"An Ancient American Network Of Interpersonal Fraud"

Wesley Morris, New York Times, June 3, 2020:

The most urgent filmmaking anybody's doing in this country right now is by black people with camera phones. Their work comprises a ghastly visual mosaic of mistreatment, at best, and whose victims are international symbols of mourning ... Art is not the intent. These videos are the stone truth. Quaking proof of insult, seasick funerals. Livestreamed or uploaded, or suppressed then suspiciously unearthed as found footage. Last week, the archive grew by two, and now the nation's roiling.

First, a white dog walker called the police on Christian Cooper, a birder in Central Park. Her unrestrained dog disturbed this man's peace. He asked that the dog be leashed (the park's rules, not his) and its affronted owner told him that if he didn't stop recording their interaction she'd tell the police that an "African-American man is threatening my life." He kept rolling — actually, he kept directing. "Please call the cops," he calmly instructs her. "Please tell them whatever you like." And she does.

But it was how she told on him that you don't forget. Three times, she informs the dispatcher that this man is her emergency. By the last round, she's made herself hysterical. ... When the call is over, Cooper thanks her — for now endangering him, for living down to herself, for quite a performance of umbrage. This woman has dialed 911, but she's also got access to an ancient American network of interpersonal fraud. She knows the advantage of her role. So, of course, did he. That's why his camera's on. In case. The video would be the counterfactual that might save his life.

That's not how it went for George Floyd, that same Monday, 1,200 miles away. In this video footage, captured, in part, by Darnella Frazier, the Minneapolis police officers who bore down on his body appeared immune to the cameras trained on them, immune to his gasping pleas for air and his mother. There is a madness in how calm they appear as a grown man rasps and begs. For stretches, one officer stands there like an inanimate object that refuses to hear the bystanders beseeching on Floyd's behalf. Another officer had rested his knee in the man's nape, comfortably. For more than eight minutes — eight of George Floyd's last — it barely moves, as though that's what God intended napes to be, a kneeler.

The Cooper and Floyd videos capture ancestral false alarms and overreactions, centuries-old hatreds, miserable inequalities. (The dog in one video fares better than the human being in the other.) These videos are part of some newish optic tradition that dates back, at least, to those abstract camcorder images of the L.A.P.D. going to town on Rodney King, stories black people share to keep one another safe and warn others; bystander evidence, filmed by all kinds of people, that has to embarrass the wheels of justice into their slow grind. It's video that is currently breaking open the United States once again.

This country manufactures only one product powerful enough to interrupt the greatest health and economic crisis it's probably ever faced. We make racism, the American virus and the underlying condition of black woe. And the rage against it is strong enough to compel people to risk catching one disease in order to combat the other — in scores and scores of American cities, in cities around the world. They're a tandem now, the pandemic bold-underlining-italicizing what's endemic to us. The underfunded hospitals, appalling factory conditions and unequal education were readily evident last year, before Covid-19. Now, the inadequacies and inequalities expedite death and compound estrangement. The low-wage workers have been deemed essential yet remain paid inessentially. The numbers of black, Latino and Indigenous people infected, deceased and unemployed are out of whack with their share of the population. And the president has yet to offer his condolences, in earnest. ...

This explosion seems meant to occur in the year in which we saw a video of a 25-year-old black man, a runner named Ahmaud Arbery, chased down by white men in Georgia and shot dead, men who went on about their lives for months after.

It had to happen in a year in which police killed a sleeping black woman, Breonna Taylor, wanted on suspicion of nothing. It had to be in the year of lockdowns, masks, in-a-blink job loss and funerals no one could physically attend. It had to be the year whose numbers refer to perfect vision. People could, perhaps, see anew that, when it comes to certain white people, what we call freedom is basically impunity. Freedom-plus. Americans have watched that plus burn outside their homes.

Impunity permits politicians and TV hosts to lie about whatever and the police to shoot rubber bullets at nonprotesters as if they were squirrels. ...

George Floyd was suspected of having used a counterfeit bill at a corner store, which means his life was worth less than money. I heard her thinking through an ultimatum now being laid down in the streets of this country. You still think we're monkeys, monsters, beasts, thugs, the living dead, minorities? If you don't know that a black man, calling for his mother, his dead mother, is so desperate for somebody to hear him that he's screaming for ghosts — or fears he's in the process of becoming one; if you don't know that we, too, can run for leisure and sleep for rest; if you don't know that this skin is neither your emergency nor an excuse to invent one, that the emergency has tended to be you — by now? — you will never, never, never . . .