How the Jim Crow internet is pushing back against Black Lives Matter
▻https://theconversation.com/how-the-jim-crow-internet-is-pushing-back-against-black-lives-matte
Police killings of African-Americans on social media have become the visual hallmark of our time. This decade will be recalled through blurry cellphone and dash-cam videos of shootings. But how will it be remembered?
From my scholarship on visual culture, most recently on the visual tactics of political protest, it is clear that this marks a transition that I call the rise of the Jim Crow internet. It’s not all of the internet, of course, but a self-referential, wide-ranging and increasingly influential slice of it, from Breitbart to Blue Lives Matter and all over Twitter.
Visible on cable TV, Google searches, Twitter and other social media, the Jim Crow internet is challenging the way race in general and police violence in particular are understood, pushing back against the gains made by Black Lives Matter.
Who wins this struggle over cultural and political meaning may determine our political future.
Cameras don’t stop violence
Because there is a political and cultural divide as to how we see and what we make of it, cameras in themselves solve nothing.
Terence Crutcher, 40, was shot in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Sept. 19. In the official account, Police Officer Betty Shelby describes getting scared when he “locks his eyes on her.” Under Jim Crow, the allegation of “reckless eyeballing” meant any look from a black person at a white person, especially a woman. It was used to justify deadly force.
Looking a police officer in the eye also got Freddie Gray into trouble in Baltimore, leading to his still unexplained death in a police van.
The dash-cam video in Crutcher’s case suggests that the windows of his car were closed. The indicted shooter claims they were open, causing her to fear that he was reaching for a weapon. Her case depends on how we interpret what she thought she saw, against what the video shows.