Resistance is not a game...
Illustration by Public Square Amplified.
NEWARK, NJ—Corporate media stirred up deep dread and apprehension whilst shaping the social and political response of how and what we are to understand and consume in this recent state killing of a human being – Tyre Nichols.
Major corporate media outlets, including public radio, teased out the video of the latest killing of a Black man by police as they would a major blockbuster movie or a ride in a Bezos or Musk spaceship. The narrative braced us for an explosion of wanton and rampant destruction, as gatekeepers are never fully convinced that the participants will not bring down the "big top", in its relatively commonplace fashion.
News anchors and paid pundits of the Black and white neoliberal professional managerial class gyrated through the 24-hour news cycle ahead of the "video release" that one may liken to a red carpet parade. And citizens fixed their eyes, set alarms, and positioned themselves in their social formations to view the primetime release of "Tyre Nichol's police bodycam" and the potential perils of the morning after.
And with the sleight of hand in a comedy of errors, the media becomes the balm in Gilead for its contrived horror show of lives erased and extinguished to serve state and corporate gatekeepers. So, the consumer becomes consumed as the media prepares for the content's consumption and curates the digestive process.
It is the role of state-sponsored violence to deny the pain and dire material conditions in which [the majority of] Black people sit and obfuscate the struggle for liberation from settler colonization. The long-constructed mythology of villains and victims interpreted through a preferred narrow lens of Black-on-Black crime is separated and disappeared from any state responsibility.
For the state, Black people not only exist in discrete militarized confines but also as fully weaponized beings. So, Tyre Nichol's body, in all its blue-blackness-riddled-bloody-red, finds space in an expanding graveyard in this seemingly never-ending labyrinth.
In these moments, history reveals the unanswered questions central to the struggle for liberation. Ms. Nichols calls to us from her pain that is not just one of losing a child but an existential one: to affirm the Black being and identity separate from the state-centric view that is prescriptive of the limitations of Blackness.
Black people, at all the constructed intersections, have lived in a counternarrative grounded in a Black radical tradition of deep resistance to settler colonization that runs through to the current social struggles. Our history of resistance comes through generations over thousands of years, allowing us to reimagine anew continually: to create social and governance structures to design a counternarrative to oppression.
And yes, in our stratified spaces, this killing of Tyre Nichols, like that of Emmet Till, lynching under Jim Crow, and the subjugation and torture under chattel slavery, is experienced in segregated racialized psycho-social political spaces where resistance lives and is readily accessed.
In Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, Cedric Robinson offers a framework for us to think about the curated images of ourselves as subhuman to justify the policing and militarization of our bodies and minds by "racial regimes."
Frederick Douglass bore witness to chattel slavery through his photographs and writings as a citizen journalist that inspired and continues to inspire resistance to inhumanity and injustice. The new abolition movement of today reimagines a radical transformation of policing.
In deciding to lay bare to the world, her son as a witness and evidence of the result of the torture of Black children, Mamie Till seared in everyone’s psyche the standing practice of the long history of terror against Black people. This act of resistance instructs us today; it demands now, as it did then, that everything must change to end the history of violence.
Roadmaps of resistance sit on our bookshelves, in video libraries and on the latest AI portals. Citizen journalism isn't a new form of bearing witness in the fight against tyranny for the oppressed: it has a long history as a tool to carve and serve a narrative for liberation. Why Black Media Matters is one such guide: it explores the critical importance of Black media in the narrative construction of stories like the killing of Tyre Nichols: stories that center humanity and question power.
In the tradition of Thomas Paine, ordinary citizens have used the tools and resources of their time to spark and inspire resistance, revolution, and transformation. Today, local news organizations are using the technologies of the day to center the voices of those decentered by corporate media.
"Some people can be reasoned into sense, and others must be shocked into it." Thomas Paine
