Koritha Mitchell | Vox

What I learned about police brutality videos from studying images of lynchings

2016-07-21T15:36:22-04:00

Openly racist leaders. Voter suppression. Violence. In America today, we’re seeing throwback after throwback to earlier decades.

In addition to all this, another classic of American culture is making a comeback: gruesome images of racist violence. It is difficult to avoid seeing the brutalization and murder of black and brown people. Video recordings of such violence often begin rolling even without the viewer clicking play.

How photos of lynchings reinforced white supremacy

At the turn into the 20th century, even without such technology, it was fairly common to stumble upon pictures of lynching victims. Lynching photographs circulated in newspapers, entering American homes along with the day’s headlines.

These images also proved profitable as picture postcards. In fact, some photographers expanded their businesses by setting up mobile operations, offering prints to spectators who weren’t lucky enough to secure the most coveted keepsakes, such as a lynching victim’s severed body parts, bones, or burnt flesh.

Most often, these pictures featured a mutilated body surrounded by a mob of self-righteous whites — no grieving loved ones in sight. Victims appeared to be brutes with no connection to a family or community, or to institutions like marriage.

Framing the isolated figure was a throng of white citizens who felt so good about what they had done that they were eager to be in the picture with the corpse, proving that they took part in this (patriotic) act.

Because lynching photos circulated in a society that constantly depicted nonwhites as noncitizens, the images were interpreted according to that logic. Everything about American society, from entertainment to education, ensured that the black body was not associated with humanity and citizenship, so lynching photographs simply reinforced those messages.

Even if these images sometimes encouraged an acknowledgement of black bodily pain, their circulation did not naturally lead to an appreciation of the community’s more enduring losses, including psychological, emotional, and financial suffering.

These photographs were taken by people who were safe at the lynching and did not question the practice enough to disrupt it. Not all lynching photographs featured African-American victims, but they all had a fairly straightforward purpose; they were created by white supremacists and advanced their point of view. Thus, their documentation of the encounters helped spread the message of the event: Whites are citizens, and they can and must keep others in their “proper” place.

Why police brutality videos can’t promise justice

Today, recordings of violence against people of color emerge for more complicated reasons. This is why civilians who document these interactions face more consequences than killer cops do. Sometimes victims’ families sue for the release of footage recorded by police equipment because they suspect it will reveal that officers used unjustified and excessive force.

Therefore, in contrast to lynching photography, today’s violent footage does not circulate simply to celebrate white domination. Whether captured by a patrol car’s dash cam, a police officer’s body camera, or a civilian’s smartphone, today’s recordings are often viewed as the best proof that victims did not deserve to be attacked.

Nevertheless, these videos often end up making a statement very similar to that conveyed by lynching photographs: This can be done to people of color because they are not true citizens. And this message is supported by nearly every aspect of American society.

Even if they provide the only evidence that can vindicate dead victims of color — who are so easily demonized by our racist society — there is no avoiding the terror and trauma that such images deliver. Thus, lynching photographs and police brutality videos are similar and different in ways that parallel the resonance and dissonance between the “Rope” distortion of Barack Obama’s “Hope” campaign poster and the poster promoting Nate Parker’s film Birth of a Nation. “Rope” was created by white supremacists who wanted to remind Obama and everyone who supported him of his “proper” place.

Meanwhile, the Nate Parker image articulates the perspective of marginalized people who refuse to be silent about the injustices the United States inflicts. It critiques the nation’s demand that people of color experience injustice but never feel empowered to say aloud that they notice the injustice. Nevertheless, alongside the self-determination and agency asserted through this critique, there is undeniable pain.

And this image is not emptied of its terror because community members are encountering it while people of color are being killed with impunity. Thus, one might find this image disturbing, even while admiring the power, artistry, and poignancy inherent in its use of the American flag.

Targeted communities find themselves in a no-win situation in relationship to images of the brutality they face. They want to prove that they do not simply “feel” discriminated against, that they are treated by police in ways that most white people cannot imagine being treated.

However, being able to provide evidence often fails to yield the desired response — not only from the criminal justice system but also from fellow Americans in the form of basic human empathy.

In my own experience, the best way to get an ordinary citizen (usually white but sometimes a person of color) to say something blatantly racist is to express pain and anger over black and brown people being killed for no reason.

When Philando Castile’s death by police shooting was broadcast on a Facebook live stream, and I joined the chorus of voices insisting that black lives matter, I received this response from a white mother who probably sees herself as reasonable: “Criminals thinking it’s ok to resist arrest, and then resisting arrest — that’s what is killing CRIMINALS, black and white and every other race.” Castile’s “crime”? Having a “wide-set nose.”

At the same time that watching the brutalization of people of color fails to inspire empathy, Americans don’t need to see white people brutalized to grieve along with their families. When two white journalists were shot on camera by an African-American former colleague in August 2015, media outlets refused to broadcast the footage. And no one had to witness their victimization in order to sympathize with them and express outrage against the shooter.

Furthermore, Americans were not urged to quell their anger toward the gunman by having a “national conversation” on mental health, as happens for white perpetrators, even when their crimes are as heinous as hunting 5- and 6-year-olds at school.

So the nation has decided that while it is indecent to watch white people being massacred, most Americans cannot be expected to believe that nonwhites suffer unless one can see them bleed and die.

Still, the United States insists upon inflicting bloodless violence too, reinforcing its disregard for the humanity and citizenship of people of color. Accordingly, Americans watched police officers choke Eric Garner to death and shoot 12-year-old Tamir Rice within two seconds of arriving at a Cleveland playground.

After witnessing innumerable “incidents” like these, terrorized communities then watch as mourning families must put their pain on display in order to have any hope of pressuring the machinery of “justice” to move for them.

Yet most often, convincing local authorities (or even the Department of Justice) to investigate simply begins a series of less bloody — but no less violent — scenarios in which the citizenship of victims and anyone who cares about them is disregarded.

#CarefreeBlackKids2k16 and the power of affirmation

Denying black and brown citizenship is something the United States does very well and quite consistently, however, so marginalized communities have developed traditions to affirm themselves in the midst of both physical and institutionalized violence. At the last turn of the century, black-authored lynching plays were part of that tradition for African Americans. One-acts published in periodicals, such as the NAACP’s Crisis or the Urban League’s Opportunity, were read aloud in black churches, schools, barber shops, beauty salons, and living rooms.

Rather than focusing on white-authored violence, playwrights highlighted the injustice of it and the fact that families and communities were grappling with tremendous losses. That is, while mainstream discourse insisted that lynching victims got what they deserved and should not be mourned, these plays acknowledged that families were grieving and encouraged them to do so in community.

Today, black and brown communities continue in-person traditions, but they also use the internet for public mourning and self-care. Without question, marginalized groups are forced to encounter terror online, but many flock to social media daily because, as early adopters and influential users, they have created online spaces for self-affirmation.

Hashtags often memorialize those unjustly killed, but they also emerge as a form of self-care. Heben Nigatu, co-host of the podcast Another Round, created #CarefreeBlackKids2K16 to help people deal with the deaths of Castile and Alton Sterling as well as the demonization of black and brown communities that so easily followed the shooting of Dallas police officers.

Parents and caregivers of color must consider when to have “the talk” with their children about being aware of how others see them because other people’s fears and assumptions can kill them, but this hashtag encourages community members to enter a space where those concerns are suspended.

Similarly, Erica Garner’s frustration after President Obama’s CNN town hall on “policing and race relations” prompted Feminista Jones to create #LoudBlackGirls. It acknowledges the countless ways in which black women and girls are silenced and taught to silence themselves.

It also calls on them to celebrate moments when they overcame the pressure to be quiet by understanding the value of their own thoughts, experiences, and voices.

Those needing to find life-affirming messages can also visit (and contribute to) hashtags like #BlackManJoy, #BlackJoyMatters, #GrowingUpSalvadorian, #SoyRebelde, and #NoMames (which can be translated as #NoJoke). Likewise, Muslims who face hate for their religion often use #Islamophobia to critique both structural and personal discrimination, and #CreepingSharia can be a space for even more levity as community members highlight the absurdity of claims about impending Islamic “takeovers.”

As importantly, indigenous populations demonstrate that they were not decimated, despite relentless efforts (in both the past and present) to destroy their communities, languages, and cultures. Hashtags such as ‪#DearNativeYouth‪, #TheNewNativeIntellectuals, and #NotYourMascot sustain connections and educate non-natives who are willing to learn, bolstering the work of media outlets, such as Native Trailblazers.

A particularly powerful use of social media for self-affirmation that did not involve a hashtag was the dance studio video made immediately after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.

To similar effect, popular culture commentator Kid Fury took to Instagram and to his wildly successful podcast with Crissle West, The Read, to assert the importance of continuing to be fearlessly queer, given that anti-LGBTQ aggression did not begin with the Pulse shooting.

Long-term projects associated with hashtags like #PrettyPeriod, #BlackGirlMagic, and #BlackGirlsRock provide sustenance regardless of the latest headlines, and the fact that so many of these projects focus on women and girls resonates powerfully with the legacy of black-authored lynching plays of the 1910s and 1920s. Often, African-American women were excluded from leadership in political organizations like the NAACP, which was led by black and white men and white women, so they maximized alternative forms of activism, including creative writing.

A parallel today might be President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative and the ongoing need for the African American Policy Forum to apply pressure from outside the White House — explaining #WhyWeCantWait, insisting that #BlackGirlsMatter, and demanding that Americans #SayHerName. By design, My Brother’s Keeper operates as if racism only affects men and boys, and it ignores the material impact of sexism on women and girls who are not white.

Scholars and activists like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Melissa Harris-Perry have provided extensive research demonstrating that concrete solutions for women and girls of color are urgently needed, but these realities are too easily overlooked in a racist, sexist society.

The women of color affirming each other today have more in common with their activist forerunners than political exclusion, however. When lynching was at its height, mobs did not limit their attacks to men — women were lynched too. And the people leading efforts to help their communities cope were often female survivors.

Of course, “surviving” lynching did not mean that women were not victimized. In addition to trying to control black women with the threat of violence against the men and boys in their lives, white supremacists used rape as a tool of terror.

Given the hostility that American culture made sure black women felt, it is important to note that they were often on the frontlines of not only resisting brutalization but also providing self-affirmation. After all, self-affirmation empowers people to withstand the attacks that never seem to cease, no matter how much righteous protesting takes place.

Given the similarities between the last turn of the century and this one, it makes sense that targeted communities are continuing the tradition represented by lynching plays of the 1910s and 1920s. As gruesome images of victims circulated in newspapers and as picture postcards, dramatists focused on dignified representations of their communities.

These playwrights placed a spotlight on black families who were loving each other, which sometimes meant mourning each other, and they did so in the same spirit articulated by Ieshia Evans, who was arrested on July 9, 2016, after calmly standing in the middle of the street.

A woman protesting Alton Sterling’s death is detained in Baton Rouge https://t.co/qV1e2p3NOz (ph: Jonathan Bachman) pic.twitter.com/cRoEnrCSTT
— Reuters Pictures (@reuterspictures) July 11, 2016

As police officers in riot gear approached her, she had a very clear message in mind: “We don’t have to beg to matter.”

Koritha Mitchell is an associate professor of English at Ohio State University, a literary historian, and an avid runner. Follow her on Twitter @ProfKori, or at her website, KorithaMitchell.com.

I’m a professor. My colleagues who let their students dictate what they teach are cowards.

2020-01-15T12:42:02-05:00

I’m a tenured professor at Ohio State University. I have taught at the college level for more than 15 years — more than five as graduate student instructor, seven as a tenure-track professor, and three with tenure.

When I read about professors being afraid of their own students and changing what they teach in response to that fear, I’m struck by two things. First, I understand why they’re afraid. After my decade and a half in the classroom, I can confidently add to the chorus suggesting that universities increasingly treat students like consumers. As administrators seem more concerned with enrollment dollars than students’ learning, instructors receive a clear message: “The customer is always right.”

But here’s the other thing: I don’t have the luxury of simply changing my syllabus to make my students more comfortable. You see, I’m also black and a woman. There aren’t a lot of other people like me — women of color hold just 7.5 percent of full-time faculty positions nationwide. My very presence makes some of my students uncomfortable because I do not fit any picture society has given them of an expert. My students, after all, have grown up bombarded with the message that people who belong in authority — especially authority based on intellectual accomplishments and expertise —are men, usually white men.

I challenge my students simply by existing. And this has made me realize that avoiding controversial topics is the worst way for my colleagues and me to react to this insecure, fear-inducing moment in academia. Professors should not cower. If we believe educators should not simply bestow credentials but should create an informed citizenry, then that sort of cowardice in professors is a dereliction of duty.

How professors should approach controversial topics

My students’ discomfort with me is especially clear when I teach “general” courses — courses that are not explicitly about people of color. It is not uncommon for students to accuse me of diminishing the quality of their education when I teach classes like this. For example, when I taught an honors writing class, I included two — just two! — reading assignments by nonwhite authors. At the end of the term, a significant percentage of student evaluations complained that the class was skewed because it unjustifiably prioritized African-American authors.

All of my students, regardless of the identity categories they embraced, had been taught their entire lives that real literature is written by white people. Naturally, they felt they were being cheated by this strange professor’s “agenda.” When your presence generates anxiety that students often cannot admit they have — even to themselves — then you don’t have the luxury of simply changing course material to avoid pushback.

What my experience has taught me must become every instructor’s priority — that is, if we are in the profession because we want to develop engaged citizens. I have learned to teach students to notice how they are being groomed to join a “docile and contingent workforce” whenever they are not encouraged to think in ways that feel like a challenge. I couldn’t do this if I were busy cowering to avoid complaints. Besides, I want my students to be passionately engaged and to feel empowered about speaking up both inside and outside of my classroom. The real question, then, is: how can professors broach controversial topics in a way that does not lend itself to complaints that are grounded more in emotion than in intellectual inquiry? The solution is simple, but implementing it requires courage and tenacity: professors need to directly discuss power and power differentials, no matter the subject area.

All of my students had been taught that real literature is written by white people

After all, power has everything to do with how every discipline developed. The idea that our class veered away from real literature whenever nonwhite authors appeared on the syllabus was not some outlandish accusation my students cooked up. It very much aligned with their experiences in high school and in most college classes, and it certainly aligns with the American media landscape. (A similar tension exists in STEM fields. In the sciences, teamwork is crucial for progress in the lab. And although teamwork is treated as a neutral idea, conceptions of it are inevitably shaped by the fact that men comprise the majority in most labs. Proactively discussing power differentials would empower researchers to be self-reflective enough — and intellectually honest and rigorous enough — to notice their own unstated ideas about who is easy to work with and good at what they do.)

It is worth asking, Who can most afford to teach in ways that are least likely to inspire controversy? Those who are not immediately hurt by dominant ideas. And what’s the most dominant idea of them all? That the white, male, heterosexual perspective is neutral, but all other perspectives are biased and must be treated with skepticism.

I am invested in helping my students ask, Why are 90 percent of those in authority here white? I want them to notice that race isn’t a factor only when the person in question is black or brown. For every white person in a position, whiteness helped make him or her an appealing candidate. That these people fit the description of what all Americans are taught to see as “qualified” helped them appear to be qualified, even if their credentials were lackluster. (As long as a candidate is white, lackluster credentials can become evidence of potential.) Indeed, their whiteness likely put them on the radar in the fist place because they were more likely to be in networks recognized and respected by the (mostly white) people making decisions. I ask my students, “Have you ever noticed how, even if standards are changed to accommodate someone, Americans never worry about standards being lowered unless the person getting the opportunity isn’t white?” Wouldn’t it be powerful if all of my colleagues were doing the same?

No matter the topic, power dynamics matter, so it is intellectually dishonest to ignore them in any discussion. To acknowledge power, I call my students’ attention to the fact that dominant ideas parade as “natural” “truth” rather than as a particular worldview. (This is not unlike white men molding the world to themselves and then claiming that every policy, tradition, and institution they created is neutral, not oppressive, toward others.) As my students and I work to create an intellectual community, our job is to notice the contours of everything that parades as “natural.” That’s when students begin to note, for example, that it is never left to “natural” forces to tell them they should be attracted to the opposite sex. They are told from birth what boys like and should like and what girls like and should like. “Nothing is left to chance,” my students begin to say. Challenging dominant ideas is always difficult, but it’s gratifying to see my students grow from simply demonstrating that they can memorize something I said to thinking through issues by testing long-held assumptions.

Knowing that we all crave these gratifying moments, I wonder if so many professors fail to teach critical thinking because we have gotten out of practice ourselves. When I look at how vulnerable tenure and shared governance have become at the University of Wisconsin, I wonder if professors have wanted to court favor with administrators and politicians so much that we’ve accepted their claims to being merely pragmatic? Have we actually believed the lie that the only people who engage in “identity politics” are black feminists like me? Could it be that when some white men looked at more powerful white men, they could see them only as reasonable and not politically motivated, so they turned off their critical thinking skills when observing their actions? (Not everyone, of course.) Could it be that we only consider people ideologues when they don’t vow allegiance to capitalism? Do we actually believe that religion isn’t a corrupting force unless someone mentions Islam? Is this how Scott Walker could drop out of college and still rise to enough power to tell educated white men and women how to run the University of Wisconsin? I really have to wonder. (I wonder because I know it could happen anywhere.)

How problems on college campuses connect to the “real world”

It may be tempting to dismiss what I’m writing about here as an insidery argument that only applies to the “ivory tower.” Supposedly, academia is a safe haven for the irrelevant; it is full of people who could not cut it in the “real world.” This perspective is misguided: no matter the topic, it is destructive to pretend that academia can be bracketed from real-world issues.

My research centers on violence, and I have found that people are most vulnerable to physical violence when they are already marginalized in society. Vulnerability clings to those whose voices are least likely to be heard because perpetrators know that even if caught, they will not likely face consequences if they victimize someone already devalued. This dynamic enabled lynchings to become a form of entertainment, complete with photographs of mutilated bodies as souvenirs. Being punished for killing an African American was (and still is) unlikely; everyone has been taught that a dead black person does not represent a true loss for society.

Now, I could operate as if my understanding of lynching only matters when I’m writing a book for a university press, or I can use this expertise as a lens that sharpens my interpretation of the various ways people can be victimized and receive no redress. Because I know cultural patterns are enduring but also dynamic, easily morphing to fit various circumstances, I do not hesitate to note in my scholarship, teaching, and lived experience when various forms of violence emerge in a range of contexts.

Professors need to directly discuss power and power differentials, no matter the subject area

As a result, I have no problem saying aloud that perpetrators’ tendency to focus on the most marginalized never fails. If money commands attention, then those without money are most likely to become victims of violence. If whiteness inspires sympathy, then those who are not white will most often become targets. If being tenured gains you a hearing, then those without tenure will receive the most abuse.

Given these patterns, it is no coincidence that American institutions look like they do. The most influential positions are held primarily by those who are white and male not only because of this country’s long history of directing affirmative action toward whites but also because white men continue to insist that their whiteness and maleness has little bearing on their actions. The more that Americans allow this lie to hold sway, the more the culture of fear will expand.

Make no mistake, the culture of fear is intensifying. One need note only a few examples:

The un-hiring of Steven Salaita by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The unauthorizing of ethnic studies hires at the University of Illinois Chicago
Boston University’s tepid support of incoming professor Saida Grundy
The University of North Carolina’s cutting of 46 programs
The possible dilution of tenure and shared governance at the University of Wisconsin

This culture must be met with courage and clarity.

My willingness to speak out about all this is shaped by the fact that I have tenure. But to the extent that tenure represents some amount of safety and security, what good is it if it only inspires cowardice? If it only inspires you to hold on to it so desperately that you can never be bothered to try to make this world (or your own campus) less hostile for someone else? If it only inspires you to avoid speaking out against unfairness and injustice? We should be asking ourselves these questions not only in think pieces and in our living rooms but also in our faculty meetings and classrooms … because they are absolutely part of the real world.

Koritha Mitchell is an associate professor of English at Ohio State University, a literary historian, and an avid runner. Follow her on Twitter @ProfKori, or at her website, KorithaMitchell.com.