Seeing is Believing: White Ignorance and the Desire to Share Images of Brutalized Black Bodies

It had been another long day of grieving. Alton Sterling had been lynched the day before by the police. His murder caught on film, with his supposed gun nowhere in sight. Baton Rouge rose up and demanded justice while the rest of the nation rallied behind them, circulating hashtags, articles, and our rage. Grieving the victims of the police’s ability to be judge, jury and executioner is something I have too much practice at. My rituals hold two main purposes. The first being to mourn those killed for the only thing we have in common, the color of our skin. Secondly, they are an attempt to give myself the strength to go back out into that same world that violently rejected one of my own moments before.

    I was winding down from a day of rage, sadness, and fear. Swaddled and safe in my apartment I felt myself regaining balance. I was scrolling through Facebook when a video began automatically playing. It was Philando Castile. Deep Black skin covered in a white shirt that was rapidly becoming red. His girlfriend Diamond Reynolds was filming and narrating, while the sound of the one man lynch mob named Officer Jeronimo Yanez panicked in the background, and a child saying “I’m scared mommy” rose from the backseat. I watched the red patches grow across his chest, his breathing get shallower, and his girlfriend led away in handcuffs. He got killed over a busted tail light.

    Over the next few days both videos were shared endlessly, with folks arguing over Facebook’s attempt to pull them down. It played on the news, sometimes with a split screen depicting Eric Garner being choked to death.  In October we watched Terence Crutcher’s car breakdown, which is another death sentence for Black folks apparently. Police sat on the footage for a few days, airing it to a select committee of around 30 people. They said it was the worst one caught on film yet. You see him, hands up, back turned, and then filled with bullets.

I try not to watch the videos, but they are inescapable. Police brutality against Black bodies is not a new concept to me. It wasn’t until I got to my 95% white college that I realized other folks weren’t taught to fear the police, that they actually believed they were here to protect us. There is not a Black man in my family who hasn’t had a terrifying interaction with the police.

I argue that the circulation of the videos of Black bodies brutalized is a terrible attempt to shock whites into racial consciousness with no concern for the traumatizing effects viewing these images has on Black folks and other people of color. Building off of Zeus Leonardo’s interrogation of white ignorance, I contend that white folks who claim to be racially conscious often are often blinded by a need to prove their allyship/knowledge/or allegiance to people of color not out of a genuine concern for our well being but for social acceptance. The well rehearsed racial script that white folks have been taught following the Civil Rights Movement has caught up to the discussion of white privilege and call out culture, but not to a genuine empathy for people of color. Alleged white allies circulations of the videos of police brutality, Black children being assaulted, and dead Black bodies is proof of this.

    The latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by mental health professionals added racism as a cause of post traumatic stress disorder. Between the historical trauma we’ve inherited from our ancestors, daily discrimination, and a fear of being murdered for no reason, it’s easy to see why. Add to this other marginalized and persecuted identities and the terror intensifies. 2016 has been a devastating year for trans women of color, especially Black trans women. We lost 15 Black trans women in 2016 and one genderfluid teen.

Despite exhaustive statistics, stories, and shootings caught on film - white folks will never fully understand the day to day terror I feel as a Black queer transmasculine person in the United States. While white folks cannot fully understand the terror of our experiences with police brutality, they can still be, and hopefully are, horrified. And those who are horrified have some semblance of empathy for Black folks, or at the very least can acknowledge we’re human.

The leap from being horrified by watching a video of a modern day lynching, to then seeing the need to spread that image is lost on me. I can’t help but think of the lynching postcards that were traded like baseball cards by whites in the early twentieth century. Upon its development in the nineteenth century photography was largely driven by a need to prove and know race, especially blackness. This empiricism driven white supremacy extends from eugenics to verify the inhumanity of Black folks, to amateurs capturing the spectacle of lynching to celebrate the destruction and desecration of the other. Photos detailing skull shapes and mementos of Black bodies swinging from the poplar trees are both technologies of white supremacy used to perpetuate the facade of control and incite terror in Black folks.

Some Civil Rights organization attempted to appropriate the image of the lynched body to induce horror in Northern whites, but to much contention. Arguments at the time raised by Black folks were mostly focused on a concern that constantly exposing white folks images of their Southern brethren proudly standing around a brutalized Black body would make them numb. Black folks’ circulation of the images and the protests against them were both centered around the desire to gain empathy from white folks.

I argue that the situation is similar today with the inescapable moving images of modern day lynchings and police beat downs. And like the lynching photos produced by mobs at the turn of the century and circulated by both white supremacists and Black freedom fighters, the sharing or reproduction of these images is still done without consideration for the trauma said images inflict on Black folks. When what I call both endearingly and exasperatingly “well meaning white folks” share these images, mostly on social media like Facebook, I think they are doing so from a place of wanting to incite horror from other white folks. They take on the role of educator, thinking that these images provide the undeniable proof that will push other white folks unconvinced of racism in the US.

I can only speak for myself and from my experiences, and I’m not sure I can fully articulate what it is like to see these videos. Being an already anxious person these videos solidify and reify my worst fears about the world. My heart that I struggle to keep open collapses in on itself. Every morning that I wake up to a new hashtag I pray it’s not my father, my uncles, my cousins. The moment of terror that I feel between hearing the news of another unarmed Black person murdered by the police and finding to my relief it wasn’t a relative, that moment of terror are other families’ realities now. Every lynching story sticks with me as I move through the world. I drive less, I walk less, I minimize any chance I have to garner unwarranted white attention and most importantly fear. I fear the fear that I incite more than anything in this world.

I’m obviously not arguing against body or dash cameras. I’m not arguing for white folks to stop their allyship out of fear of offending. I’m arguing for white folks to self reflect on their want to share the footage that these technologies capture. What a privilege to see a man murdered on film or a teen tossed around and see it as an educational tool. I want white folks to reflect on their intentions behind allyship, whether it be to be an actual ally to people of color or to adhere to the new script of “well meaning white person”. If you are sharing these videos without even thinking about the pain and suffering such images because those of us who live it, you are not anywhere close to the ally that you strive to be.