The Carcerality of Virality: Terror

Imagine. The year is 2012. If you're a Zoomer like me, this makes you a child in late middle school to early elementary school, just becoming conscious of what it means to live in a deeply and foundationally unjust world. I was 12 years old, and from my family's experiences with housing insecurity, I was coming around to the idea that shit was just unfair. Moving away from the community you've grown in since your siblings were babies will teach you that. Imagine being 12 years old in 2012 learning about the murder of Trayvon Martin. Shot for no reason besides craving a sweet familiar candy that - Skittles are just pure sugar after all. But maybe being gunned down by a Florida man, fearing the end of your life while carrying the cultural product of centuries of sugar plantations in your back pocket is the perfect analogy for the carcerality of this country we proclaim to be a United States for those relegated to Blackness.

I think as a collective we like to not think about slavery - and when slavery is imbedded into every little aspect of society, it easy to dislike thinking about anything too deeply. But to understand carcerality, you should understand that fundamentally a colonial society is a carceral one. It's a society under duress, full of hostage cultures trying to fight their way out from the brutality they face - by any means necessary.

And now we return to my 12 year old self - witnessing the grueling process of the news coverage of the death of this black teenager - barely older than I was. My brother who was 8 years old at the time took the news really hard. He was scared to sleep at night alone for a hot minute there. The trauma of having to process so young that Black people are simply NPC's to many of the white faces that surrounded me and my family. Because I'm almost 13 years old, I'm like basically a real teenager now, and I'm angry. I took to the internet - my dearest confidant that housed my longest, most stable relationships. All of my online friends were sharing their feelings, signing petitions, and contributing to #TrayvonMartin. His mom, Sybrina Fulton had contacted lawyers that spoke on the news about how the support online was bringing much needed attention to the case, and that black people across the country were positively impacting its progress.

And today I can look back and remember George Zimmerman's acquittal in 2013 with rage but at the time, 13 year old me was beyond devastated. You see, back in 2008 all the adults we're acting like a new level of racial equality had been achieved, and I truly believed them. We marched and chanted down the halls of my VERY Black elementary school all election day: "It ain't no white house anymore! It ain't no white house anymore!" (We were very clever 3rd graders.) George Zimmerman's acquittal was a gut punch to the heart. Even if he could, Obama wouldn't do anything about it. And he damn near called the protestors in Ferguson thugs. And he definitely didn't prevent the onslaught of images of black death my friends and I even up surrounding ourselves with, desperately signing petitions, and writing letters to our congressmen. Yeah I'm that brand of autistic.

Nothing worked though (obviously). I finally hit my breaking point sophomore year of high school when footage of that 16 year old black girl being body slammed by a North Carolina police officer. And then there was the 15 year old black girl that was body slammed by a police officer at a pool party in Texas. And even writing this article now, I can't even find the specific video that I really couldn't stomach, the 14 year old black girl slammed from out of her desk by a police officer in her classroom . The year is 2017 and I'd spent over the past half decade of my life surrounded by an exponentially increasing amount of violence against black bodies. See, in 2012 my family couldn't afford to get me a smart phone. By 2017, I've had BEEN using all the apps all the time like a good little consumer of social media. I had been following and using all the hashtags but nothing was working. Imagine how the families and communities of these people distilled down to hashtags felt.

Later that same year, I learned about how back in the day yt people used to keep postcards from lynchings?? And kept preserved body parts of murdered Black people as family heirlooms??? Yeah that's some vile shit. That's that disgusting evil villain type shit. And I realized that images of black death are foundational to American social life in the sickest, most twisted ways. Because it's not enough to brutalize black bodies - it necessary for maintaining hegemonic power dynamics to also terrorize Blackness, to throw your most debase desires and values at us and demand normality - business as usual - in service of that terror.

At this point you might be wondering (if you're yt) what this has to do with the topic at hand. You've got no topic sentences or thesis to distill my experiences of this world into and it's scary here. It's scary sitting in the terror. Sit in this terror and you'll only begin to see the feelings of desperation is must take to post images of your dying or brutalized child on the internet - hoping that this new social media thing is surely the answer to your already shattered prayers. They're already dead. Surely Emmitt Till's open casket in 1955 will shock the nation into legislating the extra-judicial murders of black children. What Ida B. Well couldn't live long enough to see was signed into law this year - the Emmitt Till Anti-Lynching act by our dear old anti-integration, pro-war on drugs president Joe Byron. Good job Joe. And those school shootings we get to witness every few weeks? Maybe in 40 years our descendants will get to see Ben Shapiro sign the Sandy Hook Anti-School Shooting Act.

To understand the carcerality of virality, you must first sit in the terror of the Black social media experience. Tell me, how does it feel?