black is exhausting, and here's why
For many black Americans, watching black people die on camera feels like a job.
It’s not something they’re paid for, unless they are a journalist. But it can still feel like an obligation, because every time a new video is released of a black person being shot by police, black people know that America’s response to that video will affect their lives.
This is why when a judge forced Chicago officials to release video of the 2014 shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonaldby Officer Jason Van Dyke, a group of young activists used the hashtag #BeforeYouWatch to encourage people to take a collective breath to brace themselves.
The video is disturbing, but in a more abstract way than, for example, the first-person view of the shooting of Sam Dubose in Cincinnati. It's taken from the dashboard camera of a police cruiser, which is too far away to show McDonald’s facial expressions, and the officer is out of frame.
Instead, we can see only the body of McDonald jerk, and puffs of smoke rising as the 16 shots are fired. The shooting is too far away to be able to see any wounds, and the only evidence that there is blood is the faint reflection of a shiny wet pool, glinting briefly in the lights of a police vehicle that arrives after the last shot has been fired.
A lot of people didn’t feel the need to watch the video. Some avoided it. Another common trend in the #BeforeYouWatch tweets was a reassurance: It's OK if you don't want to watch the video.
But for tens of thousands of people, black and otherwise, that decision was made for them when the Daily Beast posted an animated GIF image of the shooting on their Twitter account. Any one of their nearly 1 million followers who was scrolling through their own timeline saw a looped animation of a boy’s body tremoring in the dark.
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