Race-based Trauma: Why Many will not Watch the Tyre Nichols Video
As we embark into Black History Month— a time to honor the triumphs and struggles of African Americans throughout U.S. history— it is, yet again, highlighted by police brutality. Our society has witnessed another victim: Tyre Nichols.
Police brutality has been one of many continuous forms of terror and racism towards the African American community. Video footage of the moments leading up to Tyre Nichols’ death, where five Memphis police officers who’ve now been charged with 2nd degree murder, was released last Friday.
Many people have taken the initiative to stop viewing these videos as it can be incredibly stressful. To see violence and death against our own people is the race-based trauma that many are trying to stay away from. In a 2018 study by The Lancet reported about police killings and their spillover effects on the mental health of Black Americans. Research showed that Black people continued to be affected by a fatal encounter between police and an unarmed Black person months after first hearing about it.
In the hours before Memphis police released video of the beating death of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man from Memphis, cable-news anchors spoke of the police footage as “hours away from release,” “soon to come,” and other terms typically reserved for sporting events, major political speeches, moments of scandal, and Hollywood film premieres not savage police killings of citizens these ‘cops’ swore to protect and serve.
Today, despite the seemingly wall-to-wall coverage of events in Memphis and the relatively quick firing and arrest of the officers, the vast majority of deaths caused by police will not lead to criminal charges. So we, who are alive to see it, or at least take in the essential facts of what happened to Nichols, do have a range of choices, including the degree of solemnity those of us who watch bring to the viewing and what those of us who don’t watch say about a man’s last moments in immense terror and pain.
