How do we consume a body?
When Kanye West released his video for Famous, AJ+ tweeted a graphic asking if it was provocative or exploitative. Did Mr. West have the right, it was debated, to use the naked likenesses of celebrities to illuminate the way we view and degrade bodies in our culture, or was it perverted?
When Jessica Hampton was stabbed to death on the Red Line in Chicago, IL, pictures of her dead body were circulated on the Internet. She was stabbed and then she died She lay sprawled on the floor of a train car; her uncovered body was posted, shared, and retweeted for everyone to see. It was graphic and a little disturbing.
When Alton Sterling was attacked by the police for selling CDs outside a convenience store–when the officers pinned him, held him down, and shot him at point blank range in the chest–the video of his execution was circulated quite widely on Twitter.
When Philando Castle reached into his pocket to pull out the license and registration (that the police officer who’d pulled him over asked for) he was shot and left to bleed to death, with his fiancee sitting beside him and his four-year-old daughter in the back seat.
In contrast to the other stories, in which victims of state violence have their images circulated without their permission, Diamond Reynolds, Castle’s fiancee, took to Facebook Live to broadcast her story. She probably feared for her life. Who do you call to protect and serve you when the police are the ones assassinating you? Do you call the police on the police?
So: how do we consume a body?
I use the word consume because it is especially fitting. After a Black man or woman is shot for selling CDs, reaching into his pocket, strangled for selling cigarettes; after a twelve-year-old Black boy is shot for playing in the park with a toy gun, their bodies are circulated on the Internet without any sort of censorship.
A lot of is a question of awareness: many Black Lives Matter activists themselves do it to raise awareness of the state violence against Blacks and other people of color. These images and videos are then used by police agencies and major media outlets. After that, debates spring up, while white journalists and police officers look for a way to justify a murder. Added to the videos and pictures of Black men being killed are decades-old mugshots, a picture with a gun, never a happy smiling photo with family.
America grasps at straws. How do you make an unwarranted, evil thing socially acceptable? You take the victim’s dead body, pull apart their character, and make them seem like the monster. You have successfully consumed their body.
The latest case of police brutality defies even those who seek to justify a Black man’s murder by saying he was resisting arrest or posed a threat to police officers. Charles Kinsey is a behavioral therapist, and was helping an autistic patient who had escaped from a group home, when the police were called to the scene because someone in the area suspected that Mr. Kinsey had a gun.
Charles Kinsey then laid on the ground, and put his hands in the air. He was immobile; he did not approach the officers or threaten them in any way. And still, they shot him.
What this highlights is the utter disregard for Black life that is prevalent across this country. It has infiltrated our police systems in Texas, Minnesota, Florida. If a white man lies on the ground with his hands in the air, he is apprehended by the police without gunfire. If a white man shoots nine Black people in a church in South Carolina, he is apprehended by the police without gunfire. So, what is it about a Black man on the ground that seems so threatening to police officers? What reason did they have to shoot him; really, what reason did they even have to pull their guns?
Another, more interesting question is how those who deny police brutality disproportionately affects Blacks will respond to this, latest shooting. What justification can be offered? And this highlights another, more deep seated issue with police killings in America: when Black people protest, when we yell that we should not be slaughtered by the men and women we pay with our own taxpayer dollars, other citizens scramble for excuses. If other, non-Blacks cannot see our humanity and how we are experiencing what is approaching a civil genocide, how can these things change?
