We become desensitized to images of the exploited in two ways:

1. Mainstream media overuses them and creates a "fatigue of empathy" as Sontag would call it.

2. Social media, designed for and by the white gaze, constantly bombards us with them, removed from direct experience.

Regarding point 1: “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. ...

... If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”

The media actively shows us these images without a viable path to combat oppression.

Inaction tied with a bombarding of images of death and misery begins to drain us from compassion and emotions. Ideally any of these images should cause us to writhe in pain. That is natural! Many of us don't...our moral centers and psychology needs to be retrained.

Regarding point 2: "So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence."

These images framed by white gaze and controlled by the white narrative removes the oppressor's guilt.

This then results in the widespread sharing of images by guiltless, yet contributing actors of violence, and the traumatization of oppressed eyes seeing them. It is their fears and nightmares manifested before their eyes using media that already creates a sense of helplessness.

Read "Regarding the Pain of Others": https://monoskop.org/images/a/a6/Sontag_Susan_2003_Regarding_the_Pain_of_Others.pdf