Worse Than Trump by Dayvon Love

Author:Dayvon Love [Love Dayvon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2018-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4:

The Baltimore Uprising

‟ “Can’t stop, won’t stop until killer cops are in cell blocks.”

„

—Tawanda Jones, 2013

By the time the Baltimore Uprising took place in April 2015, we were already in the midst of a media context where conversations about police brutality had hit the public mainstream. This new media environment was initiated by the coverage of the killing of Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman in Sanford Florida in 2012. This is not to say that the killing of Trayvon Martin was some unique phenomenon amongst Black people. In fact, police and Vigilantes killing Black people is a decades-old problem that has been confronted by numerous grassroots efforts to address these issues. When George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, he was able to go in the police station and leave that very same night without the police conducting any significant investigation. The district attorney decided not to investigate whether or not George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin warranted criminal charges that changed only when demonstrations and public pressure drew the media to this case. Several weeks went by before the media began to cover Martin’s death as a major story.

In the midst of the immense nationwide coverage the Martin killing, the corporate media stumbled upon a commodity they could sell to the public—Black death. They discovered that they could generate profits from a large audiences by covering stories about Black people being killed at the hands of police and vigilantes. It is important to make this point so the record is clear about why police brutality became an issue that became so heavily covered in corporate mainstream media.

The media coverage was not due to some sudden increase of Black people being killed by police and vigilantes, and it was not because there was some increase in concern on the part of the American mainstream about issues of police brutality. Mainstream media began to cover instances of police brutality because Black death is a commodity that has become very marketable to White society, particularly in this moment where smart phones are able to capture videos of police abuse and violence in ways that are unprecedented. The spectacle of Black death and suffering is the framework by which issues of police brutality are narrated by the American corporate mainstream. The dominant framework used to narrate issues of police brutality is the emphasis on details about the individual characters involved in the detail of the individual cases. This makes the news coverage of police brutality a protracted criminal investigation television show instead of a true interrogation of the phenomena of the devaluing of Black life.

The news coverage of the killing of Trayvon Martin and the trial of George Zimmerman dealt primarily with issues as to whether or not Trayvon Martin was a good person and whether or not George Zimmerman was a bad person. This trades off with more important conversations about why it is that Black people are more susceptible to this kind of violence. It is this media context that set the stage for the nature of news coverage of the uprising in Ferguson Missouri.

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