When Proof Is Not Enough

[Valin]

Five Thirty Eight

Throughout history, evidence of racism has failed to effect change.

Mimi Onuoha

Jul. 1, 2020

According to the pundits, the revolution, if you would call it that, began with video. The first and foremost was the excruciating recording of George Floyd’s last moments as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin¹ publicly pinned the life out of him. That was on May 25, but more than a month later, the recordings have continued to disseminate. Protesters uploaded photos of rubber bullets, their wounds and their mangled faces, while journalists and other concerned members of the public aggregated footage of police brutality into lists and websites.

The compilation of evidence has seemed to jar something loose, for now. Corporations are pledging to donate millions to racial and social justice causes,² legislators have proposed tentative yet unprecedented restrictions on the police, and the Marines and Navy have banned the Confederate battle flag³ some 150 years after the ending of the war that sparked its creation.

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But regardless, a luckless great many of us know that the deck has been stacked from the beginning. And because we know that no amount of shouting, pleading, calculating or visualizing will persuade those who have been educated and raised to deny this, we have put our efforts in other places.

If wider society recognizes data’s limitations, it, too, can move on from overly relying upon it as the only proxy for evidence. That which can be captured on camera is always incomplete. It is never the totality of what occurs in our lives, let alone what occurs in our communities. By considering the vast context and evidence present in the nation’s history, we can save ourselves from tacitly reinforcing the idea that structural violence matters only when it can be compressed into a form that fits what we recognize as evidence. And, in doing so, we give ourselves new frames for thinking about the many people who have died at the hands of brutality and whose deaths were not recorded. As we find a fluency in addressing the greater mass of life that is lived outside of our data, we can begin, finally, to fully address the living.