“[White supremacists] can be cocky about their cruelty because of their certainty that they will be protected by the system they enjoy supremacy within. Their showiness makes their impunity even more real,” writes RTraister
Photo: Getty Images In the midst of the most eruptive, widespread, and hopeful uprising against systemic racism and injustice of my lifetime, white supremacy is once again staring straight into a camera and declaring that nothing can break its deadly grip on power.
These political shows of force are the hallmarks of the era in which we are living, reminders of what’s not so different from an American past many would like to think of as more undeniably racist than our present. But they recall something very present, very recent: the cold face of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, staring brazenly into the cell-phone camera held by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier as she captured the murder of George Floyd.
Through generations, the voyeurism, the assuredness that an audience is looking on, has been a key component of racist brutality. As Melanye Price recently wrote in the New York Times, “Black death has long been treated as a spectacle. White crowds saw lynching as cause of celebration … their children would pose for pictures in front of swinging corpses, and those photos often became postcards.
In the end, he was right, and those who predicted that his flagrant exhibition of racism and misogyny would spell his end were wrong. All around us, aesthetic tributes to dominance are coming down: On Wednesday, Trump defended the Confederate monuments that are being defaced, crushed, and removed by protesters. Those monuments were themselves this kind of display of public power, as the historian Emily Farris has noted, built not immediately after the Civil War, but as Reconstruction ended.
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