Playing Dead: The Trayvoning Meme & the Mocking of Black Deathby Lisa Guerrero and David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
The more things change, the more they stay the same. While new media and social networking is “transforming” our society, in certain ways, bringing people closer together, if only seemingly so, its “newness” seems only relative to its potential as a new frontier in which to deploy and recycle the same old narratives and tropes, to continue a history of injustices that define the American experience. As the technologies of communication appear new, the technologies of oppression are anything but. However, as we see with “Trayvoning,” the trend that has White youth posting pictures of themselves as if they were part of the Trayvon crime scene, the marriage of communication innovation with racist stagnation does constitute something new, though not improved, in the history of the system of racism in the United States.
“’Trayvoning’ is when you get a hoodie, Skittles and Arizona iced tea, and pose like you've been shot in the chest.” The Facebook page instructs participants in go through the following steps:
1. Get hoodie
2. Get skittles
3. Get Arizona
4. Wear hoodie
5. Go to Florida
6. Get shot :)
Trayvon Martin was a 17-year-old African American male who was unarmed and got shot by a raciest [sic] Mexican American.
During Step 7, participants are instructed to post their pictures on the Internet, which has led to widespread circulation of these disgusting and dehumanizing images.
In response to reports about “Trayvoning,” Jasiri X asked on Twitter: “Trayvoning? Really? Why is our pain, suffering & death, always mocked for laughs?” This question gets to the heart of not only the efforts to recreate and disseminate representations of the Trayvon case, but it is also a means to communicate pleasure in the murder of Trayvon. “Trayvoning” recasts and performs injustice by turning someone’s pain and suffering into a spectacle of white pleasure that further denies the humanity of black people. This is reflected not just in “Trayvoning” but with the Orlando businessman who has sought to capitalize by selling Trayvon shooting targets, the media that continues to criminalize and blame Trayvon, and those who have disparaged, mocked(see here for picture of someone who donned blackface), and made light of a dead young man.
The disregard for Black life, and the disparagement of Black death is nothing new; the pleasure and joy garnered from Black suffering and dreams deferred has been central to White supremacy throughout United States history. Evident in minstrel shows, the history of lynching, and jokes about racial profiling or the war on drugs, whites have always found joy in the violence experienced by African Americans.
The history of American public discourse is one marred with both the erasure of black and suffering, and efforts to find happiness and pleasure in the suffering of the OTHER. We saw this during Hurricane Katrina where the sight of African Americans wading through water in search of food or medicine, or stranded families clinging to life on roof tops elicited reactions of shock and horror as well as pleasure and joy at the knowledge that could never happen to White America. Dylan Rodriguez describes Katrina as a “scene of white popular enjoyment, wherein the purging/drowning of black people provided an opportunity for white Americana to revel in its entitlement to remain relatively indifferent to this nearby theater of breathtaking devastation.”
Such joy isn’t simply an outgrowth of the denied humanity of Black people or the refusal to witness and see Black pain, but it is also a celebration of, or at least the solidification of, White humanity, White power, and the protective armor that whiteness provides each and every day. This is the story of race in America, from lynchings to Katrina, from slavery to Trayvon Martin.
But the examples of racialized disregard that have surrounded Trayvon Martin’s death, most recently exemplified in the commodification and “meme-ification” of the tragedy by various White people. This marks a startling new mechanization of racism wherein there has been a complete evacuation of humanity…on both sides, that of people of color and other marginalized groups, the dehumanization of which is, sadly, no longer surprising, but also that of dominant groups who willfully participate in acts of oppression like “Trayvoning” whose humanity becomes increasingly and insidiously taken over by consumption and performance. The joy historically, as well as contemporaneously, taken by many Whites in the violence against and suffering of African Americans has become nearly indistinguishable from the joy of consuming.
The consumer market has overtaken all facets of social interaction, the good, the bad, and the very bad. We are witnessing a descent into a “society of the spectacle” that perhaps Guy DeBord himself could scarcely imagine. The spectacularizing of racialized events and tragedies within the 21stcentury, while still largely constructed through sociocultural lenses of White supremacy, racialized inferiority, and histories of racial injustices and violences, allows for their translation to be conveniently dislocated from these racial phenomena and displaced onto the assumed “neutral” projects of commodity and consumption. As DeBord stated regarding the nature of the society of the spectacle, “The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images…It is a world vision which has become objectified.”
Writing about the practice of whites collecting body parts as souvenirs during lynchings, Harvey Young, in “The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching,” highlights the spectacle of white-on-black violence and the pleasure derived from Black suffering and death. He describes the lynching of Sam Hose in 1899, where, “the assembled crowd descended upon his body and collected various parts of it assouvenirs.” Seeking to explain the unexplainable, to provide meaning to the unthinkable, Young identifies this history in the following way: “lynched black body in the aftermath of the lynching event and variously read it in terms of the souvenir, the fetish, and the performance remain.” He argues, “that the lynching keepsake not only can be defined by, but also can exceed, each of these three terms. Containing within itself the various features of the souvenir, the fetish, and the remain, the body part recalls and remembers the performance of which it is a part. It not only gestures toward the beliefs that motivated its theft, but also renders visible the body from which it was taken.”
It would seem that the efforts to recreate Trayvon’s death, to trivialize his death by including skittles and ice tea, and then disseminate this image within the new media sphere continues the history of rendering Black death as souvenir. “For white supremacists, souvenir lynching photos became ways of reliving the erotic thrills of torture and mutilation produced under the guise of righteous civic actions, as well as a way of reaffirming a racial and gendered hierarchy that kept white men on top and blacks at the bottom,” writes Dora Apel in “Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib.” She furthers that, “When lynching photos were transformed into souvenir postcards, they were sent to friends and family with the senders' proud boasts of having been in the mob, making blackness an exotic spectacle and privileging the ‘look of whites over blacks. Spectacle lynchings similarly relied on the look of the crowd to reaffirm notions of superior white ‘manliness’ over the stereotype of the hyper sexual black male”
In this historical example we see the explicit rendering of White supremacy. The White supremacy and racism of the act, purposefully done as the dual act of White superiority and Black inferiority, as well as of the racist and violent talisman provided by the souvenir, was never obfuscated. It was seen as a right. It was claimed. In the new millennium, a time heavily invested in the belief in its own racial progress, while remaining heavily mired in colorblind racism and reimagined racial violences, the rampant consumer society, fortified incalculably by new media, makes the claims to White supremacy, (for all but the most extreme), almost completely deniable. The claims become subsumed beneath the “logic” of the spectacle wherein “the spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.” (DeBord) This is the sociocultural state in which “Trayvoning” exists, the state of the self-referential spectacle.
Thus “Trayvoning” creates a community bound by whiteness and the ability to “become” Trayvon through the dehumanizing ritual, through the spectacle of Black death, and through recasting his murder apart from white supremacy and whiteness. While his murder, his death, and the circumstances that surround the injustice are understood as a site of White ritual and pleasure, a space of White pleasure resulting from Black pain, they are not transparently claimed (by and large) as such. While the trend can be interpreted as a new technology of lynching, its character remains separate from lynchings of the past whose act, and the dissemination of lynching photographs highlighted White power and White supremacy.
The ability to “act” like a dead Trayvon Martin only to get up and head back into White suburbia is illustrative of this same feeling of power and privilege, but invisibly so. White people don’t take part in “Trayvoning” to “declare” White supremacy; they take part in it because the declaration has been rendered unnecessary by various sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic forces. In fact, the absence of the explicit claims to it emphasizes the power and privilege even more. It reflects an unstated joy at the lack of possibility of getting suspected as a criminal for merely walking to a convenience store; it reflects an unacknowledged level of pleasure in knowing that being stopped for walking while White is less likely than a visit to Newt’s moon colony; it reflects a flaunting of the power and privilege that grants Whiteness protection from armed security guards, an unwilling/reluctant criminal justice system, and a media culture more concerned with convicted Trayvon Martin than George Zimmerman. The ability to stand up and walk away after the photo indicates the power of whiteness.
“Trayvoning” is thus akin to a history of racial cross-dressing and minstrelsy, practices that, according to Eric Lott, embodied white desire “to try on the accents of ‘blackness’ and demonstrates the permeability of the color line.” He writes that blackface “facilitate[s] safely an exchange of energies between two otherwise rigidly bounded and policed cultures.” The ability to imagine and embody Trayvon in death is a source of pleasure because it not only provides whites with the opportunity to “try on” and “control” blackness but to reassert their whiteness. Whereas Trayvon is dead, whiteness lives on.
Much of the media discourse has likened “Trayvoning” to planking or “Tebowing,” emphasizing the phenomena as a spectacle, as yet another example of youth culture, the ease that pictures are disseminated on the Internet, or how trends come about. Yet, while “Trayvoning” is certainly a disturbing phenomenon of spectacle, these comparisons are absurd at so many levels because neither “planking” nor “Tebowing” rely on, perpetuate, and relish in Black death; these practices don’t find recreation in the re-creation of black suffering nor do they produce souvenirs to remember the death of Trayvon Martin.
“Trayvoning” is but another moment in a larger history of racial violence, and white efforts to establish a segregated community based on power and pleasure, commodification and deniability. One can only hope, based on the resistance and condemnation these pictures have elicited, that those thinking about “Trayvoning” will simply skip steps 1-6 and go right to step #8: humanize death, ANY death, instead of spectacularizing it; and continue to protest racial injustice in this form…and in all its forms.
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Lisa Guerrero is Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University Pullman, editor of Teaching Race in the 21st Century: College Professors Talk About Their Fears, Risks, and Rewards (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and co-author of African Americans in Television, co-authored with David J. Leonard. (Praeger Publishing, 2009).
David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness was just published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.
