what we choose to see

on viral videos and how we recognize the value in human lives

Lately I’ve been feeling a lot of anger. In a weird way, it’s a good feeling, because generally speaking I haven’t really felt much except heaviness, hopelessness, and panic for at least six months. A lot of personal weirdness happened: some legitimately heavy and sad things, and some things that were incredibly stressful at the time and now just seem like sort of hilarious examples of how truly bizarre and ridiculous people can be when they’re blind to the world beyond themselves. I got an out-of-nowhere full-body scaly, miserable skin rash that took weeks to heal, which might have been my body’s way of prepping me for a lockdown. And then COVID-19 happened, and then things just kept getting worse. 

We’re now in a time where I feel both more angry — because of our federal and local governments’ truly inept responses to the outbreak, and because of the ways the pandemic is exacerbating inequalities that I fear will do lasting damage to already-awful social problems — and more hopeful — because of the people who are working hard to keep us safe, and because of the people who took to the streets to demand that we dismantle the systems that keep those inequities going — than I have in a long time. 

I’m hoping you’ll soon be able to read more about what’s been happening in my life, especially the sillier stuff, and I’ll keep you posted about when those will be published. There are some other things I’ve been working on, and I’ll keep you posted about those pieces, too. 

You also might have noticed that it’s not Sunday, the day I normally sent out these missives. (Or maybe you didn’t notice? Who knows what time is now, anyway?) Now that I’m back publishing weekly, I’ll be experimenting with different days and times to send them out, so if you have thoughts or observations about when you most enjoy settling in to read my long and rambling thoughts about the world, please let me know or comment on this post.

But for now, some thoughts, and some book recommendations. Content warning that I’m about to barf up some dark thoughts about murder and white supremacy with a side dish of rage at misogyny, so if that’s something you want to avoid this week, or anytime, close the email now. 

I haven’t really tried to place what happened to my brother into any larger social context, at least publicly – it’s felt weird and, I don’t know, presumptuous? grandiose? at the very least, self-centered – but I’m going to start muddling through it. 

For those of you who don’t know what happened: on a Saturday morning last spring, my younger brother Eric was out driving; he had just picked up some groceries. What happened next is a little unclear — it seems that Eric’s car might have clipped another car as the man was cutting into a lane, or his car might have clipped Eric’s — but a witness told detectives that she saw the other man tailgate, honk, and harass Eric for several miles. Eventually, Eric pulled off the freeway, where nearby security cameras show that he pulled over. When the other man pulled over behind him, Eric got out and walked towards the other car. The other car accelerated and, though the street was wide and empty of other traffic, plowed directly into my brother. He flipped over the windshield and onto the pavement; the other car drove away. Eric was declared brain dead the next morning. 

I know what happened after Eric pulled over because I’ve seen the surveillance camera footage, and so have a lot of other people. It ran on Austin local nightly news, and has been posted to YouTube. The television station that publicized the footage didn’t reach out to my family. I accidentally discovered it had been posted and immediately called my parents to ask that they not turn on local news; I didn’t want them to find out like I had, without warning and caught off-guard. 

At first I didn’t want to watch it, but then I decided that it bothered me that so many strangers had seen the last moments of my brother’s life and I hadn’t. I also thought it would maybe help answer some of the questions about what happened that still keep me up at night. Of course it didn’t, because those are all questions about what Eric was thinking, what he was feeling, and a video can’t answer those. I just felt sick, discombobulated, and kind of violated. 

You probably know why I’ve been thinking about that day a lot for the past few weeks (and if you don’t know, let’s have a chat!). I started writing this piece a few months ago, after video of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder went viral. Then, of course, Breonna Taylor was killed in her sleep by police executing a no-knock warrant for another person who was already in their custody. And then, in the last week of May, I found myself in a laundromat, watching television news play video of a police officer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, on loop, over and over and over. 

I can’t stop thinking about those videos, why it matters that there isn’t video of Breonna Taylor’s death, how all of their families might feel right now, and how I felt watching the video of my own brother die, knowing that other people, strangers, had watched it too. And it’s raised a bunch of questions for me about why we need these videos, why and when we share them, who is afforded privacy and whose privacy is violated — the people whom society requires to be traumatized and re-traumatized in order for justice to happen — and why we even need these videos broadcast. 

To start with the very obvious: what is very, very clear from the difference between what happened to my brother and my family, and what happened to Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd and theirs, reeks of white privilege. (Shouldn’t need to be said but: That is true, always.) 

In a small, superficial sense, you might observe that what happened to Arbery is similar to what happened to my brother. Both were minding their own business, living their own normal lives. Both were chased, harassed, and then murdered (Arbery, we learned later, was run over by a car, like my brother — but then of course, Arbery was shot). In both cases, the accused killers claimed self-defense against acts of aggression. In both cases, video footage of the attacks showed a story that belied those claims. In both cases, the video footage was released publicly. 

After that, though, the stories diverge significantly in ways that are illustrative of many, many of the problems with our criminal justice system, and our society at large. 

Within a week of when my brother died, the police department used the footage to track down the alleged driver of the car, arrested him, and charged him with two felonies. Later, a grand jury indicted him with an additional charge of murder. We’re currently waiting for the justice system to play its course. There are a bunch of things that we feel very lucky about – there was only one car of the make and model and color that hit my brother registered in the county, for example. I have very complicated feelings about the American criminal justice system that I’ll eventually explore, but generally speaking, we also feel very lucky that the detectives and prosecutors took the case very seriously. 

And when local news broadcast the footage and posted it to YouTube, I was uncomfortable with how many people saw it, but it didn’t go viral. No one needed it to go viral; we didn’t need any public outcry for authorities to take the case seriously – by that point, they already had. 

The opposite was true for Ahmaud Arbery. As most of us know by now, more than a month passed after his murder with no charges filed against the killers, though authorities knew exactly who they were. The Waycross, Georgia, district attorney argued that the killers had acted legally under Georgia laws around self-defense and citizens’ arrest. The case got passed around from office to office because of conflicts of interest in various prosecutors’ offices. Then, on May 5, Arbery’s family’s lawyer posted leaked video of the murder to social media, prompting outrage across the country. It was only after millions of people saw what happened in a gruesome video that Arbery’s killers were arrested and charged. His family needed that video to go viral in order for the case to be taken seriously. 

The two cases are obviously not cleanly comparable. At the very least: who knows what would have happened if the police and prosecutors who are working on my brother’s case worked on Arbery’s, and who knows what would have happened if my brother was in Georgia (I have some thoughts on the good cops/bad apples debate, but they’re for another time). And I’m grateful to the detectives and prosecutors who are working hard for justice for my brother. 

But that’s the thing – those detectives and prosecutors are behaving like my brother is a human, and that his family, my family, are humans. And I just cannot accept living in a country where this is a privilege that my family is granted and other families are not. 

The families of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd have already been forced to be so much stronger than my family and I had to be. Their burden has been so much heavier than mine, and mine was too heavy. I’ve been basically useless for a year, and my brother’s case seems to be an example, so far at least, of the justice system working as it was intended. 

I had to watch video of my brother dying only once, and now I have to rigorously avoid images of cars running into people — whether that’s news videos of drivers running into protestors, which has happened with horrifying regularity over the past few months, or in silly rom-coms — to prevent panic attacks. I have nightmares about being hit by a car constantly. George Floyd’s and Ahmaud Arbery’s families of have been forced to re-live their trauma over and over again — knowing also that the videos can also traumatize millions of other people who see themselves in these cases — just to get anyone in power to pay attention. That is unconscionable. 

After Arbery died, I turned to a book by the scholar Sarah Sentilles called “Draw Your Weapons” to help make sense of my feelings around watching so many videos of people being murdered. It’s a compassionate, weird, fascinating book — part joint biography of a conscientious objector during World War II and a prison guard at Abu Ghraib, part personal memoir, and part academic analysis of how we as society choose to look at or away from images of violence and how we consider other people’s trauma. 

One of Sentilles’ core observations — also articulated concisely in this essay about the video of Arbery’s death — is that when some kinds of suffering are hidden from view while other kinds of suffering are constantly broadcast, those images both expose injustice and reinforce it. Her book is full of analysis of why images of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan were hidden from American view, while we saw many, many images of dead and tortured Iraqis and Afghani citizens. But her conclusions, she notes in her essay, are just as applicable to American domestic affairs, right now and throughout history. 

“Why, during the Ebola crisis, did traditional media outlets like the New York Times show dead bodies on the floor, bodies in the dirt, bodies being burned, but now there are no images of such bodies in the coronavirus pandemic? Why is it acceptable practice to broadcast images of dead and injured Black bodies, but not to do so when it comes to white bodies?” Sentilles asks. “I am not suggesting that hiding images of white supremacist violence is the solution. But I am suggesting that when other images are hidden from view, then being allowed to see images of dead Brown and Black people does racist work. And at this very moment that disparity is even more visible.”

When no one really needs to see the video of my brother because the justice system was already doing its thing — but other people, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd and Elijah McClain and Tamir Rice and Philando Castile and Freddie Gray and Eric Garner and Walter Scott and Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, have their deaths displayed everywhere, on repeat on television and on Twitter and in the pages of the New York Times — the coverage subtly reinforces white America’s view of these men as “other.”

Yes, if those images had not been publicized, it’s likely their deaths would have been ignored; the power of the photos and videos was, in that sense, necessary. 

But I see that less as a testimony to the power of photography than as a disturbing indictment of white American society. Black people have been explaining the impact of violent, racialized policing for as long as American police have existed; why did it take gruesome videos of murder for so many white people to concede even slightly that there might be a problem? That is an extreme moral failure that I believe requires a reckoning, even as mainstream society belatedly acknowledges reality. I would like to live in a world that doesn’t need dehumanizing videos whose circulation inflicts pain on family, friends, and viewers to believe that serious problems are real and worth fixing. 

And then there’s another point: sharing these videos of Black people being murdered doesn’t seem to have stopped it from happening, at least not so far. People smarter than me will be debating for a long time why George Floyd’s case was different, why we might only now, finally, be on the verge of real change in policing. But anyone who is currently an adult has been (or should have been, if they were paying attention) seeing videos of men and women being murdered for as long as there have been cell phone cameras.

Here’s the writer Jamil Smith, for example, in a piece published more than five years ago: “Activists, journalists, and concerned citizens continue to spread these images throughout social media to alarm and inspire. But to what end? Increased awareness has not translated into prevention and policy. Judging by the lack of advancement on those latter fronts, the surge of video evidence has only made our society increasingly numb to the spectacle of black death.”

Sentilles paraphrases the writer John Berger to explain why these photographs are not as practically powerful as we imagine or wish them to be. When you see a violent image, the first response is shock. “The other’s suffering engulfs you,” she writes. “Then, either despair or indignation. If despair, you take on some of the other’s suffering to no purpose; if indignation, you decide to act.” But there’s no way to act, Sentilles argues, without first returning to your own life, at which point the gulf between your lived experience and the shock sparked by the violent image becomes very large. “The object of your shock has shifted,” she writes. “No longer is it the violence in the image that shocks you. It is your sense of inadequacy. You are too small. Violence is too big. You have failed before you have even begun.”

None of my thoughts are meant to diminish the power of photography. But if we are to live in a United States that matches our ideals, we need to find the photos that reflect the full, lived humanity of Black people — Michael Brown’s graduation photos, photos of George Floyd with his daughter and his friends, Elijah McClain and his violin — just as powerful incitements for change. At this point, I believe it’s our moral obligation not to put any more families through the pain of watching their loved ones die on video, over and over, so that they can, just maybe, find justice. 

All of which brings me to the case of Breonna Taylor, and how her murder and its aftermath indicts American society on many different levels. 

There is, at least to my knowledge, no video of Breonna Taylor’s murder. Most of the videos of police brutality that get shared with the public are of Black men dying, because police tend to kill Black men in public. When women die, it’s often behind closed doors — Breonna Taylor in her own home, Sandra Bland in a police cell beyond the public eye. There are of course exceptions — Botham Jean was of course murdered in his own home also — but it’s striking to me that so many Black women’s deaths have been invisible to us, both literally and figuratively. 

Striking, but not surprising — throughout history, women have been confined to the domestic sphere, so that when men exert power over them, it can be invisible to the public eye. Black women, of course, suffer this injustice doubly, in ways that are disturbing and by design. Tressie McMillan Cottom, in her excellent essay collection “Thick,” notes that the cameras used to photograph evidence of abuse on battered women’s bodies often do not reflect bruises on dark skin. “For black women,” she writes, “a camera designed not to see our abuse becomes a protocol that will only label such spots ‘dark.’”

The lack of public video of Breonna Taylor’s murder has given rise to the type of online memorial that, earlier, I said I wanted — I find the photos of Taylor receiving her EMT certificate, of her posing on a porch with matching gold purse and strappy heels intensely powerful, evidence of a joyous life she should still be living. And they have generated outrage, at least in some corners of the internet — not a day goes by when I don’t see some version of “Good morning. Arrest the police who killed Breonna Taylor,” in some of my social media feeds. 

But it is also clear that attention isn’t working as effective activism in the Louisville justice system. More disturbingly, the “justice for Breonna Taylor” message has been co-opted into too many offensive memes — you’ve seen them, the ones where someone posts a photo of their side-boob or themselves in a bikini, and then says something like, “now that I’ve got your attention….arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.” It’s classic look-at-me activism, and it’s gross.

“I hear you arguing that you see these memes as being sometimes a bit disrespectful, as trivializing her death,” NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly asked the culture critic Cate Young last week. “Is it possible for that to be true and for it also to be true that some of these memes are effective, precisely because they might reach people who otherwise aren't talking about this?”

“I am a huge proponent of the fact that two things can be true,” Young responded. “But I think that whether or not they are effective for a small segment of the population should not override the fact that it is a disrespectful way to engage with her memory. I think there are lots of things that could be effective. It doesn't necessarily mean that they are the best option. And if there are better options, then they should be taken.”

So, it seems, for white American society to pay attention to the unjust deaths of Black people, there either needs to be a dehumanizing video or a dehumanizing meme. As Sentilles argues, those images —“even when they help generate outrage that leads to arrests — become part of the armature of white supremacy, too.” We need to be better than that, and I believe that means reckoning with what we choose to see, and how we choose to see it, and how those decisions have been baked into our lives and our criminal justice, housing, education, and health systems. 

There’s a line in the arrest warrant affidavit for the man accused of killing my brother that has given me nightmares: the alleged driver, whose name I don’t like to use, “said that he couldn’t tell if [Eric] was Chinese or Hispanic or an age or any descriptors but he stated he was in fear for his life so he went forward” to strike Eric. 

Imagine driving your car directly into a person from some distance, watching him flip over your windshield and onto the ground, and only being able to describe that person as, essentially, “maybe Chinese or Hispanic.” There’s an absurd part of me that’s offended by the lack of attention paid to even the most superficial aspects of Eric’s humanity – this man, by his own admission, drove his car into my brother and couldn’t be bothered to notice even basic things, like that he was tall and skinny and clearly a young person, or what style of clothes he was wearing. Also image paying so little attention to the other person, but believing you could convincingly argue you knew that person was a threat to you. It’s a stupid thing to get hung up on, because a person who runs another person over with his car on purpose obviously doesn’t care about that person’s humanity. But still, it makes me feel so frustrated. 

Then there’s the more uncomfortable thought: if my brother was blonder, paler, like me, if he more obviously read in that moment as “white,” would he be alive right now? Would the man accused of hitting my brother have been less (supposedly) fearful, would he have valued Eric’s life more, if he hadn’t made some uncalled-for assumptions about Eric’s ethnicity? It’s a mindfuck of a question – completely unanswerable, but also a pretty simple illustration that race is a social construct. 

The things that expose us to danger, or that keep us safe, have nothing to do with us or our families and everything to do with how other people choose to see us, and that is fundamentally, morally wrong and un-American. I’m glad that more white people in the United States now are choosing to adjust their lenses, but I also want us to grapple with why so many facts of other people’s lives were invisible to us for so long. I want us to grapple with why, even now, the most “effective” way of acknowledging Black people’s pain has been through the spread of painful, graphic, and disrespectful images. I want us to articulate why exactly my family didn’t need to put ourselves through that extra pain for our original loss to be taken seriously, but so many other families are forced to. And when we’ve figured that out, I want us to hold ourselves accountable for it.

For the last year, I’ve been really struggling with the concept of justice — of what it really means, and of who deserves forgiveness and why. Of course, I don’t get to decide what justice is delivered to the person who killed my brother, which is exactly as it should be in democratic society. The men who shot Ahmaud Arbery are perfect examples of why enacting justice should not be left to individuals, of why we have a justice system, of why we should strive to improve it. I’m not sure what “justice for Breonna Taylor” should mean; as I’ll write later, I’m personally leaning toward the side of the police and prison abolitionists. But I think we should figure it out, and I think figuring it out requires figuring out whose pain we decide to witness and how, and then using that knowledge to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again. 

Tell me what to read

For the past six weeks, I bet you’ve seen a lot of reading lists circulating, including from me, recommending books that give context to the protests. A lot of those have focused on what are essentially practical manuals to anti-racist work. I’m not going to criticize those books here — though many people have valid criticisms of how basic or white-centering they can be — because I think they often provide useful observations that many white people haven’t heard quite so explicitly before. 

But those are not the books I want to recommend today. Last week, the writer Jia Tolentino expressed frustration that I have also been feeling about the phenomenon of white people treating anti-racist education as, in Tolentino’s words, “boot camp.” 

For one thing, it seems that, like fitness boot camps, this work is perhaps something people commit to for a brief period and then abandon. More importantly, as Tolentino notes, treating this kind of education as work feels vaguely like missing the point of working towards true equality, which is about understanding the experience of people who aren’t like you, and then using that understanding to act. 

“To deepen your understanding of race, of this country, should make you feel like the world is opening up, like you’re dissolving into the immensity of history and the present rather than being more uncomfortably visible to yourself,” Tolentino says. “Reading more Black writers isn’t like taking medicine. People ought to seek out the genuine pleasure of de-centering themselves, and read fiction and history alongside these popular anti-racist manuals, and not feel like they need to calibrate their precise degree of guilt and goodness all the time.”

In other words: read (or watch, or listen) for the joy and the pain of experiencing other people’s stories! Or, as Beandra July put it succinctly in Vanity Fair: “If you support Black lives, watch Black stories.”

So here are just a few novels, tv shows, and works of history and sociology that aren’t trying to teach you anything, but that, for me at least, really let me sink into the pleasure of transporting myself into lives that are nothing like the one I’ve lived. There are tons more; they’re not hard to find; seek them out. And if you don’t already in your general reading practice, incorporate books by Black authors not because they’re Black, but because expanding your reading habits will lead you to some really great books. 

Most recently, I really loved Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s “The Revisioners,” which tells the parallel stories of Josephine, who escaped from slavery and sharecropping but who still must grapple with her fraught relationship with her white neighbor, and her descendant Ava, who out of necessity moves in with her white grandmother and must navigate the uncomfortable realities of her interracial family. It’s not an uplifting book, but it is hopeful, and I loved the way it illustrated the difference between uplift and hope. 

My other current obsession is Michaela Coel’s HBO show “I May Destroy You,” which is a semi-autobiographical story about the aftermath of sexual assault. There are so many things to love about this show and so many things I’ve never seen on television before. Just to pick one example off the top of my head: its depiction of adult friendship — in the most recent episode, the main character’s best friend is so worried about her, and so anxious to help her, that she actually ends up pushing her away and missing signs that another friend needs help too — is one of the most empathetic and moving examinations of how sometimes the most difficult conflicts have no real villains that I’ve ever seen. 

Then there are the non-fiction books, of which I would really strongly recommend three: “The Warmth of Other Suns,” by Isabel Wilkerson, “The New Jim Crow,” by Michelle Alexander, and “The Color of Law” by Richard Rothstein – all of which I believe should be required reading in American schools.  You’ve probably heard of all of these books, but if you haven’t read them, get on it. Wilkerson’s book is an incredibly moving history of the Great Migration told through the stories of the people who lived it; Alexander’s will show you exactly how twisted our criminal justice system is; and Rothstein’s will demonstrate exactly how those inequities were instituted by design. 

(On a more lighthearted note, if I ever wrote one of those New York Magazine “I Think About This A Lot” columns, I would probably choose to discuss the time in August of 2016 a woman attended jury duty in Nashville with Taylor Swift and asked her to autograph the only thing she had on her, which was a copy of “The New Jim Crow.” Somewhere, there exists a copy of “The New Jim Crow” in which Taylor Swift has scrawled, “so nice to meet you!” Did they talk about the book?? Has Taylor Swift read it? I have so many questions. Also, “Taylor Swift avoids an interaction with Kanye West at the VMAs by going to jury duty, where she autographs a copy of Michelle Alexander’s book about our racist criminal justice system and is then dismissed because she was being considered for the jury deciding an aggravated rape case and she was currently in the middle of dealing with her own sexual assault trial” is a real humdinger of a 2016 time capsule. Anyway, I’m very happy that Swift has grown to speak her mind – I care a lot about Taylor Swift! – but I will also say: if you’re going to watch one celebrity post about how the world is on fire, make it Cardi B’s. That woman knows how the system works, and you should too.)

Thank you for reading. As always, thanks for bearing with me as I figure this thing out, for the rambling first-draftiness of it, and also for forgiving all the typos that I miss because I write quickly and with no editor. And also as always, if you like this kind of dispatch from my brain and know someone else who might, too, please do share it. You can subscribe here.