The Video Release of Tyre Nichols
Rev. Winford K. Rice Jr, Guest Editorial
The video of Tyre Nichols being made available for public consumption is extremely problematic. It showcases him being maimed and beaten by a mob of Black police officers. It is analogous to a crowd of white citizens gathering for a public lynching and execution of Negroes in the American south during Jim/Jane[1] Crow, who viewed the act of lynching as a mere sport and disregarded the humanity of the person being executed.[2] The public viewing of black bodies being killed or beaten at the hands of police is pornographic – given the rhetoric of police chief Cerelyn Davis around its release and the growing anticipation as if it were a movie premiere – and largely reinscribes white supremacist logic. Considering Davis’s language around the video, her repeatedly framing the officers’ actions as “inhumane” and its release gestures towards a voyeuristic exploitation of blackness that sensationalizes Black death. Further, it desensitizes the American population to the perennial victimization of Black bodies. This construct is critical to the logic of white supremacy.
White supremacist logic illustrates grossly erroneous tropes and images of blackness, which perpetuates the ideology that Black bodies are the subject of the state – regardless of who kills them. This logic is present in some Black officers who unconsciously hyper-police other Black bodies, akin to how Black overseers used to reprimand enslaved Africans during chattel slavery on behalf of the slave master. This dynamic is foundational to the slave-master dialectic[3] and reiterates the notion that the entrapments of white supremacy occupy and inhabit Black bodies, too, not just white ones. It is just as damnable for Black police officers to conduct themselves in this manner as for white police officers. White supremacy is not inherently racialized – it is often masqueraded in Black faces and disguises itself through the mirage or illusion of blackness. The objective of white supremacy is to subjugate and dominate its property – the Black body – by any means necessary, as we witnessed with Tyre Nichols. From chattel slavery to present-day forms of policing, this travesty has reminded the general public that white supremacist logic manifests itself in many ways and unjustly weaponizes blackness.
It is repugnant then for our society to incessantly consume such perturbing images of the dismemberment of the Black body. It highlights and normalizes violence against Black bodies, which is irrefutably traumatizing. Moreover, it reifies basic (mis) conceptions about the Black body ontologically. It suggests that Black life and bodies are disposable when they do not acquiesce to the demands of law enforcement or subscribe to a politic of respectability. Why does the general public need to see “acts that defy humanity” and “a disregard for life” if the culprits of this atrocity have already been held accountable (by being arrested, fired, and charged)? In the past, when there have been growing demands, and public outcry, for video footage to be released of police-civilian encounters, it is because of the elusiveness of local police departments and their lack of accountability for debasing human life. However, this preoccupation with ingesting footage of the Black body being desecrated is foundational to the tapestry of the American project.
Central to this phenomenon is a continuum of state-sanctioned murders against Black bodies (albeit Emmett Till, Rodney King, or Tyre Nichols) and a tacit normalizing of violence against Black people. The release of this video, highlighting five Black police officers mangling Tyre Nichols, is fundamentally a tool of white supremacy, is antiblack, and is damaging to the social imagination and collective consciousness of our nation, particularly Black America.
Winford K. Rice Jr. is an Adjunct Professor of Religion at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
