THE WHITE ALBUM

Abstract

In an interview with Mavis Nicholson in 1987, James Baldwin said: “Black people need witnesses in this hostile world, which thinks everything is white.” Baldwin’s statement invokes the witness as one who bears a responsibility to the violence that renders Black life vulnerable to premature death. But what is it to bear witness in a world structured by anti-Blackness? This paper charts a relation between the 1992 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers and the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, asking why such mediated witnessing of such moments of racialized state violence regularly fail to provoke an ethico-juridical crisis for the state. Against the idea that the ubiquity of mobile media – from smartphones and platform media to police dash-cams and body-cams – produce greater levels of police oversight and accountability, the paper argues that the scene of witnessing is structured by a racialized perception of the human which creates a situation in which artefacts of witnessing are challenged and contested. Drawing on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s notion of “the crisis state” and Judith Butler’s articulation of a “racially saturated field of visibility,” the paper explores the limits of the figure of the witness and offers a critique of techno-fixes to state-sanctioned anti-Blackness such as body-worn cameras. Against the presumption of the witness as an objective conduit of truth, the paper reads the work of the artist Arthur Jafa, whose video works Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death and The White Album stage a confrontation with a visual field structured by racism and suggest an articulation of the human in excess of liberal subjectivity.