It was the summer of 2020. The two weeks off of school had morphed into a semester behind a screen and a vacationless summer had set in. I had nothing but time and a screen to connect me to the outside world and was horrified to see the footage of George Floyd with a boot on his neck on my TV screen. I turned to posting infographics with fervor, hoping that my following of other teens would spread awareness on police brutality. It was during this that I was subjected to seeing more violence against Black bodies through my screen, far too many to name. I stumbled across video after video constantly invading my social media scroll. Although I cannot name all the victims, I couldn’t divorce their circumstances from my own life. In them I saw my father, a calm man who loves mowing his lawn, pinned down face first in concrete. I saw my uncles, not hosting their normal family barbecues, but being shot by police. I saw my friends, being told to stop resisting despite standing still. This violence, being thrust into my feed under the guise of activism, did nothing more than traumatize me. By the end of that summer the posting and reposting of images of violence committed against Black bodies became so commonplace that each new murder displayed on my screen shocked me less and less. At a certain point, I stopped acknowledging what they were: gore videos.
A gore video is a genre of content that aims to capture violence done to the human body. These videos can be consumed online for a myriad of reasons, but there is a subset of people that consume them for pleasure. Those that engage with this content can become desensitized to violent content over time, and some may even grow to perceive the violence as desirable. In the case of Black bodies, this type of content can quickly veer off the course of activism and into the normalization of violence against Black bodies.
Our society has a history of systemic violence against Black bodies. Slavery set the course by normalizing the beating of Black people, lynchings done in the Jim Crow era were often spectacles and family affairs, and sexual violence done against Black men and women often goes unpunished. The Black body has often been seen as a spectacle, and the violence done to it as little more than entertainment. While I doubt those who repost videos of Black people facing police violence have the intention of promoting this violence as a spectacle, I fear that the oversaturation of these images is just that.
The overconsumption of this content can provoke two types of responses: fear and apathy. The fear is the initial response, a natural reaction to gruesome content. This fear can run deeper for Black people, like myself, as these videos are more than just content. The videos reflect the most brutal outcomes for us and our peers. When consuming this content, it is easy to spiral into anxiety because it brings up some of our deepest generational traumas. The legacy of violence against Black bodies has left a scar on the Black community that videos like those only reinjure our collective consciousness. For those outside the community, an eventual response to the overexposure to these videos is apathy. In order to cope with an overexposure to violent content the brain can disconnect emotionally from what it is witnessing. When this process occurs, the videos being spread lose their efficacy as tools for activism. Instead of making people aware of police violence, they normalize this violence, allowing people to become disengaged from the movement.
I know the majority of people that reposted these videos are not exactly activists, and most of the posters are well meaning people. I am not writing this to denigrate well-meaning laypeople who reposted these videos in a desperate attempt to encourage critical thought in their peers, but instead as a warning to those who want to engage with activism for future movements. There is a line between activist content and gore, and that line is far thinner than most realize. Those that wish to repost these images should do so sparingly. When the content is posted, make sure to place trigger warnings before the post, so those who may not be in the right headspace can avoid the content. When it comes to disturbing content like this, remember that a little goes a long way. A video depicting extreme or even moderate violence can have a massive emotional impact, and that should never be underestimated. For those that choose to consume this content, I encourage you to set boundaries. Limit the amount of gore you consume, if any at all. And remember, you have permission to look away from these images, or even skip over them if they are too triggering for you.
