In a brief span of two days the police killed 2 black men but, in a way, they didn't because we won’t remember them when the 24-hour news cycle is up. Perhaps our memory will be awaked momentarily if the cops are exonerated by the “justice” system in America and the media covers it. (We don’t convict “law enforcement” officers because, as Donald Trump says, “We love our police.”)
Tomorrow, or the next day, the time when the cops destroyed the black men's lives will be forgotten because in America time does not exist
except in the moment it appears on TV, or the internet, as part of fragmented news. As Henry A. Giroux writes, we live in a “. . .society that uses new communication technologies that erase history by producing a notion of time wedded to a culture of immediacy, speed, simultaneity and endless flows of fragmented knowledge.”
Reality is what’s on TV or the Internet and it’s only in the present. What is real is “now,” it has no past or future – it is only in the present. The shooting death of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, took place in a community that has been wracked by racial tension in the past. But since the past racial tension doesn’t exist, except for right now, if it is brought up on TV, that context will soon disappear just as the cop killing of Alton Sterling will vanish.
“The killing of Philando Castile, 32, who was shot by a police officer after a traffic stop on Wednesday evening, prompted Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton to order a state investigation. A graphic video showed blood oozing through Castile's shirt as he appeared to lose consciousness,” writes the Associated Press. Some spectacular statement by Donald Trump about Mexicans, Jews, or some other minority group will soon erase the second murder by cop.
But, maybe not, because Sterling and Castile’s deaths may trump Trump by providing a superior spectacle of black folk and their supporters rioting so that the TV cameras can focus on a burning tire in a street, or better yet, youth jumping on an abandoned police car. But like Castle’s oozing blood, the riot will vanish as though it never happened. So, there’s nothing to forget.. . even if it happened it would probably be presented on TV without historical context to join the parade of fragmented momentary knowledge that would soon be erased like the body in a San Gabriel Valley, CA, alley of Kendrec McDade, an unarmed black youth, who died in 2012 in a hail of bullets from the Pasadena Police.
Philando Castile, who? Alton Sterlling, who? Kendrec McDade, who?
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