Some point to Rodney King’s 1991 beating by four White police officers, all acquitted despite video evidence. Yet, criticism of cameras as preventive of police violence is not new. The exigence of police brutality guides two related anecdotes about body cameras I critique in the proceeding section: one assumes body cameras protect citizens the other assumes they protect police. 1 While police brutality has intensified important social movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName, I focus my critique on unquestioned celebrations of body cameras. The capability to turn images of Black people recently murdered or beaten by police into Internet memes further normalizes antiblack violence as spectacle, throwing doubt on the radical potential of body cameras. I apply Eric Watt’s “spectacular consumption” to Barry Brummett’s “representational anecdote” to argue that body cameras (but also cell phone videos and social media) further normalize the commodification of black death. I am concerned with the reduction of antiblack violence to Internet mimicry. I agree with Ben Wetherbee’s argument that “rhetorical criticism benefits from accounting for memes,” but I want to push this position into a discussion of rhetoric, mimicry, and black studies. Taking a page from Carey and Nakamura, I am skeptical of the antiracist, radical potentiality of body cameras. In light of the recent police murders of Black adults, and children, like Michael Brown, Tanisha Anderson, Tamir Rice, and Miriam Carey, body cameras are championed by politicians, the NAACP, and reporters as necessary to police the police. When Carey and Nakamura wrote about these two celebrations of technology, they speak to, but did not explicitly have in mind, the contemporary celebration of body cameras as preventative of police brutality.
Nakamura challenges this view, however, nothing that anyone who thinks racism is a thing of the past “need only look to the Internet for proof that this is not so” (“Gender and Race Online” 81).
Lisa Nakamura makes a similar assessment about the Internet, arguing that some people have declared the Internet “a ‘utopia’ where ‘there is no race, there is no gender’” ( Digitizing Race 337). But he continued by noting that electronic communication technologies actually furthered inequality rather than lessened it. James Carey once wrote that in the late 19 th century people celebrated “electronic technology as the motive force of desired social change” (88).
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