Racial Violence in Black and White
Benjamin Balthaser
July 13, 2016
... Even among activists there have been calls both to share and to bury the videos. “Why do we engage in circulating footage and photos of lifeless Black bodies?” one Facebook page asked ...
This proliferation of images of violence against black bodies has met its share of anxiety and critique, not least because, in the neat causality of the New York Times, they “have led to nationwide protests.” There is a suspicion that empiricism is not enough: even with such visual evidence, prosecutions and convictions of police officers are rare, and there is little in the way of positive legislation — requiring a greater proportion of police budgets to go to social services or the disarming and demilitarization of police departments. Indeed, many African American journalists, including Adreanna Nattiel, Jamil Smith, Phillip B. Williams, and Charing Ball, have wondered whether the amassing of such images is simply another form of consumer “entertainment,” a way “to be able to pull up a seat and watch the lynchings take place over and over” ...
... What does it mean to look at images of African Americans being murdered? In an age in which footage of fatal shootings appears alongside cat videos and selfies in social media feeds, what claims can be made for the representational power of filming? ...
Perhaps no form did more to cement the connection between photography and race than the dissemination of the lynching image from the Gilded Age to the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1930s. Distributed as postcards, mementos, ornaments, and handbills, images of lynching both documented and helped to construct communities of white supremacy ...
http://bostonreview.net/us/benjamin-balthaser-racial-violence-black-and-white
