Understanding the Distinction between Seeing and Reading Racial Violence

• In Event: Aesthetics, Anti-racism, and Democracy

Abstract

The recent proliferation of photographs and videos depicting black suffering and death has renewed interest within political theory about the conditions where such images can serve as “evidence” of racial violence. As argued elsewhere, narratives shape people’s encounters with images, influencing their understanding of what they see. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of jurors’ reaction to the Rodney King video in “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” I call these encounters “reading” and illustrate how white supremacy perpetuates reading practices often misidentified as simply seeing. I elaborate the problem and possibilities of distinguishing the perceptual act of seeing from the interpretive exercise that is reading, by examining Butler’s chapter alongside Gail Weiss’s and Davide Panagia’s critiques in “Imagining the Horizon” and The Political Life of Sensation. I respond to Weiss’s and Panagia’s respective concerns about determining the legitimacy of one reading over another and the impulse to narrativize what is viewed, arguing that even with its limitations Butler’s distinction offers a helpful way for understanding the problem of getting people to ‘see’ racial violence. Through engaging with Butler’s, Weiss’s, and Panagia’s texts, I demonstrate why circulating visual ephemera depicting black suffering and death is not enough to prompt people to “see” racial violence. Like Butler, I believe people must be taught to read these images differently.

Author

• Damali Britton, Brown University