I almost broke my own rule by deciding to watch the new-age lynching video of Tyre Nichols. The footage is of five Memphis police officers savagely beating him like a "human pinata." For a moment, I thought that watching the video could be the least I could do to bear witness to the tragedy that befell him.
Tyre Nichols' funeral took place yesterday.
But I know what lynchings of Black people look like. I have seen them in analog form on postcards and in photographs. Memorialized in prints like "The Black Book", "At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America", "Without Sanctuary", "A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature", "Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow" and other books on the subject, all currently on my bookshelf. Of course, America and that vague thing known as "race relations" are much different now than they were in the 19th and 20th centuries. Police body cameras and smartphones now use pixels instead of light and ink. The evil, however, is the same whatever the medium or technology. The impact and purpose of lynching as a type of public ritual remains the same: to terrorize and dehumanize Black people both as individuals and as a group.
When surviving and living and other quotidian actions are exhausting then resting becomes a type of oppositional act and affirmation of our humanity and personhood.
The pleasures and excitement that many white people enjoy from watching Black bodies suffer are also much the same as from the spectacular lynchings of the Jim Crow era when police thuggery was first broadcast into homes. Those white people who are drunk on white racial innocence and who see a distorted view of reality through the white racial frame will likely find such an accurate and raw description of reality quite discomforting. The ability to choose when and how one will be uncomfortable is one of the great privileges of whiteness – and it is one that I do not cater to.
The lynching ritual in post-civil rights America adheres closely to the following script:
Civil rights activists, politicians, media personalities, and others will become involved as they promise to pursue "justice" for the victim and their families and community. Most of these people are sincere; too many others are opportunists. Celebrities and high profile politicians and other national leaders will attend the funeral of the victim or otherwise offer their support. Vice President Kamala Harris attended Tyre Nichols' funeral on Wednesday. President Biden has invited his parents to the State of the Union address next week where he is set to comment about the need for "police reform."
The police propagandists and their agents will spin up the "copaganda" machine to argue ad nauseam that "the vast majority of cops are good and they just do their hard job every day without much acknowledgment." The mainstream news media will be complicit, of course, in advancing this narrative.
The "few bad apples" talking point will be endlessly repeated.
There will be the inevitable op-eds and other public statements by politicians, activists, and thought leaders that America's police just need "more training" to prevent these wanton acts of thuggery and violence. The evidence, however, shows that such training and body cameras do not prevent this abuse. If anything, America's police seem better trained at how to hide and otherwise avoid responsibility for their brutality.
As part of this new-age lynching ritual, America will also engage in another tedious "national conversation" about race and racism. Black and brown faces will be featured for several days on the news to talk about "race relations." Those same Black and brown faces will, with few exceptions, largely disappear from the mainstream news media until the next "racism story." The (white) American public will quickly lose interest in the story. They – and too many people of all backgrounds — are more concerned with black celebrities acting badly at the Oscars and other such foolishness.
In the case of Tyre Nichols, much discussion is centered upon the "discovery" that Black police can be agents of white supremacy as they harass, brutalize, and kill other Black people. The public displays of "shock" and "surprise" upon release of the footage should serve as an indictment of America's broken educational system. After all, James Baldwin said the following about Black police officers and their brutality against the Black community in his 1985 book "The Evidence of Things Not Seen":
Black policemen were another matter. We used to say, "If you must call a policeman"— for we hardly ever did—"for God's sake, try to make sure it's a White one." A Black policeman could completely demolish you. He knew far more about you than a White policeman could and you were without defenses before this Black brother in uniform whose entire reason for breathing seemed to be his hope to offer proof that, though he was Black, he was not Black like you.
"Spoiler alert: Black cops can be racist because they are Black cops," writes Michael Harriot at TheGriot. "So when demonstrators, activists and regular Black people refer to the police as racist, they are not complaining about the content held within the individual hearts of cops":
Farmers farm.
Singers sing.
Police perform racism.
"But why must all this 'good' come only after videos of Black people being killed by police have circulated on autoplay?" asks Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah:
Little has changed systemically in the decade of #BLM. So how do we, in the media, continue justifying this normalization of Black death? How are the graphic deaths of Black people acceptable to consume? Especially when White death — yes, the police kill White people, too — gets nothing like this treatment?
In total, the ritual of these new-age lynchings is a public spectacle of Black pain.
The impact and purpose of lynching as a type of public ritual remains the same: to terrorize and dehumanize black people both as individuals and as a group.
Georgetown Law professor and NBC News legal analyst Paul Butler further explained: "In the end, the most important constant in these new-age lynchings is how they are part of a larger dynamic where life in a racist society is exhausting and lethal for black and brown people." As I explained in a previous essay here at Salon, "Beyond the clinical language, racial battle fatigue causes Black and brown people in America to live shorter lives than white people and to die at higher rates from heart disease, strokes, cancer, high blood pressure, and other maladies. Like other Black people in America and across the world, I know that racial battle fatigue is killing me, both slowly and quickly. I am not alone in this experience."
We Black Americans are so very tired because anti-black police thuggery and other forms of institutional and structural violence are enduring features of American (and global) society. When surviving and living and other quotidian actions are exhausting then resting becomes a type of oppositional act and affirmation of our humanity and personhood.
In her book "Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto", Tricia Hersey writes:
All of culture is working in collaboration for us not to rest and when we do listen to our bodies and take reset, many feel extreme guilt and shame. Embrace knowing that you have been manipulated and scammed by a violent system as powerful evidence. Now with this knowledge you can grieve, repair, rest, and heal….
The idea of rest as resistance is a powerful counternarrative to the dominant story. Protest and resistance doesn't look one way. It's what's really happening on the ground in the small and important details of our lives. It says, "No, this isn't the full story. I have another perspective. I can speak for myself." It's living when someone told you you should die. It's centering joy when pain and oppression surround you daily. It's living in your truth, even when your heart trembles at the thought of being vulnerable. It's napping when the entire culture calls you lazy. It's sleeping when you have been told by capitalism that you aren't doing enough. It's honoring a day, a week, a second for Sabbath. It's reimagining what a Sabbath can look like based on your own history. Resistance is laying down when you have been told to keep going.
If we Black and brown people were not exhausted, then we would not be fully human. And it is our full humanity that white supremacy is trying to deny us.
In the end, I decided that I do not need to see that horrible new-age police lynching video to know (again) that what happened to Nichols was evil and wrong. I will not subject myself to that trauma.
Instead, I chose to honor his memory by working to prevent such things from happening to anyone else – whatever their skin color may be — here in America or anywhere else. We need to rest to keep fighting against the inhumane system that killed Tyre Nichols because that struggle has lasted centuries and shows no sign of ending anytime soon. To rest is not an act of disrespect to Nichols' memory. Instead, it is a strong affirmation of Black life and why Black lives matter in a society where those basic facts are viewed as anathema and a provocation by white America.
