Contracirculation

July 3, 2020 9:30 AM

On rewriting the terms of engagement with images of Black suffering. Images of Black suffering, death, and protest have widely circulated on the internet before: for example in 2012 after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s murder by George Zimmerman, or in 2014 after Michael Brown was shot in the back by Ferguson police officers. One difference this time is that it’s not just that people who already saw themselves as activists who have called their online followers to take to the streets and participate, but formerly nonactivist users have become politicized and seized upon the feed as a politicized space to engage in an activism of their own.
posted by Ahmad Khani (4 comments total)

Makes me think of what Susan Sontag wrote in “Regarding the Pain of Others,”

“The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.”

The Black Lives Matter movement has been around for a long while and so too these images and horrific incidents of violence but within the last couple of months I've seen a lot of people who are not activists, who aren't as invested in the movement, people who are more mainstream twitter/social media users sharing these kinds of images with a lot more frequency.

It feels very performative and has a kind of "woke currency" feel to it all. The way things are RT'd and <3'd on twitter sort of transforms how these images might normally be perceived. Who is choosing to share these images matters a great deal. It shapes their impact. I feel like I'm not articulating this very well, so I'll step back and read a bit more.
posted by Fizz at 10:07 AM on July 3, 2020 [7 favorites]

The ways that these images are being used among non-activists brings to mind lawn signs in an election campaign. You see a lot of lawn signs for somebody and you think, I guess supporting this is a normal thing for a normal person like me to do. If I admit I voted this way I won't be shunned by the community. I won't lose my job or be hunted down by the police. Lots of people are doing it and it's okay.

This surely isn't the most important step in changing the system, but it feels like a necessary one of them.
posted by clawsoon at 1:57 PM on July 3, 2020 [11 favorites]

According to Wikipedia (and the facts in evidence) "Brown was struck six times, all in the front of his body". He was unarmed, the police should not have shot him at all, but please don't make things up to strengthen your case. It has the opposite effect.
posted by w0mbat at 9:34 PM on July 3, 2020

w0mbat, there is a dispute about how this went down. From the same Wikipedia article, "Wilson stated that Brown stopped and charged him after a short pursuit. Johnson contradicted this account, stating that Brown turned around with his hands raised after Wilson shot at his back." Let's not derail about Michael Brown's murder, let's focus on the article at hand which has much more depth to probe than the direction a person was facing when the police committed homicide.

"Crystalized by the current moment is a paradox: These images, in their circulation, oscillate between being tools of activism that galvanize protests and being the means for neoliberal capitalism’s persistence as Black death is instrumentalized as a spectacle — evoking sympathy rather than empathy, solved by black squares rather than action."

The spectacle spilled over into the neolibs really life. The leaders of the democratic party responded in part by dressing in kente cloth stolls, as if cosplaying allyship was somehow an acceptable mode. You could argue that this performance was intended for the eyes of social media and continued to flood algorithms with not-action. The effects are the same and the media is the massage.
posted by kaelynski at 6:47 AM on July 4, 2020 [1 favorite]