← Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
The Verdict, the Video, and the Unreasonable Burden of Proof.
00:58:42
George Floyd’s murder and the history of bearing witness while Black in America.
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- [00:06]
A
Who are these videos for now at this point? Are they for people who really are interested in dismantling this form of policing that's killed so many people, or are they just people looking at this as entertainment? And at some point, we have to ask those tough questions.
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B
Hi, and welcome back to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court. I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover the courts and the law for Slate. There is a lot of news this week coming out of 1 First street, including a decision Thursday reinstating juvenile life without parole, another refusal by the high court to take a big gun case, and a reported $2 million book advance for the newest justice. Justices Sotomayor, Breyer and Gorsuch are all out stumping about how very, very get along. Coincidentally, they're doing that just as a bill to expand the size of the court was stomped to death by Nancy Pelosi. Later on in our Slate plus segment, we are going to talk to Slate's Mark Joseph Stern about the shocking decision out of the courts this week in a juvenile life without parole case. We're gonna talk about Sonia Sotomayor and we're gonna talk again about court reform. That conversation with Mark can only be accessed by Slate plus members. If you'd like to join us and have access to bonus segments from lots of your favorite Slate shows completely ad free episodes. And to never ever hit a paywall for any of Slate's articles, go to slate.comamicusplus to sign up. Your first month is just a dollar. That's slate.comamicusplus and thank you for supporting the work that we do. If you think about justice, your eyes were probably on the Derek Chauvin verdict this week. It was a moment of profound national, international reckoning when after just 10 hours of deliberating, a jury in Minnesota found him guilty of second and third degree murder as well as second degree manslaughter in the killing of George Floyd this past year. It remains astounding to me that this is the quantum of evidence we need to prove that a police officer recklessly murdered yet another unarmed black man. But perhaps this is a moment for long fought for real, meaningful change around policing and the law. Last summer we spoke to Vanita Gupta after George Floyd was killed. She was actually confirmed this week to be Associate Attorney General of the United States. And in that episode of June 6th, we talked to her about police reform and what needs to happen systemically for that to be achieved. Have a listen. Go back and have a listen to that show for her roadmap of what's needed. We'll link to it in today's show. Notes this week, I can't stop thinking about that video. That video taken by 17 year old Darnella Frazier as George Floyd's life slipped away with Chauvin's knee on his neck. The video becomes the irrefutable testimony in this trial. Margaret Sullivan at the Washington Post described this footage as the star witness. The existence of the video changed the way even the police themselves talked about and eventually testified about this crime for those who could bring themselves to watch it as it played on an unending loop. The video changed the world last summer because it made this verdict seem almost inevitable. Indeed, it says so much that videos were the closing argument for both the prosecution and the defense. But if we start from this proposition that but for the video, there would have been no conviction at all. And I wrote a version of that piece myself this week. We start in the middle of this tragedy because there is a lot that is wrong in a country that demands the spectacle of black death to believe what we know to be true. This isn't just a law problem, although of course it affects the legal system. It's a history problem, it's a media problem, it's a storytelling problem. And so we wanted to start there today with this question of what America needs to see before it will believe black and brown victims and why and who actually bears the burden of that. Today's guest, Dr. Alyssa Richardson, is author of Bearing Witness While Black, African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest Journalism. She's an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School. And her piece in Vox this week really stopped me in my tracks. It's called we have Enough. What's the purpose of sharing violent police videos anymore other than to traumatize black communities? Her piece forced me to really think carefully about the differing burdens of bearing witness. Alyssa, welcome to Amicus.
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A
Thank you for having me.
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B
Alyssa, I think I want to start with this caveat that we are talking as journalists. You're a journalist, I'm a journalist. We are not here today as lawyers to talk about the law per se. But I think this conversation actually has a deep impact on how lawyers think about what journalists bring to justice. I thought maybe we could talk a little bit before we start about just your own background, your own story. You teach journalism, you think about, you study social science. I think you probably work harder on this issue of how the news Tells stories of racial injustice and violence and how that has changed with new technologies, more than most of us think about it. So maybe let's just start with you telling us just a little bit about how you came to this question of black lives and protest and journalism, injustice.
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A
Absolutely. I think my first foray into this arena was really formed by working at JET magazine. And JET magazine, as many people know, is one of the longest standing African American publications at its time, before it ceased to publish. And it is also credited with being the first publication, only publication that was entrusted by Emmett Till's family to publish his lynching photographs. And Mamie Till Mobley made a really difficult decision back then in 1955 to show the world what they did to her baby. Those were her words. And working in that building every single day, knowing that there were people who were present during that time. There were people in that building that I worked alongside who attended that funeral and who could recount to me over lunch just how it rocked the world and how seeing for the very first time that level of violence levied at a child really galvanized the civil rights movement. And just walking around as that, being my first real job coming out of Northwestern's journalism school, really filled me with a sense of purpose to tell black stories, with an incredible level of humanity. And so I spent a couple of my formative years as a journalist there, really learning while Mr. Johnson was still alive from him about what it meant to really publish the full measure of black life. The good, the bad, the things that we'd rather not mention, the things that we're very, very proud of and the complexity of black life. And so then, as I began to see what other things I could do with journalism and really felt an ache to see more young people enter the field, I had a friend who was leaving an hbcu, Morgan State University in Baltimore, and she said, you know, there'll be an opening. Want to come and teach. And I thought, I've never taught before. I myself have only been in the newsroom for six years or so. And she said, but you have been getting a crash course in what it means to make journalism, especially for black folks, being at JET magazine. And she said, how many of us actually get to work there? You know, there's only a few slots, about six staffers, and you're one of them, so please come. And so I interviewed for their job and took it. And I fell in love with just the energy that young people have, and particularly in the city of Baltimore, the frustration that my students had with how the city was being portrayed not only in shows like the Wire, but on the nightly news. And they said, can we do something where we show not just the crime, but just the people trying to stop it, the people who are working in these communities? And so we launched the Morgan Mojo Lab, which was the first mobile journalism lab. And it was at this time that the iPhone for the first time had a front and rear facing camera. And so in 2010, we set out to prove that you can make news with a cell phone. And we were invited around the world. We partnered with Global Girl Media, for example, and taught classes to South African girls, to girls in Morocco. And it was just a fascinating time where we were experimenting with the phone itself. But then on the continent at the same time, I am witnessing, like most other people, the Arab spring. And in 2011, just seeing the effects that the cell phone was having on the people of Egypt who finally got to tell their stories or stories that were coming out of Tunisia or Libya. And I think for me, seeing Muammar Gaddafi killed on camera was a watershed moment for me because I thought were it not for cell phones, maybe I wouldn't have been able to see this kind of thing. And should I be seeing it? And it really sparked a quandary in me. How much do we need to see to be sympathetic? Where do we go with this? For the last 10 years, as the Mojo Lab just ebbed and flowed and took various shapes, I began to study it academically and say, what are the pros and cons of this? In many ways, bearing witness while black has been a blessing because it's opened the eyes of many people who didn't know that systemic police brutality is deadly in many black communities. It's also really perform such an incredible toll on the communities that have been forced to pre litigate their own humanity in this way through video. And so that's where I landed in terms of taking in these videos this last summer. And it's really how my thinking has evolved on the matter. As someone who studied in traditional journalism at first and came up, if you will, in magazine and then experimented with Mojo and saw it grow and then saw it go dark in terms of covering the darker parts of humanity and really questioning, how much more do we need of this?
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B
Alyssa, you have already identified what I think is the beating heart of this conversation that I want to have with you today, which is, what do we do about the fact that citizen journalism, new technology, the ubiquity of the iPhone, all of those things solve a whole bunch of problems, journalistic problems and justice problems and truth problems. But they also, in doing so, create a whole bunch of new problems. And you have been tilting, I think, pretty hard from your recent writing into feeling that the new problems being created are really profound and that we're missing them. That when we say things like, oh, the video was the star of the trial, and thank God for the video that got the conviction, we're not seeing all of these cascading other problems and the downsides of making the video the hero. And obviously, that's why you're sitting here. But I also want to step back out a bit, Alyssa, and put this in the context of your book, because I think your book is about this notion of bearing witness and ways in which bearing witness when you are black in America requires, now has always required telling stories. But telling stories in the context of, as you lay it out, three phases of American brutality. And you break those phases out into slavery, lynchings, and then racialized police violence today. And I think your point is that this act of bearing witness throughout all of this comes both from a place of almost complete powerlessness, but also actually massive power. Right?
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A
Definitely. And I. I'm so glad that you mentioned that this bearing witness, this act of doing this is not new. In the book, I write about these three overlapping eras of domestic terror against black people. And I start with slavery and explain how that morphed into lynching and how that then morphed into police brutality, which is often the first gateway, if you survive it, into mass incarceration. And throughout each of these eras, you have exemplars. You have people who are working very hard to shine a light on what's going on and to scream it, scream about those injustices through whatever technological medium they have at the moment. And so I start with people like Frederick Douglass, who used autobiographies and pamphlets at the time, at first. And he wrote not one, not two, but three memoirs to tell us how horrible slavery was and became one of the most famous men in the world because of his. Not only his writing, but his book tours and his photography and just the way he photographed himself so that people could see him as a human being. He understood very early on the power of imagery, and so he would couple those pictures with his writings and his oratory and really took the world by storm to let people know slavery needs to be abolished. And he was a mentor to Ida B. Wells. And I was very excited to see that, you know, as the different technologies are evolving and newspapers begin to become the way we communicate. She picked up that baton in such a seamless way from him to produce all kinds of lynching reporting. And so she was keeping a tally of all the African Americans who were dying during Reconstruction and beyond as the backlash to the end of slavery rose and as whites who lived in these areas did not want to have to compete with black people for resources. And so her red record earned her a posthumous Pulitzer Prize last year, making sure that people knew just how many lives were being lost. And then I think about, as we move through time, when we think about police brutality, we think about it most visually during the civil rights movement. And I can think of, for example, Bloody Sunday and how that was mediated and how the iconic John Lewis, who he lost last year, was met with a wall of police officers when he was trying to march for black enfranchisement. And so he, John Lewis, knew to use television, which only lasted 15 minutes. Mind you, back then, there was 15 minutes in the evening that you had to make an appeal. And so the visuals had to be right, they had to be compelling, they had to be distressing enough to, again, galvanize people. But again, it wasn't looped on a 24 hour basis. So that 15 minutes of fame, so to speak, is what John Lewis and many others like him knew to use to get people's attention of what was going on in the South. And when we land at the smartphone, we have to recognize that even before the smartphone, there was one incident back in the 90s of George Holiday using his handicam to record Rodney King's beating. And that video turned 30 years old this year. And there's a huge space and time doesn't mean that police brutality wasn't happening. But enter the cell phone and we see Oscar Grant, we see him lying on the platform in 2009, and more than four people filming from various angles. The police officers there abusing him, handcuffed, prone, and then shot in the back. And so these are the images, these are the touchstones that I use in the book to connect these dots that from Frederick Douglass to Ida B. Wells to John Lewis to today's brave filmmakers who are just in the wrong place really at the right time. They're all connected, they're all trying to look, but this is the first time in history that they can look in real time. You see, during slavery, we could not look at the master beating someone. There's an iconic scene in the film 12 Years a Slave, for example, where Chiwetel Ejiofor is hanging and the slaves behind him are sweeping up. They're doing their chores. They're not looking at him. You couldn't, or you would be punished, too. If we think about lynching photography, which was a gloating form of recording or documenting the lynchings that took place across America, white people took those photographs and they made them into postcards and traded them and sent them in the mail. But you don't see black people in those photographs either. They're not huddled in the corner. They're likely fleeing town in many cases. This, however, is the first time that we can look in real time. What Darnella Frazier did is something that none of her ancestors were able to do. She was able to stand there as it was happening and say with her camera, I am not going to leave you. I'm going to make sure people know what happened to you. I'm going to make sure people know your name, and I'm going to try my very best to get justice for you. And by not leaving him alone in his final moments, that, I think, is the indelible mark that I think of most is that she will live with that for the rest of her life. And for me, having African Americans having to pre litigate their own humanity and record it and document those last precious moments in order to get justice shouldn't even be a prerequisite. And so that's really what the heart of my argument is now.
- [18:41]
B
We're going to pause now for messages from our wonderful sponsors. When we come back, more from Professor Alyssa Richardson on what it is to bear witness while black in America. Now, I want to be very clear because I think I've read through this arc of your writing over the years, and you're thinking about this issue, and you really developed a different view. You've changed over time. I think, as you said, you started with the Arab Spring, with really early instances of citizen journalists, the lofty notion that people with iPhones could change the world, that they were going to create a testament to violence, to change to civil rights that would really reshape everything. As you said, I think in your piece, and as you said today, those Emmett Till photographs became engines of the civil rights movement. And then something changed for you in recent years. As I framed it at the beginning, you got to a point where you said, no, these downsides, these costs are simply too many. And now, as we reckon with the downsides, it's too much. I think you wrote that it was actually George Floyd, that that's what broke you. In your words, the video of the murder of George Floyd being played on a loop over and over again was having an effect on you. That really upended this aspirational idea that technology and these videos and this testimony would take us to a better place. Is that fairly accurate? George Floyd, Floyd as the pivot for you personally?
- [20:32]
A
Right. I would say that's, that's very fair. I think that in the, in the very beginning as I was experimenting with mobile journalism and seeing it light up my students faces and just knowing that they probably wouldn't have had a quick entry into journalism without this inexpensive device, I was, you know, very, you know, happy about that. You know, I thought this lowers the barrier of entry for people to participate in making news. They don't need a fancy satellite truck, they can create their own broadcast and as they get even more sophisticated can add effects and all of these things. And also I should mention when I was teaching in South Africa, we were there on a PEPFAR grant, which is an HIV AIDS grant. And so the girls we were teaching were HIV positive and openly. So they wanted people to know how they were born with it, how they live with it and these kinds of things. And one of my students passed away at the age of 18, she had TB. And I just kept looking over the archive of her work. As you know, I was grieving her and I thought were it not for this device, maybe I would never have known her story. Maybe the expensive equipment would have been a barrier for her to do journalism. And I was grateful for the mobile phone at that time. But as I've kind of traveled through time and have seen just the grief that these images have caused my community and so many people saying how many more videos do folks need to see see? It really made me investigate why we needed them in the first place. And I came to some pretty grim elephants in the room that no one wants to mention. And the first being most people believe the inherent, the stereotype of inherent black criminality. And so when they're looking at these videos, they're looking for proof that that person did not deserve their demise, that they were a perfect victim, so to speak. And so what we're saying is I'm going to reserve my sympathy unless you can prove to me that you were truly blameless in this. If there's any inkling that you look like you may have deserved this kind of treatment from police, then I'm going to remain silent. And so I think for a long time that has been what's going on. People have been looking for a modicum of proof that black people weren't doing something that warranted their death. The second thing I would think is that we don't ask this of anyone else, of any other group of people. And that began to bother me greatly, especially when it came to Mr. Floyd's killing. It was just looped on television and replayed like a sports highlight, sometimes with a trigger warning, sometimes not. In many cases, I didn't have enough time to turn off the television before my children could see, and I really didn't want them to at ages 6 and 8. And so it, for me, began to feel like a new lynching photograph. I said, are we celebrating this? In some circles, you know, everyone is not viewing this the same way. Some people may have incredible sympathy. But then I began to see memes popping up similar to the ones that popped up when Trayvon Martin's postmortem pictures went up online. People said they were trayvoning, and they would lay down on the ground like he was and, you know, feign his look of surprise at the moment of his death and have even a hoodie on and Skittles and iced tea. And the same thing happened for George Floyd. I saw white men posed like George Floyd with the knee on the neck, pretending to be Officer Chauvin. And that bothered me because I thought, everyone is not looking at this through the same similar lens. And I started to talk to some of my friends who happened to be white, and I said, how do you feel when you see these? And they said, well, I don't identify with him personally because I'm not black. So I don't see myself the way you see yourself in these videos or see a relative of yours saying, you know, that could be my dad or whatnot. And I certainly don't see myself as the aggressor. I would never do that to anyone. I would never put my knee on somebody's neck. And so I guess I'm kind of, you know, I'm horrified at what I'm seeing, but I can pop in and pop out. You know, it. For me, it is a. An opt in, opt out kind of thing. And they realize during the course of our conversation that that's a privilege to be able to remove oneself emotionally from what you're seeing. And that's why, you know, I observed so many of my colleagues kind of eating cereal and watching this or, you know, just talking about it and having it loop in the background without it bothering them. And I would enter spaces and say, please turn this off. This is a snuff film. And they were just like, whoa. I didn't think of it that way. I'm just trying to educate myself on the issue. I really want to share it so that other people know we're not black. And I said to them, if all of the evidence over the last 200 years that Black witnesses have put together don't convince you that there is a systemic problem of anti black racism in the country, then no amount of video will. And that's when one of my colleagues was saying to me, I think you should write that up, because I never thought of it that way. And I said, for sure. You know, when white people die violently, we don't ask for video. I'm old enough to have worked in the newsroom in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. And I remember seeing people who were white being forced out of the Twin Towers and falling to their death. And I just remember weeping, just being so horrified. And I said, we're definitely not going to show this, right? We're not going to put this online. And people are like, oh, absolutely not. And the videos were scrubbed from the Internet, and rightfully so. And then as a young journalist, I think about Daniel Pearl and I think about how he was decapitated on camera, and I think about, oh my gosh, when I saw those videos again, weeping for his family. And I just. I'm glad that those videos are no longer online because they at one time were circulated greatly. And when I think about any number of the mass shootings that have occurred that have largely affected white people, what have we of journalists done? As journalists, we have tried to humanize the victims as soon as possible without the gory videos. For example, on my coast, the Las Vegas music festival videos were one time online, and they were circulated pretty widely. And then you'd be hard pressed to find them now, and rightfully so. We know that something horrible happened that day, and we don't need the proof. But what I did notice about that coverage is that even though it affected a large number of people, more than 200 people, the media did their very best to find something humanizing about every single person. Whether it was finding out if they had a pet, finding out if they had a hobby, what instrument they played, if they were in college, what was their major, who were their friends. There were videos of them as children, home videos, loving ones, and images that showed me how they lived, not how they died. I never saw one image run on television of anybody prone face down or running in that crowd. It was horrifying. And we didn't need it. And so when we think about even the more recent mass shootings that affected people who are not black, you think about the rise in anti Asian hate crimes and what has happened in Georgia. No one said, let me see the video. Let me make sure that these folks didn't do something to provoke these mass shooters. Maybe something happened. Maybe there's a prior relationship there that may have necessitated this. Let me see some security footage. Maybe this is an old massage parlor customer that is just disgruntled. No one said that. It would be ghastly and indecent to suggest. Even if we think about the FedEx killings that recently happened that affect four Sikh Americans, no one went there and said, let me see those surveillance cameras, the security cameras in the building. Did they do something that seemed threatening? Did they somehow upset the former worker? No. No one says this at all, ever. But when it comes to black people, it's, let me wait and see. I'm going to reserve my judgment. Let me see a video first. And that bothers me. That bothers me the fact that African Americans have to pre litigate their own death because it creates a diabolical cycle. Now, I see in terms of, one, the first step is I have to produce video to show you that my loved one deserved better. Two, I then have to release that video into the public and let it enter a court of public opinion to be picked apart by journalists and scholars like me. And then if it even goes to court, which many of them don't, I have to let a jury look over this. And if I choose to sit in that courtroom to support my slain loved one, I have to watch that video over and over and over again. And then, even if there is a measure of justice or not, that loved one is then entombed online forever. And so those deaths are not removed from the Internet in the way that the deaths of the people who died in 911 or Daniel Pearl, or any number of the white victims of mass shootings are removed. You can Google Trayvon Martin, unfortunately, and one of the very first images that pops up is this postmortem picture. It bothers me. It's wrong. And I think a lot of it is born again of this stereotype that black people are inherently criminal and that the video will show us some exceptions to the rule that we can get behind. And I think after Breonna Taylor's death, we have seen that we don't need video to get behind a case that just feels wrong, where something doesn't smell right. There was no video of Breonna Taylor being shot in her own home. Yet everybody just hearing the details wept. And many people across the nation descended upon her hometown to try to get justice for many, many months. And we know now that that didn't turn out the way that many people would have hoped. And there's an officer who's come under fire for trying to get a book deal out of it. And so again, I ask, who are these videos for now at this point? Are they for people who really are interested in dismantling this form of policing that's killed so many people, or are they just people who are looking at this as entertainment? And at some point we have to ask those tough questions? And the last thing I'll say about that, that's evolved my thinking is when I consider another thing I'll date myself on. I was working at Jet magazine when Nipplegate happened, so to speak, and Janet Jackson had a wardrobe malfunction with Justin Timberlake. He ripped off a piece of her clothing and revealed a bare breast. And the nation just went into this huge uproar. So indecent. We shouldn't have had to see that during our 2004 halftime show at the Super Bowl. And we need to do something. And President Bush, indeed, he revived, or I should say reinvigorated, the Broadcast Decency Enforcement act and increased the fines for companies that aired indecent material tenfold, so you could be fined 10 times more. And many stations instituted delays, whether it was a two or five or ten second delay to try to catch things before they aired to the public. Those were the fallouts of Nipplegate. And people thought, oh, she's so indecent. And so when I thought, why wasn't the looping of Black Death ever considered indecent? That is another thing that really troubled my thinking, is that I had to report endlessly on the fallout of Nipple Gate and would Janet be able to bounce back? And Justin Timberlake recently has apologized for his role in keeping the misogyny going and pretty much being omitted from that narrative. He's spoken up about it, and I think a lot about how we realize so many things much later on and how the media are now just questioning their role in perpetuating misogyny against people like Janet Jackson and Britney with his free Britney Spears campaign. I don't want this to be one of the things that people look back on so, so many years later. I don't want this to go on much longer. I don't want us to be 20 years after saying, you Know, we got a little carried away with publishing low hanging fruit. And that's really what this is. It's lazy journalism. The death is really not the full story. Their full life, how they live their life is part of that story. And I Learned that from Mr. Johnson. But also the city itself needs to be indicted. You need to be looking into why are some of these cities in their surrounding areas a recurring site of death. Minneapolis, for example, bears further investigation. Why has it claimed the life of and its surrounding areas, rather claimed the life of Dante Wright and Philando Castile and George Floyd and so many others who were not on video? Why is that a hotbed? Why is Chicago now on the chopping block again for lying about what happened to someone? Laquan McDonald being the first case that was suppressed by Chicago police. And now this Adam Toledo story coming out is an embarrassment, quite frankly, for the city. And so when I think about certain cities being just horrible places, tough places to be black, I think, why is no one investigating the systemic racism that runs through those cities veins, really picking it apart in ways that are meaningful and that would lead to real change? And then why isn't anyone making sure that we have opposite images of these folks who are laying prone on the ground? Why aren't we making sure that we're showing them why they're alive? And I think some of that is changing. Last night I was really pleased to see Joy Reid's coverage on the readout of Makea Bryant and the fact that I got the chance to see her TikTok and her doing things that little teenage girls do, doing her hair, singing along, lip syncing to songs. I thought this is what a sea change looks like. Yes, we know something horrific happened. Yes, we know that people need to be held accountable and that it bears further investigation. But as we move further along in this history of witnessing, we really need to say these videos should be for the families and they should be for juries and human consumption. I really, I'm hesitant about, unless the family wants you to see it way that Mamie Till Mobley said, I want the world to see what they did to my baby. I think that it really should be up to the families how much of that goes out to the world. Because what we end up remembering about their loved one is the startled look on their face as they were being shot. Look of terror, you know, signs of life leaving them. And no one needs to be entombed like that. And we reserve that only for black folks.
- [35:41]
B
We'll be right back after these messages. And now let's return to our conversation with Professor Alyssa Richardson of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She is the author of Bearing Witness While Black African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest Journalism. So a couple of things, Alyssa, that I was really struck by in your Vox piece from this week and your Atlantic piece from last year. And one is you mentioned this. There is an actual physical re traumatizing that happens to witnesses who see these videos over and over again. As you say, they see it like it's a sports highlight loop. And this is just ongoing violence against black bodies. I was reading an amazing piece by Tracy Clayton making the same point, saying you can't understand the depth of what this does, the actual physical lingering pain of having to watch this over and over, how debilitating it is. And then secondly, and here's where I'm going to date myself, as I was reading you, I was remembering covering Abu Ghraib and the torture photos that came out after it became clear that the Bush administration had this secret torture program. And the photos that came out of American forces torturing prisoners, torturing half naked, badly beaten, hooded prisoners and celebrating it, posing around these bodies and acting as conquerors. And I remember exactly the thing you're describing, this visceral horror and a deep feeling of empathy and compassion for these victims. And at the same time, I remember thinking, wow, we are going to get desensitized very quickly to these photos, that if we see these, we're going to need to see worse ones and more and more gruesome photos to elicit the same sense of shock and horror. And I guess I find myself thinking is part of what is troubling to you right now, that this video of George Floyd is so brutal, it is so painful, it evoked exactly the kind of global response it needed to. And yet would the next one have to be worse? Would it need to be the case that the next video is so much more shocking and horrifying to elicit the same response? And I guess that makes me wonder, first of all, does this question even make sense? But is part of what your fear is that you get desensitized so that the power of these videos in some sense falls away unless you jack up the horror every time?
- [38:43]
A
It makes an incredible amount of sense. And I'm so glad that you're talking about the somatic visceral response that people have to these videos. I mean, I think immediately, as soon as you were giving your example, I thought about a Tatiana Jefferson, who was shot in her home by police during a welfare check. She was playing video games with her relative. And I think about her not only because we went to the same college. And I remember when the press release came out from our school from Xavier University of Louisiana, and it's an hbcu, so we're all pretty close knit. It's a small school. And when we have losses like that, everybody feels it. We're all texting each other like this is horrible, you know, what are we going to do? And I remember being very upset by the fact I didn't see much coverage about her life and her plans. She was a biology pre med student and really wanted to be a doctor and all of these things. And I remember the coverage being very limited to a neighbor who called police for a welfare check because they saw an open door at her house and then the police just immediately shooting into the window as soon as he detected movement. And it was her. And I think about that because months later, as I again could not put this story away, just kept thinking, how's her family doing? I was saddened to find out that her parents died of heart attacks very shortly afterwards. And I thought what a traumatic toll that her death had on their lives. You know, the stories both reported that they were in pretty good health before that, you know, there was no indication that they' already been sick. And the fact that they died of broken hearts just shows that this is an incredibly stressful time for families when they have to see these kinds of images mediated. And the video of a Tatiana Jefferson didn't get as much attention, I guess, because it's only kind of her shadowy figure behind a curtain. And I guess it wasn't gory enough, you know, as you're saying. But for me it horrified me because I was thinking here she is in her own home. And it made me think of so many other women that don't get their deaths televised, if you will, who die under the COVID of night or under suspicious circumstances like Sandy Bland. And it makes you think about the say or nay movement in terms of all the women who are likely to be harassed in quiet places and dark places. And I think that is also the unintended consequence of having these photos is that we don't have enough stories about, you know, women and what they face in terms of police brutality because it happens away from a camera. And maybe news organizations think that it's boring visually because there's nothing to show. And I think that that bothers me as well, the fact that things that maybe don't have video, won't get as much press coverage when they probably should. And so, yes, to answer your question, I think there's an incredible somatic toll on black people when their relatives die from violent police encounters and when they have to see these things over and over again. I, you know, I've talked to many of my students at former HBCUs where I've worked historically black colleges and they've all said these things give me nightmares. And they said, I just feel anxious. I can't even look at the whole thing all the way through. I'm just like, somebody just tell me what happened to summarize it and just to see that sea change in at first their enthusiasm, like, finally we have coverage, you know, people will be able to see what happened to fill in the blank, you know, because there have been so many names. And then, you know, somewhere around 2016, after Philando Castile's ghastly death on camera, on Facebook, live, mind you, the first time one has been live streamed by Diamond Reynolds, brave fiance. My students around that time said, I'm done, I don't want to look anymore. That was the most horrific thing I've ever seen. And his four year old was in the car and I remember being in class, I was teaching a summer school class that summer and it was online and I was asking my students and really regretting we couldn't be in person with each other how they felt seeing that video. And one of the young ladies said it made me physically sick. I got sick and that's the first time I've ever gotten sick watching one of these. And I'm not going to watch anymore. And you know, for me, I'd been trying to because I'm studying this academically compartmentalize and have days to write and days to grieve, days to write, days to grieve. But again, something about this George Floyd video just really broke. Something where I was thinking, the look on this officer's face as he's doing it is just unbothered. He does not seem to care. He doesn't. He could have been squashing a bug for all you know, he cared. And for me just to be able to see with such clarity that the iPhone gave his expressions the nonchalance that the other officers have during that moment. It just broke. It brought me to tears. I could not even watch the entire thing. I remember I said, well, I'm going to try to read the transcript. Maybe that'll be less traumatic because I do have to talk about this in Academic arenas. I need to know exactly what happened. Even the transcript had me weeping as he called for his mom. And as I talked to a number of people who are close to me, they were physically weeping, and they were just like, I just feel so anxious. And just knowing that as a grown man he was calling out for his mom just hurt so much. And one person said in our group chat, do you think she came to get him? Do you think maybe because she was already deceased that she came down to get him? Because we're all moms here. We know there's nothing you wouldn't do. Move heaven and earth to get to your kid if they're in trouble. And that made us all weak. We were all just kind of just weak for that day, just at the thought of, you know, not just the bodily harm we're seeing, but a certain level of spirituality that black people have. And I just thought, this is horrible. And as I began to find out more and more about Breonna Taylor, I did start to have nightmares about that, because I thought, wow, what I study could make me a target. What if the police come in here? How would I protect my children? What would I do? What story would be told? What narrative would prevail? That kept me up a lot. I worry about black journalists and people who are forced to look at these things on the front lines. You had last year, a black journalist arrested live on air, you know, in pursuit. He's telling them, I work for cnn. You know, I'm a journalist. And he still arrested him. And he went to my school, he went to Medill, and we had a huge, you know, session about it so we could air out our feelings and talk about and show him support, but it was still demoralizing. You felt it in your body that at any moment, this could be you. And, you know, to NABJ's credit, the national association of Black Journalists has done a fabulous job of providing not only Covid resources to journalists and having a Covid relief fund to people who are out of work and can't report, but also starting new funds and new groups for journalists on the front lines of this kind of coverage to make sure that they're not traumatized. I've been a member since I was a college student, and I've never seen this level of distress amongst my colleagues. I led the plenary session, opening session for our national conference last year to really give space to that and to let them know that they could be human. It's okay. And there was an outpouring of support of people who said, I'm tired. This is so hard. It's so hard to have to be professional and do standups when the person that you're covering could be a relative of yours. And so all of these ripple effects that we didn't see because we were at first so excited about the tech. And I was one of them. I was an early evangelist. I really started to analyze and pick apart. And that's my job as a scholar to see how things evolve and what is happening here. And is it still good? If it's not good, what else can we do?
- [47:00]
B
Alyssa, what I think I'm hearing you say is there are technical fixes, there are systems fixes. You, I think, suggested earlier. I know you've written this. Legislators could use the Broadcast decency Act of 2005 and start finding TV news and social media platforms that distribute what you're describing as snuff films of black lives, create real financial, structural incentives not to have black people dying on a loop every day on my television and social media. And that's a part of this for sure. You've talked about it a lot, but I think I'm hearing you say something much, much deeper, and I think what you're saying is that we need to locate that George Floyd video, all the videos before the ones that came after, within this really horrifying legacy of lynching postcards, acts of violence perpetrated on black bodies that are done as spectacle and that are performances of white supremacy. And that there's a really deep cultural error that we make when black witnesses need to keep proving again and again that black victims really are victims, as opposed to white victims who are just assumed to be victims. So what I think what I'm hearing you talk about is rethinking bearing witness. You have thought so much about what it is to be black and to bear witness, and you're telling us that white people in journalism, white people, even the law, needs to just do a much better job of bearing witness. Because what we are seeing, what we think we need to see, is constructed in a way that always, always is located within this history of black pain and the spectacle of black pain. And you're telling me that when we say, oh, the video, the video, the video saved the trial, and the video brought justice. This is not, in fact, the kind of bearing witness you're asking for. You are asking, I think, if it can be parsed a little bit for a real solution that is a massive reframe, and it is way beyond just the little kind of tech fixes.
- [49:32]
A
Sure. And I think I'm glad that you said tech fix, because in the beginning when I was thinking of this, I said, what can we do? After I saw this Floyd video looping, I had journalists from around the nation write me after I written pieces about how we should look at these differently. And they said, well, what do I do? I work in a visual medium. How do I tell this story responsibly? Because I hear you and now I'm hurt. I realize I can do better. What is it? Should I just stop the video right before the moment of impact, before the moment of death? And they even referenced a famous Vietnam video or actually photograph of a man who's about to be shot in the head. And they said, is that the kind of thing that we're asking for where before the moment of death or they're about to die, that I can just show up to there? And I remember feeling uneasy about that. And I was like, I guess I think that would be okay. But then even seeing, you know, that approach being taken with Adam Toledo, I was like, I'm still traumatized, so what can we do? And so to answer your question, part of this is, yes, saying we need to reserve. The families need to reserve the right to decide how much gets circulated. And so they should be the ones to decide if they want the world to see what was done to their baby, in Mamie's words. But part of that, in deciding to err or not to err, is also going back to a key failure of journalism. There would be no need to produce proof of one's humanity or proof of one's innocence if journalists did a better job of investigating the police's words. And one of my favorite colleagues, Danielle Kilgo, wrote a piece for the Conversation this week where she's talking about media coverage of police and protests and the blind spots in journalism which are a tendency to go with the police said narrative. And those are her words, police said. And she picks out so brilliantly these police said images in terms of early reports of Adam Toledo having a gun in his hand and early reports of Walter Scott, who was shot in the back lunging for a Taser and had it not been for a fade, and Santana turning that video over to the family saying, that's not what happened. We may never know. And so she goes on to talk about just other cases where with Breonna Taylor, the police report said injuries none. Now we know that that's not true, or that the 75 year old man who fractured his Skull. During that protest in Buffalo last summer, he, quote, unquote, tripped and fell. And so a key failure of journalism is to report, report. Police said this thing happened. And, you know, newspapers across the country parroted initially, before the George Floyd video surfaced, that a man had a medical injury in the back of a squad car and died on the way to the hospital. And so some of our most respected publications went with that narrative. They went with it. And it's embarrassing later when you have video that counters what you said because it shows that the journalists really didn't do a whole bunch of digging to see what happened. And that failure of journalism, taking those law enforcement accounts as fact, is what needs to be worked on. We definitely need to make sure that we are taking that as a source, but that we're also asking questions in the community about what happened and really investigating in the ways that our profession teaches us. One of the first things they say in J School is trust but verify. And one of the old anecdotes is, even if your mom tells you, still investigate it. And I think that me learning that as a journalist and not seeing it play out in the profession right now is very troubling to me as someone who teaches journalism and someone who really respects the field because of the sheer amount of work and heart it takes to get it done right. So in addition to figuring out how much of these videos we show, if at all, I know everyone won't be convinced. Some people will want to still publicize these. I think we should also be asking, how can we ask better questions about what happened here? How can we cultivate networks of other sources that can tell us firsthand what went on on the ground? How can we engage in reporting that's not lazy, that doesn't just take a press release from the police department and cut and paste? How can we make sure that we're doing coverage that investigates the city itself and the precedents that have occurred there in terms of police brutality and trend pieces? And how can we make the city itself a character? I wrote a piece in the Atlantic a while back about Jacob Blake being shot in the back seven times in Wisconsin. And I thought no one thought to investigate that. The Milwaukee area is perhaps one of the worst places to be black in America. It has one of the lowest quality of living for African Americans by all the measures, education, income, and people are 12. Black people are 12 times more likely to be incarcerated there than anywhere else. And so might this lead to how police view the community that they are policing, especially if they don't live within it. These are the kind of questions that I'd love to see journalists not be afraid to dig into and ask. But all too often they're relying on a press release rather than the actual people who live there. And if they do ask a citizen journalist for their opinion, it's only to get permission for gory video. It's not using that citizen journalist as a true expert witness on their own neighborhood. And so I would say the last remedy that I'd like to see is that journalists, professional ones who are members of the legacy media, come to rely on and come to trust some of the high quality citizen journalists that are living in these cities. And that's really what my book Bearing Witness While Black is about. It talks about how do people become these star witnesses, if you will, in their own communities. A lot of people have engaged in this on a long term basis and they know the ins and outs. They go to every city council meeting. Some of them have run for office and wonderful. And so we're seeing a sea change in the way news is made. A lot of African Americans who live in these communities that have been marginalized have decided to create their own ad hoc news outlets and they're independently running and operating and they know things and do things. And so when journalists pair up with them, they're not going to replace you. I think that's the fear. Instead, we should think of it like an EMT model where the citizen journalists are the first on the scene and they stabilize the patient, which is a story. They figure out the five W's, who, what, when, where and why, and then they pass that story off more often than not to legacy media. Who are the surgeons here? They're the professionals and they can take it a step further, adding context and graphics and all kind of archival footage and have more access to people across the country. That's the kind of partnerships that we need, that EMT Dr. Model, instead of emailing someone and just saying, can I have your video? Can I put your video on air? So again, a deeper respect for the storytellers who live in these towns is essential. And so I think we can get there. And all new ideas sound radical when they're first said, but I really just want my radical idea that we engender sympathy for black victims of police violence without video while investigating just as rigorously as we would for white victims. I really want that to be a reality sooner rather than later.
- [57:22]
B
Dr. Alyssa Richardson is author of Bearing Witness While African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest Journalism she's an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School. And her piece this week in Vox is called we have Enough, Enough Proof. Alyssa, I cannot thank you enough for what I think is a really essential reframing and reorganizing of how we talk about these videos and bearing witness.
- [57:52]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [57:58]
B
And that is a wrap for this episode of Amicus. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you so very much for your letters and your questions. You can always keep in touch@amicusatslate.com or you can find us at facebook.com amicus podcast today's show was produced by Sara Burningham. We had research help from Daniel Maloof. Gabriel Roth is editorial director, Alicia Montgomery is executive producer, and June Thomas is senior managing producer of Slate Podcasts. And we'll be back with another episode of Amicus in two short weeks. Take care till then.
- [58:31]
A
There.