"What he didn’t say is that Britt’s portrayal is refracted through viral news reports of Antoine Dodson, Sweet Brown, and Charles Ramsey. These videos are several years old and have been discussed at length in the pop culture sphere, but because new videos, like those featuring Michelle Clark, Michelle Dobyne, and Hazel London continuously make headlines, the original trio are still potent cultural references, even now. Dodson’s known for giving an interview after he helped thwart an attacker who tried to rape his sister, Sweet Brown for a statement she gave soon after her apartment complex caught fire, and Ramsey for the interview he gave to a scrum of reporters moments after rescuing Castro survivors Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight. The way Britt’s character is presented (poor, dressed casually, talking off-the-cuff) parodies the viral stars when they were first caught on camera by a news crew. And the Gregory Brothers’ remixes provide a particularly disorienting filter of the white gaze, in that they give a pleasing, innocuous-seeming lift to grave accounts of violence and danger. Think of the Gregorys’ remixes as modern send-ups of blues tunes transformed into dancing ditties, although the songified blues use real-life trauma and lyrics comprised of formal testimony...
Giving an interview to a news station is customary after tragedy; what’s less common is that people become permanently enshrined for their trauma, unless of course, they’re black. The ways trauma is repackaged quickly after interviews are recorded is a result of our fast-moving media cycle. And it’s true that black internet stars have talked to news reporters in memorable ways that make them subject to public fascination. But it’s also true that black viral interviewees hardly had any time to grieve before their feelings were repurposed for the zeitgeist, which is unseemly given how, seen through the mainstream white gaze, black pain has been romanticized (the “race” movies of the early 20th century) or made comical (minstrel shows)...
Returning to Hannah Nelson’s claim, that “we are a nation primarily because we think we are a nation,” is crucial to understand a constant in black culture: the white gaze. Black nationalism, not race, seems to be contingent upon shared experiences or at least a collective perspective, and I don’t think we’ve had a unified view since the civil rights movement, if then. However, the repetition of respectability in the critiques of the viral videos, or that black people should be aware of how they present to the world at all times, is proof that perception continues to be an issue many black people navigate."
https://www.buzzfeed.com/nielaorr/black-trauma-remixed-for-your-clicks?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Longform%20417&utm_content=Longform%20417+CID_0b43a5edad3812a75f8bcb7323d6385f&utm_source=BuzzFeed%20Newsletters&utm_term=.cxe0arK6m#.wuxPpM60N
This surveillance? So real. Sometimes I will say something witty, or do something unusual, out of the evidently false assumption that I am part of whatever is going on, and the friends I am with - good friends who know me well - will stop and stare for a moment and suddenly have re-oriented themselves as my audience and when they laugh it is to each other and it's a dizzying separation.
And I think this exists at an interpersonal level too, where we momentarily marginalize each other as 'the forgetful one' or 'the childhish one' or 'the fashionable one' or whatever and spin narratives of each other around these characterizations, narratives that the subject doesn't really get the chance to contribute to. We are wrapped up in our own realities and sometimes that spills out into making someone else feel like a character in our story.
But I can't help feeling that I experience this unusually often, relative to my non-black friends, or else wouldn't someone else also be recognizing and objecting to this? Wouldn't people be more self-aware of their staring eyes?
Related: There was another article about this after Dodson I think....; Unbreakable whiteness of kimmy schmidt; surveillance of black people one
FB: "Consider this flip: The line “I was attacked by some idiot out here in the projects,” spoken by attack survivor Kelly Dodson, is a bright, Auto-Tuned adlib on the “Bed Intruder” song that builds to the song’s bridge, as Antoine Dodson’s phrase “so dumb” is repeated several times. The editing reduces her comment to a simple, trite soundbite divorced from the details that ground the viewer in her in reality: the trash can the intruder used to hoist himself up to her room, the shattered glass on her bedroom floor, the baby she gestured toward, who had been sleeping next to her when the man broke in. We just hear “idiot in the projects,” and then “so dumb,” which is maybe a connection we’re supposed to make."
Giving an interview to a news station is customary after tragedy; what’s less common is that people become permanently enshrined for their trauma, unless of course, they’re black. The ways trauma is repackaged quickly after interviews are recorded is a result of our fast-moving media cycle. And it’s true that black internet stars have talked to news reporters in memorable ways that make them subject to public fascination. But it’s also true that black viral interviewees hardly had any time to grieve before their feelings were repurposed for the zeitgeist, which is unseemly given how, seen through the mainstream white gaze, black pain has been romanticized (the “race” movies of the early 20th century) or made comical (minstrel shows)...
Returning to Hannah Nelson’s claim, that “we are a nation primarily because we think we are a nation,” is crucial to understand a constant in black culture: the white gaze. Black nationalism, not race, seems to be contingent upon shared experiences or at least a collective perspective, and I don’t think we’ve had a unified view since the civil rights movement, if then. However, the repetition of respectability in the critiques of the viral videos, or that black people should be aware of how they present to the world at all times, is proof that perception continues to be an issue many black people navigate."
https://www.buzzfeed.com/nielaorr/black-trauma-remixed-for-your-clicks?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Longform%20417&utm_content=Longform%20417+CID_0b43a5edad3812a75f8bcb7323d6385f&utm_source=BuzzFeed%20Newsletters&utm_term=.cxe0arK6m#.wuxPpM60N
This surveillance? So real. Sometimes I will say something witty, or do something unusual, out of the evidently false assumption that I am part of whatever is going on, and the friends I am with - good friends who know me well - will stop and stare for a moment and suddenly have re-oriented themselves as my audience and when they laugh it is to each other and it's a dizzying separation.
And I think this exists at an interpersonal level too, where we momentarily marginalize each other as 'the forgetful one' or 'the childhish one' or 'the fashionable one' or whatever and spin narratives of each other around these characterizations, narratives that the subject doesn't really get the chance to contribute to. We are wrapped up in our own realities and sometimes that spills out into making someone else feel like a character in our story.
But I can't help feeling that I experience this unusually often, relative to my non-black friends, or else wouldn't someone else also be recognizing and objecting to this? Wouldn't people be more self-aware of their staring eyes?
Related: There was another article about this after Dodson I think....; Unbreakable whiteness of kimmy schmidt; surveillance of black people one
FB: "Consider this flip: The line “I was attacked by some idiot out here in the projects,” spoken by attack survivor Kelly Dodson, is a bright, Auto-Tuned adlib on the “Bed Intruder” song that builds to the song’s bridge, as Antoine Dodson’s phrase “so dumb” is repeated several times. The editing reduces her comment to a simple, trite soundbite divorced from the details that ground the viewer in her in reality: the trash can the intruder used to hoist himself up to her room, the shattered glass on her bedroom floor, the baby she gestured toward, who had been sleeping next to her when the man broke in. We just hear “idiot in the projects,” and then “so dumb,” which is maybe a connection we’re supposed to make."
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