We shouldn't have to witness George Floyd's killing for it to spark outrage
You know that dream where you’re screaming – really loud – but no one can hear you? Your throat is burning from the effort but still the noise you make won’t register with the people right in front of you. Imagine that nightmare was playing out in real life. That the volume you had to reach to be heard was so high that you lost your voice every time.
After the death of George Floyd at the hands – or, more accurately, the knee – of a white police officer in Minneapolis, we’re left assessing how loud we need to shout about police brutality in the United States. As it happens, we’re turning the dial all the way up: a black man pleads for his life, the white officer kneeling on his neck maintaining a blank expression. An Asian fellow officer stands guard, deaf to anguished cries of passersby pleading for Floyd’s life. Now you hear it.
Imagine again that you were scrolling through Twitter and stumbled across the image of a coronavirus victim, dead in a morgue. Or that images of British soldiers being tortured flickered by in the sidebar of a news website. There are some things that are too painful to look at: like when you stare directly into the sun, its image is stuck at the centre of your vision all day.
But images of black people being killed in the US have become part of the furniture of our lives. We have a compartment for them in our brain now, filed under “so sad, we must do something”. We’ve seen so many of these videos now that we recognise what they are before we hear the story: brown body on the floor, another one of those.
Racism makes something that should be unrecognisable recognisable, the unseeable easy to look at. Showing the moment of someone’s death should be the last resort, when nothing else can cut through; when nothing else can spark a public reaction. That’s where we are with black lives.
I struggle to remember a story of a black person being killed by police (or by “concerned” neighbours, as in the case of Ahmaud Arbery) that has sparked international outrage where there wasn’t a video of the moment of death available. Trayvon Martin was an exception, but it took several days and a strong social-media campaign before the 17-year-old’s story was picked up by the mainstream media. There are countless more instances that go unnoticed and covered up because no one was there with a smart phone to capture the person’s last moments. Sharing footage of these brutal events is no doubt a very powerful tool to have in our arsenal. But it seems to be the only tool.
The problem is the last resort is your last resort because you’ve got no more aces up your sleeve. We’ve turned the dial up to 100. Our eardrums should be bleeding, yet to a lot of people it’s starting to sound like a background hum.
For some of us, these videos are impossible to watch. For a lot of black people, they leave deep personal scars: feeling sick to your stomach while you watch another person being killed, needing to take time out to recover. That’s a normal response.
We won’t stop seeing these videos, and without them progress would, unfortunately, be even slower. But if you do look at them, interrogate whether you feel more numb than you should. Avert your eyes, try to unlearn the normalisation we’ve all inherited.
And watching in itself is not enough. If you want to raise awareness then write to politicians, sign petitions, make direct complaints to police departments, donate to the families of victims if they need help. If you’re white, have conversations with your other white friends about racism.
But let’s all try to get to the point where a black life matters, without having to witness the slow, painful sight of it ending.
• Leah Green is a Guardian video producer
