Presentation Title
Aesthetics of Linked Fate Syndrome: Violence, Trauma, and the Relationality between the African American Psyche and Fatal Police Brutality
Location
BTSU 315
Start Date
22-2-2019 1:30 PM
End Date
22-2-2019 2:20 PM
Description
Social media and technology allow people from around the world to immediately access information about diverse peoples and cultures. More than simply a theoretical notion of accessibility, social media creates literal and figurative/virtual spaces where issues of representation and identity prove ambivalent. My research study informs readers of the psychological dangers African-Americans face after viewing fatal brutality specifically on Twitter. For example, consistent, criminalized images of African American male youth when watching news broadcasts in any given urban city center in the US leads viewers, white, black, and brown, to believe that dark people do bad things—often. Hence, this project unmasks the ambivalence that is produced in African Americans as they see themselves represented as illegal/illicit subjects that routinely break laws and it analyzes the psycho-social processes through their various traumatic manifestations that are rhetorically present on their Twitter-feeds. Ultimately, the contradictions related to representation affect viewers self-perception and identify; African Americans see themselves as inevitable targets of a biased, discriminatory legal system that is at best "out to get them" and at worst, "out to kill them." My research on Linked Fate Syndrome suggests that Black viewers excessively digest images of violence and social injustice and then chronicle their reactions to said violence against Black people through their own social media outlets. The performative nature of these consistent repetitions of Black bodies as dangerous and targeted as recipients of systemic violence are key factors in how African Americans interpret the self and the other in the U.S. American social imaginary. Applying an analytical read of Linked Fate Syndrome—the ability to identify other members of the same race, sex, and/or religion, despite national origin—this study aims to interrogate the psychological ramification African-Americans symptomatically.
Aesthetics of Linked Fate Syndrome: Violence, Trauma, and the Relationality between the African American Psyche and Fatal Police Brutality
BTSU 315
Social media and technology allow people from around the world to immediately access information about diverse peoples and cultures. More than simply a theoretical notion of accessibility, social media creates literal and figurative/virtual spaces where issues of representation and identity prove ambivalent. My research study informs readers of the psychological dangers African-Americans face after viewing fatal brutality specifically on Twitter. For example, consistent, criminalized images of African American male youth when watching news broadcasts in any given urban city center in the US leads viewers, white, black, and brown, to believe that dark people do bad things—often. Hence, this project unmasks the ambivalence that is produced in African Americans as they see themselves represented as illegal/illicit subjects that routinely break laws and it analyzes the psycho-social processes through their various traumatic manifestations that are rhetorically present on their Twitter-feeds. Ultimately, the contradictions related to representation affect viewers self-perception and identify; African Americans see themselves as inevitable targets of a biased, discriminatory legal system that is at best "out to get them" and at worst, "out to kill them." My research on Linked Fate Syndrome suggests that Black viewers excessively digest images of violence and social injustice and then chronicle their reactions to said violence against Black people through their own social media outlets. The performative nature of these consistent repetitions of Black bodies as dangerous and targeted as recipients of systemic violence are key factors in how African Americans interpret the self and the other in the U.S. American social imaginary. Applying an analytical read of Linked Fate Syndrome—the ability to identify other members of the same race, sex, and/or religion, despite national origin—this study aims to interrogate the psychological ramification African-Americans symptomatically.