Hyper-Visibility and the Panopticon
Capitalism’s Commodified Black Death
“America, America / now I’m coming, Africa /
My death is money.” — Stefan Burnett
History
Can we all agree that life for Black people is still awful, even after Martin Luther King assimilated us into a “burning house”? Can we agree that, regardless of how many people knew MLK’s name by his death, our living situations are still below the standards of the average Amerikan citizen?
Can we all agree that #BlackLivesMatter and Shaun King are popular, and notorious? Can we agree that, regardless of how much Black death at the hands of police they’ve documented and exposed, no matter how much is consumed by white liberals, conservatives, communists, Nazis, anarchists, and others alike, the lives of Black people are still subpar? No?
Also, did you know that ancient Rome and Greece were both slavocracies? Rome especially. They often held slaves from “exotic” places outside their boundaries like Georgia (the country). Soon their empire would span many of these “exotic” places, but nevertheless, they were still Georgians. During that time, the women were often described in history books in grotesque ways — Amazon women being described as women who would burn a breast off just to throw a spear farther, complementing the “warlike” spirit of their peoples.
All lies.
As time passed and these peoples were assimilated into the Roman Empire, they became objects of beauty — still sold as slaves, though.
That was the hyper-visibility of the day, and still is today in the midst of the range of Black women in the media as models and sex-icons. Even with the increasing representation we have recieved, we continue to be victims of an efficient, productive cryptogenocide that only benefits non-Black people.
PS if you are looking for citations, here is some recommended reading by renowned, NYT best-seller Nell Irvin Painter: “History of White People”
Capital
“… as Eden Osucha contends in “The Whiteness of Privacy: Race, Media, Law,” mass media are technologies of racialization, and the legal right to privacy is a response to this racialized, mediatized publicity. Osucha also links races and faces as sites of exposure through an insightful analysis of the mass-mediated and commodified faces of two women: Nancy Green, the first model for the mass-produced Aunt Jemima pancake mix, and Abigail Roberson, the “anti-Jemima,” an upper-class white woman whose image was used, against her wishes, to advertise flour. Looking at the historical emergence of privacy as a right, most famously articulated by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in “The Right to Privacy,” Osucha argues that media publicity constitutes a technology of racialization. That is, the right to privacy, conceptualized as a property right in the self, emerged in response to the invasion of the domestic sphere by new visual technologies and media, an invasion that threatened to expose and “sell” all individuals as African Americans had historically been exposed and sold. She writes, “The specter of injury to privacy that haunts ‘The Right to Privacy’ and Roberson and the laws that followed in its wake thus finds more concrete expression in the media depictions of people of color in that era, images generically shaped by abjecting and frequently grotesque racial stereotype.” Focusing like González on race and commodification, Osucha emphasizes the historical dimensions behind this commodification. The right to privacy is inextricably linked to the construction of whiteness as inviolable and, in contrast, of other bodies as “natural” objects of visual consumption. Osucha’s analysis therefore reveals that the threat — or, conversely, what we might call the democratic potential — of mass media lies in the ways in which they threaten to racialize, to expose, everyone.” — Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Can we agree that we live in a dying capitalist society which has adopted overt fascism as its means of self-preservation?
There are 927 results on CNN.com for the search black african shot, and counting. CNN gets paid for every hit it makes— for every Breaking News opportunity it takes, to make a spectacle of Black death.
At the same time, trauma envy becomes the main dish at every “person of colors’” examination of Black existence, and suddenly “oppression olympics” are only reserved for anyone who isn’t Black.
Suddenly, everyone wants in on oppression.
Suddenly, oppression is a sort of wearable cloth one can put on and take off whenever it benefits them.
It becomes a mode of attack, as opposed to a self-defense in the tradition of Black radicalism.
It becomes predatorial, like capitalism.
It seems like capitalism has finally got its fingers in everything, going into full gear and commodifying even metaphysical things humans do, such as death. That’s fascism for ya.
To be fair to Shaun King, it does help get your point across when you’re a celebrity — emphasis on your, as opposed to our, point. If that’s your game, then sure, play the social capitalist game, get your paper [revolutionaries] up, boo…
Empathy
Non-Black peoples say Black hyper-visibility is a privilege.
Imagine if we could simply trade places for a moment— a moment of not having to watch our family die on the television. Imagine watching non-Black peoples go through the same frustration of watching their mothers, fathers, and siblings die on Twitter and Facebook, watching racists come out of the woodwork, heckling them to prove that their suffering is Real… Teasing trauma out of the subaltern can be so delicious to the colonizers of the Fourth World.
Why is it something to fight for?
Personally, I would sacrifice this for many moments of recuperation. As a naturally pro-active organizer, I would prefer to not go online to watch a video of the next Black person being shot to death by a system the majority of Amerika doesn’t even believe exists, because I already know it exists— and because I have gained nothing but anger, frustration, a tendency to lash out at racists without a second thought, and some paranoia from hyper-visibility.
How does it benefit me for others to know as well? Do they really know what it’s like to see fungible, fixed capital [Black people] get murdered on television, knowing it could be them someday?
I highly doubt it.
Hyper-Visibility =/= Visibility.
HYPER-VISIBILITY is what Black people have: commodification, fascist representation thru dictatorship of the (often times problematic) majority populations within Black communities, silencing minorities in Black communities.
Visibility = what whites have. It invisibilizes nonwhite, non-normative peoples. When you’re nonblack+nonwhite, realize that Black hypervisibility silences and thus invisibilized Black, neurodivergent women like me. How many Black schizotypal transwomen have you met? We out here tho…
So don’t waste your time thinking that Black hyper-visibility = visibility… It does not. If anything, hyper-visibility is just as painful as invisibility — because it IS invisibilizing.
Awareness
“If whites and anti-Black parasites alike are so ‘ignorant’ about out state and need ‘awareness’ why does EVERYONE seem to have a firm opinion after each protest? Almost like their gaslighting tools had been spoonfed to them during their entire neuroplasticity phase…” — Jumi
What good does awareness do if we already know our realities intimately? I guess if the goal is to stir anger in The People, it could be beneficial to an extent. But at a certain point, action is necessary. Why isn’t action possible without the suffering?
No, I don’t think we can convince white supremacists that we are in pain, because there is no “we” in their eyes. To a white supremacist (read all white people), we are not human.
Neither do I think CNN would want us to end this ongoing fight to survive once and for all, for they would lose thousands of minutes of Black death— consumable, wholesome Black death.
I’m also fairly positive Shaun King would be very boring without police brutality (which, mind you, is more than senseless shooting; alas, Shaun King will never tell you this because it’s not his brand of Black death).
Necropolitics
All in all, it’s fair to say that these dead Black people have no say in how their deaths are consumed or used to further a cause they died for. Martyrs, their deaths become symbols, and like AAVE they are eventually commodified into consumable tools to further the cause of anyone who claims proximity to Blackness.
I’m sure the state social media, and television producers are happy that these tools are so readily available — axes begging to be picked up and grinded before the skirmishes of the day, and the next, and the next. Shaun King is the distributor, alongside CNN, and Black “allies”. What would we do without them…
This is depressing. So is capitalism. What is to be done?
Is hyper-visibility more than a commodity?
