In this op-ed, Lincoln Blades explains the mental toll videos of Black people like Ahmaud Arbery being killed can have.
On the morning of Tuesday, May 5, I sat in front of my laptop scrolling through Facebook, searching for entertainment. The scrolling was typical, but the reason was not: I was trying to find a distraction from the pain of death, grief, and distance brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. While looking at a battle-rap group page, I came across an untitled 36-second video, the still shot showing a car dashboard. The only text accredited to the video was an innocuous caption reading, “wow, this is crazy.” I clicked play, assuming I was in for a TikTok dance gone wrong or an image of an animal cavalierly strolling through a residential neighborhood.
What I actually saw was the brutal killing of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery.
In an instant, I was transported back to July 7, 2016, a day that forever changed me personally and professionally — the day I had to write and report on the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Black men who were fatally shot by police on camera. Videos of both men’s deaths hit the net within 24 hours of each other, showing Black men violently and explicitly dying on camera.
Prior to that day, I had spent many years watching these types of videos and reporting on just how often Black people died at the hands of a police officer. I carefully consumed these videos because I believed they were important. They provided incontrovertible evidence that Black bodies were being subjected to prejudice and cruelty that went far above enacting law and order. I scrutinized every second so I could definitively report exactly where justice was replaced by anti-Black bloodlust.
But on that July 7th, I realized the mental, emotional, and psychological toll that watching Black people die over and over was having on me. Visuals of the blood-soaked wounds were stuck in my mind, and the sounds of wounded men struggling to take their last blood-choked breaths while the horrified cries of their loved ones filled the night air became unshakeable.
These videos no longer felt like proof of the violent racism we already know exists, they felt like a draining exercise in trying to prove the humanity of Black people — by watching them die.
The video of Arbery's death, which has now gone viral, triggered a debate about the merit of watching these brutal depictions. Some folks have argued that the video needed to be shared to prove to the entire nation that this brutality still exists, regardless of the toll that repeatedly watching Black death has on us. But the truth is, in 2020, there is absolutely no reason to show racist and violent imagery displaying the destruction of Black bodies — especially when it carries such an exhaustive mental, emotional and psychological toll on Black people.
Throughout these online debates, one school of thought is that these images are necessary for white people, so they can understand the violent realities that Black people deal with in our society. But that logic is flawed mainly because imagery of anti-Black brutality is not new. Since 2010, I have been reporting on the summary executions of Black men, women, and children throughout North America. At this point, countless names have been memorialized in hashtags accompanied by vile imagery of their final living moments. We carry around devices that we check compulsively, that can literally link us to an extensive database of unarmed Black death. These videos no longer exist to prove to white people that 400 years of suffering continues (a point that shouldn’t have had to have been proven in the first place). Non-Black folks who, by now, don’t believe that systemic brutality exists disproportionately against Black people simply don’t want to believe it.
The other school of thought, argued mainly by Black folks to other Black people, is the Emmett Till point: we shouldn’t shy away from showing how violent white supremacy personally impacts us. Till, a 14-year-old boy who was savagely murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman (which was eventually revealed to be a lie) had an open casket funeral at the request of his mother. Despite the wounds he suffered from being mercilessly beaten, having his eye gouged out, his ear clipped off, and being shot in the head, his mother, Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley, called the prominent Black magazines and newspapers of the time saying “I think everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till.” And she was right, as that image of a 14-year-old Black baby being cruelly tortured and murdered, has been widely credited for sparking the civil rights movement.
While that imagery was vital in 1955, we stand on the revelation of these hard truths some seven decades later, and the progress that resulted from it. In 1955, ten years before Black folks would see the Voting Rights Act, and 13 years before the Fair Housing Act, while most of the Black community was being subject to racist policies like Jim Crow laws, redlining and rampant lynching, our collective mental health was traded off for the urgency of basic rights and freedom—and it was worth it. Today, with all that we now know and all that we’ve uncovered about the reality of racialized violence, we’re not at a crucial point in history where we don’t have to intentionally or unintentionally neglect our mental health for the welfare of the collective community. In fact, in light of the emotional and psychological burnout we’ve recently witnessed in Black activists, it is critical to discover methods to find balance so we can continue to work toward justice — an undertaking much larger than sharing a video. And that conversation is more necessary today than maybe ever before.
From the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, various versions of the phrase “we’re all in this together” have become the rallying cries of solidarity as we deal with both the virus and the psychological and physical effects of being under stay-at-home orders. But, as always, while we may be facing the same storm, this nation’s societal inequities have ensured that we are not all in the same boat.
Though the entire globe is dealing with heightened levels of anxiety, increased stress, loneliness, depression, and grief, Black folks have the added stressors of being the community most impacted by COVID-19 deaths. We are more likely to live in viral hotspots, more likely to lose our jobs and experience pay cuts and wage losses, and our communities are being policed far differently for social distancing infractions than more affluent, white communities. Recent data for parts of Ohio analyzed by Propublica shows that Black people were at least four times as likely to be charged with violating the stay-at-home orders as white people. To have to deal, especially in this moment, with the sadness, hopelessness, disgust, and blinding rage that these images instantly produce in us is to subject ourselves to unnecessary mental and emotional suffering.
Right now, we are living through a period of unprecedented mental anguish. The one thing we can do as a community is to rally around each other to fight injustices while being cognizant of the toll those injustices are having on our minds, our bodies, and our souls. While true equality is still a distant goal, we’ve come far enough to make considerations our ancestors couldn’t. It will be an inconsequential victory if we allow this type of activism to free our bodies, only to consume our souls.
