The internet, Social Media and Black Trauma Porn: On never becoming desensitized to it

There won’t be an image for this one, not when I know that you have a number of images firmly and readily indexed. I truly hate that that has become our reality. I hate that we, and our children, and our neighbors, some who love and despise our lives in equal measure, have a ready memory deck of images, vivid and moving, of death and trauma being visited on Black bodies.

In this matter we aren’t powerless. Not at all. In this matter, the sharing of the recordings of trauma, and hunting and murder, we have agency. We do not have to spread these images and reels with the vulnerable. There is no win to be found in it, not anymore, and there never truly was.

See, desensitization is true and real. It’s progressive. It happens when we become so accustomed to seeing and experiencing a thing, that we are no longer stimulated by it. So, we can, and are, becoming so accustomed to seeing harm visited to Black bodies and minds that we are gradually less stunned, and outraged. At some point, while we are living between traumas, we revisit those that we have been exposed to, and play those over, and try to find some means of coping lest we collapse emotionally under the weight of it all, and the knowledge that it is happening near us, or could befall us, and our minds, so battered by the steady drip of these traumas, fictionalizes it in some way. The mind, so riddled with survivors guilt and rage, to find the air necessary to allow us to breathe emotionally, turns down the color and contrast on so many of these incidents, so many of our family and tribe, being brutalized.

I pray that we never know stasis here, and that this never becomes our normal, and yet…

This is not sustainable. Not at all. Not in any true way. There was more trauma this week, and there were reports last week, and somewhere, within you, you know that there will be reports next week, and more video and audio evidence, and it will meet your consciousness like the tide coming in.

I ask that you set the boundary. I ask that you remain aware, and fight how and where you are able, but to refrain from playing those images over and again for yourself, and that you refrain from sharing them with your community of loved ones, friends and neighbors. Some of our family are too close a proverbial edge as is, and we have no true way of knowing whether these latest images will tip them over that precipice. Simply don’t. We know what they contain. We know those responsible. We know the horror.

There is the matter of trauma. There is the matter of further exposure retraumatizing the vulnerable. There is the matter of secondary trauma for those near and vulnerable and there is the anxiety and mood disturbance, and insomnia, and so many of the conditions that run wild and are tethered only to oppression, but tolerated for those not born with privilege.

Enough, please. Stop sharing these images without considering the cost to yourself, and to so many fragile others. That is not to say that you ignore the indignities and brutality. No. Rather, I ask that you find a means to engage while also protecting yourself and your community from the trauma fallout. Those images, those recordings, strike nearly every mind in their blast radius. They aren’t healthy for any of us. There are so many other means for feeding your motivation, and activism and outrage that you need not peddle trauma trauma porn.

I don’t want for any of our family to grow so accustomed to it, that these clips play rather like trailers for the ills of our society. I don’t want for our family to have to become so used to the worst of it, that they play it out in their minds, and somehow actualize being a victim in waiting. Living and coping daily with supremacy is burden enough.

We need to engage it, and we must, responsibly. We need to face it, and reverse it, and extinguish all of the forces round us that press these traumas down round our crowns. Yes. But in the doing, we must see to our wellness, and we must process through these, and we can and should allow ourselves the space to not tune in to the most brutal of that programming. Not to feed our purpose or morbid curiosity.

We are well past the point of enough.

#BlackJoyInitiative