who can see themselves and their loved ones in the videos. 

I don’t know where the line between acceptable and unacceptable sharing of these videos lies. Should they only be shared in the news media (hopefully behind an age block)? Is their public consumption still necessary? It’s hard to imagine there is any person who is waiting for just one more video of police violence to fulfill some self-prescribed evidence quota to believe there is bias in policing. Those who get the reality of racism get it, and those who don’t, don’t. 

Whatever the case is, the callousness with which Black trauma is approached is not relegated to cases of police violence in the U.S. Mainstream U.S. publications have published images of Black African migrants who died crossing the Mediterranean and in terror attacks, along with a litany of terrible situations. Unlike U.S. videos of police violence, these images are without excuse: They don’t offer a crucial piece of the puzzle or tell of a perspective that would otherwise be missed. They are published just for the sake of it.

In a piece analyzing Western dismissal of Black trauma for The Atlantic, Hannah Giorgis utilized the book “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being” by Tufts University professor Christina Sharpe to characterize the way in which U.S. media and society covers and understands Black tragedy. A central argument of the book, which Giorgis was able to summarize with haunting precision, is that “black people do not easily earn sympathy, whether by dying in a plane crash or in an altercation with a police officer. Racist myths challenge the basic tenets of human compassion, even and especially in death. If black people are innately violent, if Africans live on an inherently backwards continent with fundamentally shoddy airlines, then their deaths are not tragedies. They are eventualities. They are facts, not stories.”

Having to write this piece is its own tragedy. Have we not progressed in the 65 years since Mamie Till-Mobley shared her son’s mangled body for the world to see? I want more than to wish for a future where videos aren’t necessary to achieve justice for victims of racist violence. I want a future without racist violence. But in the meantime, please allow me and your Black friends the grace of being able to scroll through the timeline without seeing videos of people that look like us being killed.

Michael Mikail is a senior writing about race, culture and politics. His column, “As It Were,” runs every other Wednesday.