Some thoughts on the recent non-indictment decisions in Mike Browns and Eric Garners cases. Thanks to Commonware for publishing in English and Italian! What does it mean for physical evidence to be treated both as silent and infallible, as if it was a human witness, while at the same time it is made to speak like the only witness that lives outside a long history of state and racialized violence? What does it mean when McCulloch describes the testimony of silent evidence as the only witness that is constant (because it does not know precarity), that does not look away (because it cannot be terrified), that does not suffer the trauma of memory loss (because it has not witnessed the loss of life)? What McCulloch called facts, what were supposedly neutral and unbiased objects of truth, were marshaled to speak and to testify, to discredit other witnesses accounts, made to come alive in order to render this event itself somehow outside history, outside the struggle, outside of subjective truths like the experience of racism, or what he reduced to “underlying tensions between the police department and a significant part of the neighborhood”—a description that is remarkably deracinated.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 16:26:24 +0000