Tackling Police Brutality through the Lens of Time
In the conversation on how to combat police brutality, many solutions have been placed on the table: body cams, demilitarization of police, creating movements, and/or studying and understanding structural racism and its relation to policy. But what about time travel? A desperate and comical question initially, but through the lens of fiction, it has been realized.
With the 2019 reboot of Twilight Zone, produced by Jordan Peele, an episode titled, “Replay” introduces time travel as a mechanism for, not just change, but overcoming. The main character Nina, played by Sanaa Lathan, uses a magical camcorder with the ability to rewind time as a tool to save her son’s life from an overzealous police officer.
In Netflix’s new afro-futuristic film See You Yesterday, time travel is used as social commentary on the damages of police brutality. C.J. Walker, played by newcomer Eden Duncan-Smith, weaves her love of science with her desperate need to save her brother by creating a time-traveling machine to go back to the exact moment her brother becomes a casualty in an unjust police shooting.
Each of these characters reaches for a different pathway of survival for the one they love; but with every new vignette, they face the same consequences, which becomes a metaphor for the continuous loop of police killings.
“The defining feature of being drafted into the black race is the inescapable robbery of time,” says writer/journalist, Ta-Nehisi Coates. “The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in moments,” he continues. Moments: that is what these characters are aiming to shift. The moments where things go wrong, the moments where a different decision can be made, the moments that we often never get back.
Brittney C. Cooper, professor of Gender Studies at Rutgers University, offers, “if time had a race, it’d be white.” A stark reminder that even a universal concept such as time, which affects everyone, is primarily characterized by white supremacy.
In both of these mediums, the dilemma of police brutality is cyclical. When it seems the characters are close to solving their predicament, another misfortune arises or the same problem comes in through the back door. This is the makeup of structural racism; a direct systematic result of white supremacy. Death becomes fate when we are imprisoned by an iron-fisted system that Is dead-set against our progress in any form even in fiction.
Neither CJ nor Nina have the luxury of letting go of the past. They are tethered to the idea of change that is not only possible but necessary. Black people are especially held captivate by our past because the historical trauma of slavery is still ingrained in the systems we move within.
While See You Yesterday leaves the audience to come to their own conclusion on what happens to the main character, “Replay” offers the solution of fellowship and a safe haven in the form of Tennyson University, an HBCU. It is at the gates of Tennyson that Nina and her son have the final showdown with the police. This time they are accompanied by a sea of black people wielding their own cameras. Nina no longer depends on the rewind feature of her camera to save them, instead, she presses record, which becomes far more powerful.
About the Author: Zainab Karim is a Chicago-based culture writer and adjunct professor of English and Literature.
