When are we shown death at the hands of police?

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2023

Race can be very hard: All around the world, interaction between different racial / ethnic / religious / cultural groups can be extremely hard.

That has certainly proven to be true in this country. Consider Karen Attiah's new column in the Washington Post.

Attiah offers a perfectly reasonable complaint, one you may have heard before. Her column carries this headline:

The endless video loop of Black death is doing more harm than good

You can read her column here. She lays out her premise as shown:

ATTIAH (2/1/23): On Jan. 27, Memphis police released video of the horrific death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five Black officers. Many of my Black friends and media colleagues said publicly that they would not watch the video and that Black people especially should resist the pressure to watch yet another video of someone who looks like us dying on camera.

I think they’re right. And not just for reasons of self-care.

Early in my career, I was taught that valiant and noble journalists must bear witness, so we can speak truth to power and hold the powerful accountable. The inherent promise was that if we could shed light on crimes, and if the public could see, the system would change.

Video taken by police body cameras and quick-thinking bystanders now offers the public even more opportunities to bear witness to police brutality. But increasingly, I find it less ethically correct to traffic in images of Black death for the sake of imagined awareness—specifically, White awareness.

Attiah's column is taking a turn by the end of that passage, with her reference to "White awareness." Before long, she says that we're shown video of black people dying as a form of entertainment:

"Black suffering has become an industrial complex of its own, snuff films as ritual entertainment."

Have news orgs been showing the videotape from Memphis as a form of ritual entertainment? It's a fairly ugly suggestion, but there's no obvious way to answer that question.

That said, by the end of her column, Attiah takes this suggestion a bit further. Here's how her column ends:

ATTIAH: Now, I’m not saying publicly released videos don’t have value. They can, on occasion, result in legal consequences for individual officers and their departments. We can concede that the past several years of hashtags and videos have elevated Black and other scholars who have long argued for defunding and abolition, and have presented visions of alternative forms of policing.

But why must all this “good” come only after videos of Black people being killed by police have circulated on autoplay?

Little has changed systemically in the decade of #BLM. So how do we, in the media, continue justifying this normalization of Black death? How are the graphic deaths of Black people acceptable to consume? Especially when White death—yes, the police kill White people, too—gets nothing like this treatment?

I don’t have all the answers. But I can’t help feeling that these hellish loops only compound public desensitization to Black death—and are doing more harm than good.

Do videos like those from Memphis "compound" an apparently pre-existing "public desensitization to Black death?" Do such videos create a "normalization of Black death?"

We don't know how to answer such questions—but, in the highlighted section, Attiah seems to think that she's dropping a bombshell, telling readers that "the police kill White people, too." 

She wonders why we don't see videotape of those deaths—why we don't see those "snuff films."

Atiah is quite free with her unpleasant speculations, as she frequently is. That said, we've been asking that same question for years—and we'd say the answer is obvious.

Why don't we see video of white people being killed by police? Why don't we hear more about such shooting deaths?

We think the answer is fairly obvious. Mainstream news orgs refuse to discuss such events as a way of pandering to a modern-day form of what used to be called "political correctness." It's a way of performing racial concern—a way of pretending to care.

As we've noted at various times, Attiah's own Washington Post has sometimes tried to call attention to police shooting deaths of transparently innocent people who aren't black. 

The Post has sometimes tried very hard to direct attention to such non-black shooting deaths. The Post has never been able to get these events into the information flow of our major mainstream news orgs.

Attiah seems to be suggesting that such events go uncovered because our news orgs are treating black death as a form of entertainment. That strikes us as an ugly and improbable claim, but race can be very hard.

In that last past of her column, Attiah links to this report in Rolling Stone. The report describes five incidents so far this year in which police officers have shot and killed someone who was unarmed.

Two of the deceased were white. Two of the deceased were black; the race / ethnicity of the fifth is unknown. Overall, police shoot and kill about twice as many whites as blacks in any given year—but, as Attiah notes, the shooting deaths of people who aren't black tend to receive very little national coverage.

Atiah seems to think the reason for this disparity involves the white world's ugly desire for racial entertainment. We think the explanation is almost surely different. Reading Attiah, we also think that that race can be extremely hard.

Are Attiah's speculations helpful? We're prepared to suggest that they probably aren't. But such is the fruit of the brutal history created by our benighted ancestors over the course of those hundreds of years. 

We're shown black death as a form of entertainment. Easy to be very hard!