An audience perspective on the precarity of Black witnessing

Abstract

From slavery to police brutality, the Black struggle in the United States can be traced in the visual field. The online dissemination of disparate acts of violence against Black men first widely publicized when a witness recorded the beating of Rodney King on a cellphone in 1991, has evolved into a U.S. cultural phenomenon, culminating with the video of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Insufficient attention has been paid to how audiences with lived experiences of systemic injustice bear witness to such videos. This paper seeks to understand how Black audiences engage with these sites of violence captured on cell phones and disseminated on social media platforms. The paper argues that instead of serving as a tool for accountability, the widespread dissemination of mediated Black suffering has engendered a ceaseless state of anxiety and somber acceptance of the precarity of the Black body in the United States.

Keywords

Audience Black cell phones digital platforms identity media men precarity violence witnessing

From slavery to police brutality, the Black struggle in the United States can be traced in the visual field (Campt, 2021). The latest instantiation are images recorded on cell phones and circulated on social media platforms (Koenig and Lampros, 2023). Indeed, the online dissemination of disparate acts of violence against Black men has evolved into a U.S. cultural phenomenon (Mirzoeff, 2017), culminating with the video of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Framed as modern-day lynching videos (Richardson, 2020), these images speak to larger questions of structural violence and racism in the United States over the last 200 years. Yet insufficient attention has been paid to how audiences with lived experiences of systemic injustice bear witness to such videos. Drawing on Richardson’s (2020) conceptualization of Black media witnessing, this paper asks, how if at all, Black audiences engage with the cacophonous sites of violence captured on cell phones and disseminated on social media platforms. The goal is to understand how Black people see and read these videos of police brutality and state-sanctioned violence. In doing so, the paper situates the role and specificity of audiences as central to discussions about media witnessing more broadly.

Through semi-structured interviews with Black students at a U.S. university, the paper shows how the witnessing of the videos depicting the murders of Oscar Grant in 2009, Ahmaud Arbery in 2020, and George Floyd in 2020 resonates with audiences who can personally identify with the violence depicted on screen. Although police use of excessive force disproportionately targets Black men (Robinson et al., 2024), it is not exclusively gendered. This study includes the perspectives of both male and female students to better understand how Black audiences are impacted by witnessing cell phone videos of murder.

Specifically, the paper identifies three major impacts on Black audiences: (1) a lived state of precarity and anxiety, (2) a somber acceptance of the interminable disposability of Black life in the United States, and (3) an inability or perceived moral obligation to watch these videos and act. In doing so, the paper charts some of the larger social ramifications of repeated exposure to mediated acts of violence that target the Black body. This research argues that instead of serving as a tool for justice and social change, these videos often leave a haunting trauma for Black audiences. This trauma lives in the interstices of the long history of violence, brutality, and policing of the Black body dating back to the transatlantic slave trade.

The role and specificity of audiences in media witnessing

Peters (2001) famously defines witnessing as “an increasingly tangled practice that is deeply connected to life and death,” posing “questions of truth and experience, presence and absence, death and pain, seeing and saying, and the trustworthiness of perception” (p. 707). In other words, he sees witnessing as an important topic for media and communication research. The act of witnessing, though, is not a neutral experience but one that is deeply informed by and related to one’s positionality in the world. Frosh and Pinchevski (2009) thus conceptualize witnessing as a site of political struggle, performed in, by, and through the media. How and what one sees is deeply informed by societal and cultural factors. In this context, Ong (2014) warns about the dangers inherent in universalizing the experience of the witness.

Over the last decade, media and communication research has paid increasing attention to the centrality of audiences to theorization about media witnessing (Anden-Papadopoulous, 2013; Ong, 2014; Ristovska, 2016; Sutherland, 2017). Yet, there is little empirical work on the racial components of witnessing despite the understanding that how a witness is affected by what they hear and see in the media is not independent of the socio-historical conditions that constitute the witness’s identity and subjectivity. Indeed, the Western-centric, middle-class conception of the audience has resulted in a lack of studies that explicitly account for race in the analysis (Jhally, 1992; Richardson, 2020). Responding to calls to account for the diversity of audiences who bear witness through the media (Ong, 2014), this paper focuses on the experiences of Black audiences who witness instances of police brutality via cellphones and social media.

The circulation of videos documenting state violence against people of color have invigorated long-standing discussions about the ethical and political implications embedded in the act of media witnessing. How this mediated violence affects audiences with lived experiences of systemic injustice is the topic of this paper. Following Richardson’s (2020) notion of Black media witnessing, the paper centers Black ways of seeing as central to discussions about the public role and impact of videos of police brutality. For Black audiences, there is an inherent precarity in relation to their historical and lived proximity to the violence depicted in the media, necessitating a careful examination of the politics of witnessing with a particular attention to race.

When Mamie Till-Mobley shared photographs of her son Emmett’s disfigured corpse at his open-casket funeral in Jet Magazine (1955), she sought to situate his lynching within a long history of legal and extralegal racialized violence and killing of Black American men. Looking, or what was once called “reckless eyeballing” during the Jim Crow era could cost a Black person their life (hooks, 1992). The brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, for allegedly flirting with a white woman, was a chilling moment of recognition for the Black community about the power and authority that the act of looking presumes. As Sharpe (2025) notes, “With the publication of those terrible photographs in Jet magazine people saw Mamie Till Mobley’s insistence that the brutal violence that Emmett was subjected to be seen, that it be unobscured” (p. 124). The image of Emmett’s bloated and disfigured face remains supplanted in the consciousness of many Black Americans (Harold and DeLuca, 2005). And while his murder brought nationwide attention to the racial injustice and violence prevalent in the Jim Crow South, the ideological motivations that gave rise to the extreme racial violence Till endured remain active and alive within the cultural fabric of the United States as exemplified by the videos of state-sanctioned violence.

Yet theories of media witnessing often fail to account for how race figures in the ways people engage with images of violence committed against Black people. In this context, Richardson (2020) suggests that media and communication scholars begin to observe what “the long arc of anti-black racism looks like, how it shapes, shifts and becomes more impervious to its own eradication, like a virus that has become resistant to a bevy of powerful antibiotics” (p. 6). Her critical intervention echoes a growing body of scholarship (e.g. Benjamin, 2019; Fleetwood, 2020; Jackson et al., 2020) which critiques how media witnessing often fails to account for the racialized dynamics that shape audience interpretation, emotional response, and political engagement. These scholars highlight the need to theorize more intersectional ideas about the impact of witnessing on Black audiences who continue to bear the weight of the epidermalization of their identity. This paper seeks to understand how Black students at one U.S. university witness videos of violence. In doing so, it questions how Black people can feel a sense of place and belonging in the United States when they continue to witness an unending cycle of violent rupture and perpetual mediation of corporeal death.

Methodology

This paper focuses on Black students who came of age as incidents of cell phone recorded Black death began to populate social media platforms in the United States. The students were asked to reflect on three important sights of cell phone recorded murder: the ones of Oscar Grant, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. The killing of Oscar Grant in 2009 was the first cell phone recorded murder of a Black man to be widely disseminated via social media (Rhodes, 2013). It is arguably a foundational moment in what has become the long, consistently growing arc of Black media witnessing. Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, an act of state vigilante violence, in 2020 is significant because it speaks to the aberrant nature of white violence, reinstating for Black audiences the illegibility of the Black body in modern times (Browne, 2015; Quashie, 2021; Sharpe, 2016). The third site, the murder of George Floyd in 2020, is largely viewed as the apex of Black media witnessing, garnering the most media attention and placing race and police brutality at the center of broader social and political discussions (Mirzoeff, 2017; Richardson, 2020). Although scholars have focused on the importance of these videos as potential tools for social justice (Richardson, 2016; Ristovska, 2021), asking Black undergraduate and graduate students at a flagship state university in the mountain west region of the United States—where the author of this paper is based—to reflect on these mediated acts of violence sheds light on the lived and embodied experiences of media witnessing.

The interviews were conducted at the University of Colorado Boulder, a predominantly white university. With a Black student population of only 1.7%, the university’s recent racial reckoning made national news (Byars and Langford, 2019). A white police officer pulled a gun on a Black student he suspected of trespassing (Byars and Langford, 2019) and the student believed he was being racially profiled. Soon after, the Center for African and African American Studies was established in 2023 to promote diversity and inclusivity on campus. Half of the undergraduate and graduate students interviewed for this paper are affiliated with this center. The others were recruited by visiting classes and posting flyers in various campus buildings. Though not representative of the entire Black student population in the United States, the interviewees provide important insights into the politics and ethics of Black media witnessing at times of social transformation both at their own institution and the country at large.

A total of 10 students were interviewed for this paper: five undergraduate students, ages 20 to 23 and five graduate students, ages 26 to 38, with an even split of male and female interviewees. The students were predominantly from the U.S. South and Midwest region with home states, including Alabama, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Utah, Colorado, and Illinois. Their majors span a diverse array of fields including English, political science and information science, media studies, journalism, and dance. They all learned about the recordings after the fact, via news broadcasts or social media sites like Twitter while in high school or college.

The interviews were conducted via Zoom, between September 2023 and April 2024 upon securing an IRB approval for the study in August 2023 (University of Colorado Boulder, #23-093). Each interview was audio recorded for the purposes of transcription. The interviews, lasting approximately one hour, were based on open-ended questions about the emotional impact of viewing or hearing about the cell phone recorded murders of Oscar Grant, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. The students were asked how these recorded moments of vigilante and state sanctioned violence inform their understanding of race in the United States today. Every student who responded to the open call for participation in the study was interviewed and there were no restrictions placed on their response. The interviews were then transcribed, with each interviewee being given a pseudonym to protect their identity. See Appendix 1 for the interview questions.

The transcribed interviews were manually coded and analyzed to identify recurring themes organically from the data. The analysis followed the grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss, 2017). Through axial coding of the transcribed interviews, three overarching themes emerged, which are discussed in this paper. The interpretation of these themes provides a fresh and largely unexamined reading of the burden of media witnessing for Black audiences. This study has real-world relevance to our understanding of the increasingly violent and emotionally harmful nature of witnessing in an age of social media for audiences with lived experiences of systemic injustice.

The impact of witnessing videos of racially motivated violence

In focusing on interview responses to three cases of cell phone recorded murders of Black men, the paper speaks to the weight of Black witnessing. Though not exhaustive, and by no means representative of the entire Black population in the United States, the focused coded analysis of 10 interviews with Black students provides an insight into how Black audiences may be emotionally affected by viewing an inescapable cycle of violence in the digital space. Specifically, the analysis revealed three overarching themes that speak to the impact of these videos: (1) a lived state of precarity and anxiety, (2) a somber acceptance of the interminable disposability of Black life in the United States, and (3) an inability or perceived moral obligation to watch these videos and act.

A lived state of precarity

In the early morning hours of New Year’s Day in 2009, BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle fired a single gunshot into the back of 22-year-old Oscar Grant as he lay unarmed, face down on the Fruitvale Station train platform in Oakland, California (Antony and Thomas, 2010). Grant’s murder was “the twenty-first-century version of the Rodney King beating” according to Obasogie (2013) and the first cell phone recording of a police shooting to go viral in the United States, sparking justice-seeking protests across the state and nationally.

According to Derek, a graduate student in political science,

That one was particularly difficult for me to watch. It was tough because of how it was shot. The video had the feeling of an environment that I could be in at any time. Being in a public space like that was very recognizable to me. It was a situation I could personally see myself in. (Derek, 2023, personal communication)

Derek speaks to the disquieting familiarity that Black audiences experience when witnessing the mundane locations in which Black lives are taken. It is easy for them to interpolate their body into moment of violent rupture they are witnessing on screen. Derek added, “I see my face. I see my siblings faces . . . So, it’s a mix of empathy and a deep understanding that that could just as easily be me” (Derek, 2023, personal communication). As a result of the symbolic meanings ascribed to blackness this student speaks to the lived state of precarity that comes to imbue the psyche after witnessing racially motivated violence.

Hall (1997) wrote extensively about the importance of the symbolic domain, which is at the very heart of people’s perception of social life. The Black male body, when interpellated through the media, carries a particular symbolic meaning that has been carefully crafted through ideology and representation. Hall (1997) famously argued that ideology is shaped by the unconscious categories through which societal conditions are represented and lived. These veiled categories that comprise one’s identity, when paired with the hegemony of visuality and disciplining practice of surveillance, work to mark the Black body as “dangerous,” “aberrant,” and “criminal.”

The multiple cell phone recordings of Grant’s murder read like a scene from the Hollywood film it would later become, Fruitvale Station (Finkley, 2013), marking Ryan Coogler’s directorial debut. In an interview with BlackTree TV, Coogler spoke to why he felt compelled to tell this story. “I love the Bay Area so much. When that happened there [Oakland] to someone who was my age, who looked like me and had friends that look like my friends . . . It affected me like you wouldn’t believe” (Finkley, 2013). Sarah, a graduate student in information science, echoed Coogler’s sentiments:

I went to school in the Bay Area and I’m somewhat familiar with the Caltrain and the BART. It just made me feel like if I were traveling on public transportation there, what might happen to me, or what might happen to someone I know who looks like me. It just made me feel less safe. (Sarah, 2024, personal communication)

This comment reinforces those made by other students, who spoke to the lived familiarity with the locations, often public spaces, where these violent ruptures take place.

It is this sense of familiarity which increases their feelings of precarity and anxiety in everyday life. As JD, a graduate student in English, reflected,

Every time I’m out in the world, or in a car, or walking around and a police officer passes by, I’m reminded of it. Every time I see a police officer, because of these videos, I know that I am in imminent danger. That there is an imminent threat around me. (JD, 2024, personal communication)

Jade, an undergraduate student majoring in journalism, echoes JD’s feelings of Black precarity in public spaces. In her view,

I literally think about it all the time. If a shooter was to come into this giant library and there’s four Black people, we’re probably the biggest target. I think about it in grocery stores. I think about it when there’s a cop a few cars away from me. I definitely feel like it has manifested itself into a sort of lingering, underlying anxiety. (Jade, 2023, personal communication)

These students speak to the lived state of anxiety and precarity Black audiences are forced to contend with in the wake of watching and hearing about videos of state-sanctioned violence perpetrated against Black people. And while many students felt motivated to take to the streets as a form of protest to raise awareness following these tragic events, their efforts have largely been ineffectual as the incidents of video recorded death continue to rise.

Black men who have lost their lives to state violence become physical representations or signifiers of the precarity of blackness in the United States. As Hall (1993) states, “the body becomes a thing to ‘think difference with,’ as well as something which immediately triggers fear and anxiety” (p. 105). It is the deep instantiation of ideology and representation that endow the white public and state authority with the power of the look to kill. Grant became a signifier of the fears, untruths and anxieties that work to overdetermine the perceived dangers inherent in blackness. In the words of Fanon (1952), “A black man is constantly struggling against his own image” (p. 170). The inscription of race as a marker of difference has led to an overwhelming preoccupation with the meanings embedded within that signification. Grant’s cell phone recorded murder was the first in a long line of videos to come that are now habituating the public to a new mediated form of lynching Black men captured by witnesses to the event.

In the wake of the colonial project of slavery and its extant ideological manifestations, a long, unending line of vigilante and state-sanctioned violence has continued to make visible the illegibility of the Black male body in the United States (Browne, 2015; Sharpe, 2016, 2023). The barracoons, the hold, the overseer, the slave patrols, the officer, the violence repeats and repeats into the present (Hartman, 1997). The widespread dissemination of mediated Black death and suffering has now manifested into a ceaseless state of lived precarity and anxiety for Black audiences that leads to self-policing and a hyper-awareness of how and into what spaces Black bodies are allowed to move (Browne, 2015). According to Derek,

I have a hum in the back of my mind that’s always modulating, depending on where I am and how vigilant I need to be . . . I’m passing a police officer, and I’ve got my hands at ten and two on the steering wheel. Making sure my hoodies down. Those are things that I think are a learned skill. But there’s also just the stress of having to manage those kinds of things on top of everything else. (Derek, 2023, personal communication)

The murder of Oscar Grant serves as an important mediated moment as it marks the start of what has become the repeated, quotidian nature of recorded Black male death being distributed across U.S. media (Sharpe, 2024). The lived state of precarity and anxiety that these Black students now live with speaks to the importance of understanding the impact of media witnessing.

The somber acceptance of the disposability of Black life

The idyllic space of Satilla Shores (Fausset and Rojas, 2020), Georgia, a beautiful landscape with vibrant green moss hanging low from towering oaks trees, easily evokes images from the William Faulkner novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929). For many residents “their waterfront neighborhood was a paradise without pretension” (Fausset and Rojas, 2020). On a sunny afternoon (Fausset and Rojas, 2020) in February 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was spotted jogging in this pastoral neighborhood by Travis McMichael, and his father, Gregory McMichael. Grabbing their guns, the two took off after Arbery, who was then chased through the neighborhood for five-minutes before Travis McMichael fatally shot Arbery three times with a 12-gauge shotgun (Holcombe and McLaughlin, 2020). The two men later told authorities they believed he was a burglar.

At first, the case went unnoticed, with no arrests made, until a 36-second video surfaced on Tuesday, May 5, 2020, showing the last moments of Arbery’s life (Mervosh, 2020). The video appears to be shot from a moving car, and it shows a man jogging in the street. His hands are empty. A pick-up truck is stopped in the middle of the road, blocking his path. Arbery jogs to the right in an effort to escape from Travis McMichael. There’s a struggle and then the loud pop of a shotgun blast. A second shot and then the finality of the third. Remembering the moment when she watched this video, Jade, an undergraduate student in journalism, said,

It literally was like watching a scene out of a Jim Crow era movie, like with the giant shotgun. It’s so dramatic. I just couldn’t believe that this was happening right now. It looked like something from a Confederate movie. It looked like some KKK type stuff. (Jade, 2023, personal communication)

This student’s remembrance of the video of Arbery’s racially motivated murder, illustrates how although the temporality is different the ideology remains the same. His murder calling to mind bygone eras of ramped white vigilante violence that speak to the continued disposability of the Black body.

Browne (2015) illustrates how the condition of blackness “can help social theorists understand our contemporary conditions of surveillance” (p. 8). In that moment of rupture, when the McMichaels’ surveillance of Arbery ultimately cost him his life, he became a modern-day representation of racialized surveillance (Fischer and Mohrman, 2021) which was once enacted through the Black Codes, a series of laws passed in 1865 and 1866. Following the Civil War, many southern states enforced Black Codes which restricted the movements and freedom of Black people by giving white people the authority to arrest any Black person they deemed deviant (Browne, 2015; Goodman, 2018).

The Black subject, in the process of forming his identity, is forced to grapple with the socially prescribed meanings of his own image in an attempt to understand why his skin color is the sole determinant of his perceived disposability and inhumanity. In Diana’s words,

As a Black person, when your view of yourself is to be denigrated, is to be devalued . . . is to be killed, then that sits within you. Instead of having a baseline of privilege, you have this mountain of oppression that you have to climb just to get to a space in which you can fully embrace and enjoy all the good things that you have to offer to your community and the world. (Diana, 2023, personal communication)

All of the students interviewed expressed an awareness of the long history of surveillance and violence against the Black body. No one was surprised by this act of vigilante violence. Still, each student spoke to the mental stress and consistent messaging these videos impart. In Jade’s view,

As cell phone videos and larger stories of police violence started coming out, I wasn’t comfortable with my own blackness. I think it made me have more disdain for my own identity. It was like because of this thing that I did not choose to be violence might be perpetrated against me. To be “Othered” in police violence was really upsetting. (Jade, 2023, personal communication)

This student’s frustration speaks to the fact that as an identity, blackness is inevitably called on to signify race or racism, and violence and struggle. These significations take a toll on the students interviewed for this paper. For Amber, a graduate student in media studies: “It’s just a reminder that anti-blackness runs deep and that we’re dehumanized by the fact that they justify these things, because they don’t even see us as . . . we’re not seen as human” (Amber, 2024, personal communication). For these Black students, the current climate of media witnessing works to more deeply instantiate, the belief that it is their very humanity that remains unacknowledged and in question.

According to Jade,

At this point, it’s undeniable that Black people are getting killed by the police. At the same time, I think that letting white people view Black death over and over is doing the same thing that it has forever. They’ve gotten to watch it as an outsider and distance themselves from it. They’re seeing Black death more frequently but is it helping them identify with the people or empathize with the people in the videos? (Jade, 2023, personal communication)

Once believed to have the potential to serve as a tool for justice and accountability that would make clear the unfair treatment Black men often experience during police encounters, the growing catalog of video recorded Black death works to more deeply instantiate the continued disposability of the Black body in the United States (Noble, 2014; Richardson, 2020).

When analyzed through the lens of the Black experience, witnessing takes on a very particular meaning in which Black audiences are asked to bear witness to the material manifestation of anti-Black racism and state sanctioned violence. They often do not occupy the same time and space with the original event, but the ideological signification interpolated through witnessing Black death further instantiates the disposability of the Black body in the United States today. A terrifying loop of aberrant, frightening, sometimes nonchalant violence, a hold that repeats and repeats, “that continually redefines blackness through the logics of the past” (Scott, 2017: 76). These ruptures in the digital space are now constructing an internalized narrative of “Othering,” which manifests as an embodied vulnerability and fear that anti-Black hatred and violence, regardless of time, place, and location are never far away.

Diana, a graduate student in dance, recalled the video murder of Ahmaud Arbery:

The weird thing about it is that I don’t feel like I can locate it specifically in time or place because we’ve seen so many. I especially remember during that time it was Oscar Grant; it was Philando Castile; it was Trayvon Martin. It was so many during that time that I don’t think I can remember the specifics of the video. It just felt like there was a new video every week. (Diana, 2023, personal communication)

In exploring what the act of bearing witness accomplishes in the contemporary age, Zelizer (1998) outlines how the public has been habituated to absorbing images of atrocity. “The media help us respond to that aesthetic by showing us where to position new horrors rather than understand them – how to classify, categorize, and in many cases forget what we are seeing” (Zelizer, 1998: 204). By clarifying what it means to form a connection with a traumatic public past, Zelizer (1998) points to how people draw on aspects of their social identity to connect as individuals to return to ordinary life after witnessing a traumatic event. For Black audiences, it is often within the quotidian moments of daily life that their identity is most under attack. There is no ordinary life to return to. They cannot shed their black skin in order to fit in and return to normalcy. As new sites of media witnessing continue to populate U.S. media, Black audiences are becoming habituated to the inevitability of more Black death.

The mode of witnessing within the United States has been transformed into a technological mediation of repeated violence against the Black body, distributed through various social media platforms. As technology has advanced, the sites and platforms available to witness Black death have continued to increase. Black death has become a spectacle that has lost its resonance, further instantiating the disposability of the Black body. Speaking to the impact of her witnessing experience, Sarah a graduate student in information science, stated,

Race in America today hasn’t changed as much as we like to think it has. While people used to be lynched, and people would throw a picnic about it; nowadays, people are being killed in the streets . . . The way that anti-Black racism manifests itself in the United States, I think that the core of those manifestations remains. It’s just changed its face, or its façade. (Sarah, 2024, personal communication)

These students all spoke of the harm caused by witnessing cell phone recorded acts of racial violence in the media. For them, these videos work to further instantiate the durability of racism and continued disposability of the Black body in the United States.

An inability or perceived moral obligation to watch

When reflecting on viewing these cell phone videos of murder, all the interviewees spoke about a publicly unacknowledged emotional weight that the act of media witnessing carries for Black audiences. In Derek’s words,

I really struggled during the time that these videos emerged because it was personally . . . the word that I would use is alarming. It’s alarming inside of my body to have to view these sort of things . . . It really impacts you outside of the time that you’re watching the video. (Derek, 2023, personal communication)

For Black audiences, the act of witnessing cannot be contained within the temporality of the present moment. The images, the pain, the terror, the ruptures continue to impact these students emotionally. According to Tia, a graduate student in information science:

You are constantly in this state of grieving people that you don’t know but who look like you and trying to figure out how to heal when you know that unfortunately something like this is gonna happen again and people aren’t going to held accountable. (Tia, 2023, personal communication)

The historical fallibility of the Black body has been reinforced in the digitally mediated landscape by visual representations of blatant state violence that is often enacted with impunity by police (Noble, 2014; Richardson, 2020; Sutherland, 2017). The public lynching of Black men has taken on a new iteration in digital mediated forms. The emotional impact of watching videos of recorded death has pushed the interviewees in two disparate directions: abstaining from watching the videos altogether due to their inability to disconnect from the content–or feeling an obligation, as Black people, to bear witness to the violence onscreen. The video murder of George Floyd best illustrates this impulse.

A video shows George Floyd, a Black man, immobilized on the ground, a white officer’s knee strategically placed on his neck. “I can’t breathe,” Floyd, 46, says repeatedly, pleading for his life as the air slowly seeps out of his body (Burch et al., 2021). Sarah stated, “I saw the very beginning . . . and then I couldn’t finish it. I didn’t realize what I was watching and as soon as I did, I cut it off” (Sarah, 2024, personal communication). Yet JD had the opposite reaction:

I had to see it. A lot of people were very apprehensive to sit with those nine minutes. I had to see it. I had to feel it, second by second, and it was gut wrenching. It reminded me of just how little lives like mine matter or are valued. (JD, 2024, personal communication)

The murder of George Floyd, by white Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin, became “symbolic” of the violence that targets the Black male body in America. It happened just 10 weeks after the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, sparking the largest protests in U.S. history spanning over 2000 cities and towns and over 60 countries in support of Black Lives Matter (Buchanan et al., 2020). Diana spoke about the weight of Floyd’s murder within the temporality of the pandemic:

We were in all this chaos around COVID. We weren’t outside. We were indoors trying to get information all the time. So, for that to be the new information and surpass COVID in that moment . . . it was just an extra gut punch. We’re already in the deepest state of depression and anxiety and now we’re watching a Black man literally be smushed into the earth under somebody’s knee. (Diana, 2023, personal communication)

For other students, witnessing Chauvin’s inability to recognize Floyd’s humanity resonated the most. In reflecting on her memories of watching the video Jayla’s response was thick with emotion:

It particularly hurt me to think that a man who is (voice breaks) crying out for his mom, you know. He’s so human in that moment and people didn’t see him as a person, they saw him as a caricature. (Jayla, 2024, personal communication)

It is the deep instantiation of ideology and representation that kill the Black subject at the moment the white gaze is enacted. The sight of blackness acting as a trigger for the amalgamation of fears and anxieties that work to strip the Black body of its subjectivity. As Amber, a graduate student in media studies stated, “If you can put your knee on someone’s neck (visibly uncomfortable–holding her neck), it’s like . . . you don’t see or recognize their humanity or care at all if they live or die” (Amber, 2024, personal communication).

During the interviews, several of the students showed physical signs of discomfort, looking away, fidgeting in their seat, or rubbing their hands and neck, specifically in speaking about the impact of watching the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. This points to the embodied experience of trauma experienced by the Black students interviewed. One student abstains from watching these videos due to the weight of taking in content that directly targets their identity. In Jayla’s own words,

I’m acutely aware of being very careful and curating what media I take in. I think I’ve always struggled with a level of second-hand pain, particularly when it’s racially charged violence. Just hearing about it or witnessing it . . . I feel it in and of myself. So, to see something that was happening in real life and then on top of that it was this horrendous act against a Black person. The weight of that and the implications of that . . . the um . . . (Jayla, 2024, personal communication)

In reflecting on these moments of rupture, of witnessing while Black, the interviewees often took time to pause and contemplate the implications of our current mediated moment. The silence, their physical uncomfortability, the cracks in their voices when recalling these scenes of murder, spoke volumes about their inability to separate themselves from the racial significations these videos carry. According to Tia, a graduate student in education, “Just for mental health reasons I can’t watch that kind of content. But I’m still aware of and attuned to the struggle” (Tia, 2023, personal communication). These moments of witnessing compel Black audiences “to capitulate to the mundane regularity of premature Black death” (Campt, 2021: 173). Tia added, “I feel like scrolling through social media can be harmful sometimes because I never want to normalize casually strolling through racially motivated violence and not unpack that” (Tia, 2023, personal communication).

The implications of Black media witnessing

The proliferation of cell phone recorded videos of murder has become symbolic of the marginalized subjectivity Black American citizens hold in the United States today. This analysis offers an important intervention into the limited framing of media witnessing as a tool for truth-telling and social justice mobilization (Chevrette and Hess, 2024) to shed light on these videos’ dual nature. Black audiences are asked to process an onslaught of videos that directly speak to Black social death. The lived state of precarity that Black audiences feel is fueled by an underlying anxiety that there is no end to the violence. As Diana said,

All this chaos, and all this conversation, and all this media, and I still have the lingering thought in my head of who’s next because I know it’s not done. So, sitting with that on a day-to-day basis is heavy. (Diana, 2023, personal communication)

With the release of each new videos, all the Black students interviewed spoke to their growing acceptance of the inevitability of witnessing Black death in the U.S. digital space.

Floyd’s final three words, “I can’t breathe,” have now come to symbolize Black audiences’ larger feelings of dispossession and isolation. According to Jade,

I can’t breathe not only characterizes or explains the sensation of actually not being able to breath but not being able to live and function in a society that doesn’t recognize your full humanity. I can’t breathe because the air is so thick with racism that it’s hard to breathe in this society. (Jade, 2023, personal communication)

The lingering anxiety or inability to breathe often manifests in acts of self-policing and an acute awareness of the hypervisibility of Black bodies in mundane public spaces. While many of the students could not remember the specifics of each video, they all spoke to how these moments of witnessing informed their acceptance of the disposability of Black life, creating a bifurcated response: some students felt an inability to watch the videos, while others felt a moral obligation to not only watch these videos but to participate in protests and act.

This analysis shows that these videos are illustrative of deeper fractures within America’s social fabric. The act of witnessing for Black audiences cannot be separated from the uninterrupted arc of historical violence against the Black body. The students interviewed for this paper believe that they now live in an alienating present that makes their lives and livelihoods disposable. Theories of media witnessing that fail to account for race as an integral component of the witnessing experience fail to see how for Black audiences these videos represent an articulation of white power and authority in the digital media space.

Conclusion

Black witnessing is a complex, yet timely, area within the field of media studies. This article examines how and to what effect Black students at one university have witnessed three videos of vigilante and state sanctioned violence against Black men to question how witnessing unevenly targets Black audiences. Although a study of just 10 Black students from one university, the paper points to the underlying challenges inherent in how Black audiences witness and experience videos of murder that target their identity. The insufficient attention to audiences in discussions about media witnessing has led to a lacuna in the larger cultural understanding of these videos’ dual nature as tools for both justice and racial oppression. On one hand, the act of bearing witness can be a form of social activism that renders videos of human rights violations meaningful as evidence (Ristovska, 2021). On the other hand, the proliferation of cell phone videos of vigilante and state sanctioned murder is working to reify racial boundaries in the United States, separating Black audiences from a sense of national belonging. The embodied sense of nonbelonging that these Black audiences feel speaks directly to Baldwin’s and Lorde (1984) claim that Black people exist in the American dream only as its nightmare.

Future research is needed on the effect on Black audiences’ of witnessing the virality and overexposure of the death of Black bodies through the media. Incorporating Black audience perspectives into media witnessing theorizations can be a praxis for combatting state-sanctioned police violence and our criminal justice system. Audience reflections expand our understanding of the dangers inherent in witnessing media that targets your racial identity and can provide insights into how to effectively address acts of anti-Blackness in the digital media space. For any of these videos to live up to their advocacy potential, Black audience reflections must be centered in theorizations of media witnessing to illuminate the precarity of bearing witness while Black.

Footnotes

Appendix 1

Interview Questions

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Nandi Pointer

Author biography

Nandi Pointer is a PhD Candidate in Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. A former journalist and TV producer Pointer studies questions about media, race, and identity. Incorporating writing and documentary filmmaking, her dissertation examines how and why Black men leave the U.S. to teach English in Southeast Asia and the Middle East and what their experiences illuminate about the global dynamics of race and racism. Pointer is the recipient of the 2025 IAMCR Stuart Hall Award.

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