On Reading and Antiracism: Hello, Fellow White People
For white people trying to learn about antiracism, this is not the time to burden our Black, Indigenous, and other nonwhite friends, acquaintances, and family members. There are plenty of existing writings, videos, artworks, and opinions out there that we can find on our own. However, more important than what we find is how we read it. I am writing this to offer one means of critiquing the texts we read every day. Reading a book or an article or a tweet isn’t going to do a damn thing if we don’t read with intent, and doing that takes work. Moreover, it can be overwhelming to be confronted with a pile of thick books on heavy topics, and ordering the same ten books is overwhelming small bookstores. I recommend doing the reading, but you don’t necessarily have to throw yourself into the deep end. Changing how you read can make antiracism reading a practice rather than a list.
This is an example of a recent critical reading lesson I did with my class. I share this not as an end, but as a way to show how we can read almost anything and think critically about it. In what follows, I quote a headline on the murder of George Floyd. I will not be sharing any images of Mr. Floyd’s death, but the language may still be traumatizing or retraumatizing for readers. I am a white English teacher, and my perspective is limited, so I don’t recommend that your learning start or stop with me. Instead, what I hope to offer is one set of tools that we can use to unlearn our assumptions as white readers. Too often, the skills we learn in school are not explicitly connected to their uses in our everyday lives. We are taught critical reading of canonical novels and poems, but we are not always taught how that critical reading can be used on the texts we encounter daily. Here is one example.
The Text
This was the earliest headline I found on the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s website. There was no article, just the video with this much context. I have chosen not to link to the video, as I do not think there are benefits to spreading images of the murders of Black people. As newspapers know, the headline is all that most readers will ever see, so it’s always worth thinking about headlines and how they are phrased.
Here we have a sentence: “Video shows man dying under officer’s knee.” The subject of this sentence is “video,” and what the predicate says, it does: it “shows.” This is an active voice sentence, but the actor is “video.” That’s pretty weird, if you stop and think about it. On the one hand, this is a link to a video, so putting the word up front makes some kind of sense. On the other, the inanimate becomes the sentence’s main actor.
There’s a second actor, though, a “man” who is “dying.” In the phrasing here, he is the one committing the action of dying. He’s not the subject’s sentence, but one of its objects, what is “shown” by the active “video.” And finally, in the last clause, we have a location. The action the video shows, the man dying, is taking place “under [an] officer’s knee.” How did the man get there? What part of him is under the officer’s knee? The sentence cannot say. The officer’s knee is a setting.
Notice that this is a genuinely weird way to describe what the video captured in its active role. If you were describing this incident to a friend, this is not how you would likely describe it. But we’ve gotten used to weird, tortured phrasing in headlines. I asked my students who was the main actor in the incident, rather than the headline. Everyone agreed it was the officer. They also noticed that it was weird that no one is named in the headline.
So I asked them to rearrange the sentence in a more natural way. How would they describe what it was saying? One answer was essentially “Officer kills man, shown in video.” I am paraphrasing, but this is basically where we landed. I then mentioned that a newspaper may not have the legal ability to be quite so blunt, but even so, there are options other than what the headline writer chose.
If the newspaper is being very cautious about cause and effect (and police unions are litigious and have more legal power than the average individual or their family) they might say something like “Officer kneels on man, man dies.” This is active voice. The officer is the subject. He does an action: kneeling. It still ascribes the death to the man, rather than to the officer, but the order of the sentence implies a connection between the kneeling and the death.
There’s other missing information that seems important. “Officer kneels on man’s arm, man dies,” is very different than “Officer kneels on man’s neck, man dies.” In the first, we might reasonably assume that the primary cause of death was not the kneeling. So revising our headline again, we move to “Officer kneels on man’s neck, man dies: VIDEO.” I’ve tried to keep the newspaper’s concerns in mind here. They want people to click on their video, so I put it in all caps. This isn’t the phrasing I would use in describing Officer Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd to someone else, but I am not a newspaper.
There’s more information that seems pertinent in the context of ongoing protests against racist policing of Black people who are disproportionately subject to extrajudicial police killings and arrests: the races of the “officer” and the “man.” Revising yet again: “White police officer kneels on Black man’s neck; Black man dies: VIDEO.”
There’s more we could do with this headline, but let’s take a look at the subhed. First sentence: “Warning: Video contains graphic images some viewers may find disturbing.” This is more language and phrasing that is familiar in the context of news reporting, but what I want is for us to be able to step back and notice how weird this language actually is.
Firstly: “graphic images.” “Graphic images” is a euphemism, and a very odd one once you actually think about it a little. I asked my students what it means. They said “violence.” This is correct. It is commonly used to refer to images of violence (or sex), and yet that’s not what it literally means. I started out in art school, and honestly, “graphic images” could refer to almost any images. We’ve gotten used to this phrase, but it’s a phrase that deliberately provides very little information.
Why not say “violent images”? Moreover, why not say what exactly the images will show? You don’t need to describe it in detail. You can say “Video shows a man’s death.” (That’s still assuming the caution that prevents newspapers from saying “a man killing another man.”) That specificity would help viewers. Some viewers might be able to view images of a man being thrown to the ground, which is one sort of violent image, and not be able to watch images of a man being killed. Trauma does not hit evenly for every sort of violence.
And violent images have context! I am okay with watching a fake murder on TV if it isn’t too gory. (Too gory for me is not that gory for someone else and waaaay too gory for a third person.) I am not okay with watching a real living human actually die, even if it’s without gore. So it’s not really enough to say that an image is violent, because violence without context is meaningless.
My point is that the words in the subhed simultaneously have a meaning we mostly understand because of repeated use, and that they are an odd euphemistic choice that is less useful than more specific language. Just because they have been repeated to the point that they are largely understandable does not mean that they are good choices.
Now let’s look at the second sentence in the subhed. Yes, this is a long time to spend on just a few sentences, but this is part of my point about reading: critical reading takes time and effort, but it can be applied to very small portions of text, and while it takes a while to write it out like this, once you’re doing it, it can take very little time to do.
This is the last sentence of the subhed: “‘My video proves what really happened’ to George Floyd, said the woman who was among several witnessing the incident.”
As my students pointed out, based on everything else we have here, we don’t even know who “George Floyd” is, let alone what is supposed to have “really happened” to him. What is “the incident”? Well, if we go by the grammar of the headline, it’s a man dying under an officer’s knee, an action that the man somehow committed after he mysteriously ended up under that knee.
By cutting the quote the way they did, the headline writer manages to avoid saying what the unnamed and uncontextualized woman thinks it shows. All evidence of racism and murder are missing from this headline. Stuff happens, somehow, and a video documents it. This does a tremendous disservice to readers’ understanding, especially when, as we already know, most readers will only see this much of the story.
This isn’t all we can read into the headline. There are more questions we can ask, more things we can notice, more ideas that can be raised.
I will be breaking down other headlines and short paragraphs in other posts, ending with a series of questions I find useful to ask when I am trying to read critically. If there’s a particular text you’d like me to look at, please let me know.
