Looking/seeing

A white friend put something on Facebook about how he hasn't watched any of the videos documenting the horrible events of the last week in the US. I couldn't agree less with his reasoning, but it made me want to try to articulate, as disjointed and clumsy as the attempt feels, some issues underlying the decision to watch them or not.

As a white person, it's one thing to look at the deaths of unarmed black men (is it just me or is this a phrase we've used so frequently it's lost meaning? To break it down: These are nonthreatening people who were killed and who have black skin), or of police officers who were acting harmlessly, out of a duty to observe and know. It's another thing to look at these deaths out of general engagement with the grotesque and all the voyeurism that goes along with it. But placing video evidence behind a veil risks allowing us to justify turning away entirely. It's like the flaw in the distinction between public and private spheres that explains the refusal to intervene in thousands of domestic violence situations.

My goal in thinking about this was to develop a bright-line rule for myself. "Yes, you should always see what law enforcement is doing in the name of 'protection,'" or "No, every YouTube click is a further invasion of a dying person's last moments." But it's not going that way.

Maybe the value, if any, from this invasion - and by the way, let's acknowledge for a minute that it is WEIRD AF that this genre is now a thing. Did people ever see this coming in the '90s? Was I just not paying attention? - comes from a lot of different issues. When and where did this happen? Are you close enough to it, or do you have enough power, that you could impact whether it happens again? Maybe most important - did someone do this in your name?

I'm thinking too of ISIS/al-Qaeda beheading videos, which feed this same internal debate. I've never watched one. I never will, since I don't see any larger value in doing so. The spectacular nature of a beheading - its sheer and intentional gruesomeness - is basically extremist clickbait. It screams for your eyeballs, and providing your eyeballs provides gratification to the organization.

If I'm still insisting on a bright-line rule, maybe this version would work: If the people whose acts are depicted want you to see them, refuse to look. If they don't, you should.

I want to disengage, and sign off of all social media, and stick my head in the sand and pay no attention to the bad people. And I could! I could totally rely on my white privilege to do so. Any awareness I have of what's going on is completely self-inflicted and avoidable. I work from home so I don't have co-workers tarnishing my day with information that ranges from unsavory to horrifying. I can ignore news websites and I can leave my radio off. And no one's clamping my eyelids open while reel after reel of police violence plays over Beethoven's Fifth in front of me.

Vigil of Prayer & Peace, Brooklyn, 7/11/16

I want to disengage, and I don't know what to do, and this is just a self-indulgent blog post which is probably useful to exactly no one. But I heard a bunch of different people last night, including Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and Public Advocate Letitia James, as well as about five leaders of completely different faiths, talk over and over about the need to speak out and show unity - for the sake of those who need support and to show those who support divisiveness that they're outnumbered. So I'm hoping against hope that saying anything at all, however intellectualized and rambling, is better than saying nothing.

I guess my point, as a white person looking around, is that we're all involved. We don't have to like it or watch a video to make it true.