A much larger, clearer version of the picture to the left, showing Trayvon Martin ‘s dead body in the grass after being shot by George Zimmerman, was shown today on MSNBC and posted on Gawker, a move which was met with mixed reactions. On one hand, many were outraged by this image being released to the public figuring it was completely in bad taste and should be only consumed by people essential to solving the case. On the other hand, many other people were saddened and disgusted at the fact that they even saw it in the first place. Of course there are many people who did NOT need to see this picture to be saddened, angered or frustrated by the true nature of Trayvon’s death – but can we definitively state that there aren’t people out there who have lost sight of the true human tragedy of Trayvon’s death – and ANY murder for that matter? See, what really disturbs many of those people more than anything else is being rocked out of their comfortable ignorance.
We know bad things happen in the world, but not actually seeing them explicitly helps many of us to refrain from becoming uncomfortably familiar with them. Unfortunately, avoiding that discomfort has directly resulted in many of us becoming desensitized.
As a dual citizen of Canada and Barbados, I was at home with my aunt in Warrens, St. Michaels on January 12th, 2010, when a catastrophic earthquake ripped through Haiti. The one thing people everywhere had in common was that we all had no real idea of the magnitude of the damage caused by the event but as the days slowly crawled by, early estimates were proven to be horribly wrong and the true extent of the horrific event began to unfold. I won’t claim to have been anymore emotionally invested than anyone else simply because of my island’s relative proximity to Haiti, but I do remember how much of the island was gripped in an underlying fear of ‘what if that happened here?’ especially when another, albeit much smaller, earthquake hit the Cayman Islands exactly one week later on January 19th. But, I began to notice something that truly disturbed me – and it was how quickly and easily most of my friends from North America had distanced themselves from the tragedy.
For a moment, it seemed like much of the world was interested – and then the next second we collectively returned to our comfortable ignorance. Before aide campaigns were over; Before final death tolls and estimates of the damage were complete; Before blood was washed off the streets; And before concepts around creating a solid new infrastructure were in place, we had MOVED on. It was back to posting pictures of Rihanna and wondering if she would ever forgive Chris Brown. It was back to wondering if the Celtics were deep enough to win an NBA championship. It was back to reality TV and wondering who was going to get voted off the island – and I LOST it.
I took to my Facebook and BLASTED everyone’s lack of an attention span for overlooking the tragedy and being passive internet-activists, who will dedicate a few Facebook statuses and tweets about it self-aggrandizingly lamenting over how THEY have been personally affected by WITNESSING the tragedy, and maybe even changing their profile pictures. I warned everyone that we need to be diligent in addressing this tragedy, because if we don’t do it NOW, we will FORGET this all happened weeks from now (something I’ve definitely been guilty of in MANY circumstances with issues around the world). My rant got little to no response.
So I posted the most heartbreaking photo I could find – the one that motivated me to not only care with all my heart but also to donate – which was a picture of six dead naked black Haitian boys lying dead in the back of a pickup truck, with the caption “THIS IS WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING OUT HERE! DON’T IGNORE US!”
Instantly the picture got almost 100 comments – mostly of people describing how SICK and DEMENTED I was for posting it. As reports came in that almost 200,000 men, women and children had been killed, people stopped playing Facebook Solitaire to complain that the picture took them mentally out of playing Facebook Solitaire. People who had STOPPED caring and devoting time and energy to helping with the tragedy were now upset that they had to bare witness to the REALITY of it. They were SHAKEN out of their comfortable ignorance.
But in my self-righteous rage, I missed one very real truism about what they were collectively experiencing: Compassion fatigue, which is defined as the inability to react sympathetically to a crisis, disaster, etc., because of overexposure to previous crises, disasters, etc. The nightly news is led with so much tales of death and horror, how can we truly survive without losing our damn minds if we DON’T learn coping mechanisms for bad news? But as much as our coping methods have HELPED us, can we truly say that seeing death as being “business as usual” is a good thing?
When I see the picture of Trayvon lying dead with his eyes open, it takes me back to that picture of the boys being dead in Haiti, but even moreso to Emmett Till. After Till was beaten and shot for allegedly whistling at a white woman, his mother did something that changed the trajectory of race discussions in America forever: She decided Emmett’s funeral would be public – and she made sure to make it an OPEN casket. She wanted EVERYONE to view the carnage that was done to her 14 year old baby boy. She wanted them to WITNESS what a deceased boy looks like after he’s been pistol whipped, excessively beaten, had an eye gouged out (while he was still alive) and had his skull fractured by a bullet to the head. The image of Emmett’s mangled face is one that lives in infamy, especially in the Black community because it has been BURNED into our psyche’s.
Mamie Till made us NEVER forget.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure how Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton feel about his picture, but now that it is being openly shared around, to question its existence is pointless now. But what we need to do is ask ourselves ONE simple question: Now that we’ve ALL being shocked out of our comfort zone in seeing what TRULY happened to Trayvon, are we going to let the image MOTIVATE us to NEVER FORGET and NEVER stop fighting for justice (as the graphic images of Emmett Till did)? Or are we going to complain about seeing them and bitch about being shoved out of our comfortable ignorance, like when a starving African commercial comes on TV and we instinctively switch the channel as fast as we possibly can?
Whatever we choose to do, I HOPE we keep fighting for change regardless of how the picture OR the verdict makes us feel and maybe, just maybe, we can start to see the true tragedy in the loss of all young Black kids, including the hundreds who die at the hands of other Blacks every year too.
LAB
Lincoln Anthony Blades blogs daily on his site ThisIsYourConscience.com, he’s an author of the book “You’re Not A Victim, You’re A Volunteer” and a weekly contributor for UPTOWN Magazine. He can be reached via Twitter @lincolnablades and on Facebook at This Is Your Conscience.
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