I have a few things to say about this “we need to publicly witness a death in order for the slain person to be grievable” rationale. https://twitter.com/theintercept/status/1259506428521467906

1. I need white people to stop being interlocutors of Mamie Till and every other mother or family member of a murdered black person. Their justifications for seeing a lynched body or video and your — to paraphrase — perverse white viewership are not the same.

2. I need us to be extremely judicious about our uses of “we” with regards to racial violence. Who is “we”? What do “we” need to bear witness to? Instead of using “we” use “I”: all these white-penned articles compelling “us” to bear witness are just personal confessionals anyway.

3. Natasha wrote a book, and one of the chapters is called “Looking at Corpses.” The chapter is not only about the fact that we do not often see the corpses of white people on the news or social media, but that there’s a deliberate over-presentation of non-whites.

I know the chapter because I read and reviewed the book in JC last year. My driving critique of the book is applies to this article: there is a deep, profound absence of racial politics https://jewishcurrents.org/searching-for-black-thought-in-white-antifascism/

She seemed to take my critique to heart, I guess that was not the case. No hard feelings, I know how journalism works.

4. The whole idea of “grievable lives” is, in my unsolicited opinion, racist. A death does not need to be literally seen for an individual/life to be grieved, otherwise the value of one’s life — here, black life — rests squarely with the sensibilities of the [white] witness.

The innocence of a victim — ie the nature of their death and a retrospective audit of their life — only needs to be assessed if you do not know how white supremacy functions and/or if you do not believe in black claims to life (or the claims made around the brutality of death).