Why do people need to watch videos of Black death to believe what happens to us?

I’ve been wondering about this for several years now.

Why is it that when a Black person is murdered – whether that is as a result of a cop’s itchy trigger finger or due to a wannabe cop shooting first and asking questions never – one of the first things people do is watch and share the video?

Sonya Massey, a Black woman in Illinois, was shot in the face and subsequently killed by Illinois deputy Sean Grayson. The video was recently released to the public and, to an extent, went viral. It went viral the way all violent, brutal deaths of Black people caught on police bodycam always do. Another one of her relatives, a four year old boy, was also allegedly killed by cops in a different incident. I don’t have the heart to go look for links on that one, but I have been seeing people post about it on different social media sites.

I keep seeing people say, “don’t look away, you need to witness this,” as if that ever helps.

What good will it do you to watch a woman get shot in her face, in her kitchen, by the very cops she called to help her? What good did it do you in 2020 to watch George Floyd die on camera with the weight of another grown man on his spine? What good has it ever done to watch Black people get killed on camera?

Better, smarter, people than I have pointed this out before but there is something so disgustingly voyeuristic about the way the grotesque images of Black death are peddled around the internet.

In 2015, almost a decade ago, Jamil Smith wrote a piece for The New Republic titled “What Does Seeing Black Men Die Do for You?”. In it, he points out that “Increased awareness has not translated into prevention and policy.” In fact, Biden’s response to Sonya’s murder was to… push the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act”, a bill that… mostly just gives more money to police officers. How does that help?

Some people share these images with this open specter of gleeful antiblackness looming overhead. They make memes from the images – I think of racist stans on Twitter using George Floyd’s murder as a meme to show their fave’s dominance in the charts – and show that they clearly do not care about Black people.

But there’s another kind of person sharing these images.

They wring their hands and moan about justice, telling us not to look away or else we don’t care (as much as they do). But what good is it to share a Black person’s brutal final moments? What good is it to retraumatize Black people on your timeline with the reminder that we are not safe in our own homes?

These images of horrific violence don’t spur them to get in the streets again, to cuss out their antiblack family members or to cut out the cops in their family. Watching these videos don’t even make these people rethink how they treat the Black people around them beyond a brief moment of guilt they attempt, occasionally, to assuage by tossing a twenty at some Black person they realized (belatedly) they hurt.

In fact, it’s almost like these people are using their ability to sit through fatal police brutality as a badge of honor.

“I watched this Black person die without flinching,” they seem to say in their condescending social media posts. “I cried the whole time, but I kept my eyes open. Why couldn’t you?”

Why do you watch videos of Black people being executed – on the street, in their own homes, when they’re in their cars? What does that do for you? What does that do to you?

And why do you want to do it to us?