{"id":140882,"date":"2019-11-13T09:00:05","date_gmt":"2019-11-13T14:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=140882"},"modified":"2019-11-13T11:16:30","modified_gmt":"2019-11-13T16:16:30","slug":"trending-trauma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/13\/trending-trauma\/","title":{"rendered":"Trending Trauma"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Homelessness is a crisis that, if you\u2019re lucky, never happens to you. Many, however, live in a suspended state of perpetually tenuous living called houselessness. Houselessness is denoted not so much as a lack of roof over one\u2019s head but rather looks like the problem of too many roofs. Houselessness means a vulnerable position that\u2019s also invisible: the roof or sublet or room or couch or yeah, sure, just crash here for the weekend<\/em> is a mask that keeps concern at bay. Strangers, employers, even relatives are short on empathy for those who they assume are at least meeting the physiological minimums in the famed hierarchy of needs. As a society we are bad enough to people who certainly aren\u2019t. It isn\u2019t a competition to be sure, for houselessness makes a poor consolation prize, more a transient condition punctuated by periods of homelessness, stability, houselessness, and back again. A delayed check, closed office, changed schedule, misread address, an administrative shutdown, an overlooked email\u2014the frustrated reminders that slow still exists in a world where messages cross the ocean in less than a breath\u2014might mean the difference between living or not. This is the usual.<\/p>\n

And, then, sometimes the circumstances that tip the scale are more divinely wrought: sometimes crisis begins in fire.<\/p>\n

On April 7, 2012, a fire broke out in an apartment complex in the Pennville neighborhood of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Though no serious injuries were reported, one woman\u2014in whose home the fire started\u2014was treated for smoke inhalation, and five units were damaged, displacing several families and depriving many more of electricity. KFOR-TV, an NBC affiliate, reported the story, which included a brief interview with one of the residents, Kimberly Wilkins, who ran for her life as the building burned.<\/p>\n

On camera, the light is enough to make out the smoke-stained wall behind her, yet it\u2019s unclear how much time separates the witness exclusive from the event witnessed. Wilkins, shot from the shoulders up, her head nearly filling the frame, appears on camera with all the warmth of a ghost (ashy, as someone less sympathetic might say). Whether washed by fear, stress, or the spotlight, it\u2019s also hard to tell. The pixie cut mostly hidden in a neatly knotted scarf might be wrapped for bed or ready for some fifteen seconds of fame. <\/p>\n

Watching Wilkins I am reminded of those unfortunate souls on The Bachelor<\/em>, or any other show in which personalities are made from a single serendipitous sound bite. I remember learning how contestants are manipulated into showing their worst selves, kept awake at ungodly hours and plied with many, many glasses of whatever libations ABC is willing to pay for. What does it feel like to be on camera at your most vulnerable, whether intoxicated, tired, or really, really scared? Reporters have a habit of following black people at our most exhausted moments\u2014sports media, for one, depends on it. It\u2019s funny when these subjects garble overwrought platitudes like \u201cwin some, lose some,\u201d as if anybody else could do better when mic\u2019d up for the whole world to hear after sprinting for four quarters in an arena temperature-controlled for the comfort of spectators, not their entertainment. It\u2019s amazing that the words come at all.<\/p>\n

Of course, these and other considerations are considerations only available in retrospect. Recorded live in the moment nobody has the time. On April 7, 2012, a fire broke out, a woman was unhomed, and, camera on, the words came. On April 7, 2012, a fire broke out and Kimberly Wilkins, newly homeless, spilled out the words that forever immortalized her as Sweet Brown, viral video star: \u201cLord Jesus there\u2019s a fire.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the rise of Sweet Brown, I laughed with everyone else. I laughed at the ashen mouth with lips split a thousand ways. I laughed at the scarf. I laughed at the various songs that appeared on YouTube, Brown\u2019s voice chopped, auto-tuned, and remixed over electro rhythms as is customary. I laughed until I heard \u201cain\u2019t nobody got time for that\u201d in the mouth of a tiny speck of a white girl, and then suddenly I wasn\u2019t laughing and she wasn\u2019t laughing, but she still was in a way. I wasn\u2019t laughing; I was sick.<\/p>\n

In 2008, Diane Lane starred in Untraceable<\/em>, a movie about a Saw-type serial killer who streams the deaths of his victims live at the slippery false-front website KillWithMe.com. As the URL suggests, users who visit the website become implicated in fatal torture; the intensity of method, and subsequent pace of death, is directly proportional to the site\u2019s hit count. Lane plays an FBI special agent (naturally) named Jennifer Marsh who makes the killer her single-minded mission (naturally), working alongside Colin Hanks a.k.a. Agent Griffin Dowd. (He eventually bites the dust when submerged in a bathtub filled with an increasingly concentrated solution of sulfuric acid.)<\/p>\n

Untraceable<\/em> was too bad to be taken seriously and too committed to gore porn, per genre standard, to make for an honest satire of the practice it also revels in. It was also too predictive to be of its time. Lane\u2019s antagonist is ultimately revealed to be a tech prodigy, while her nemesis throughout the film is really tech itself. Before Periscope, before Snapchat, when Twitter was just a year and a half old and live video was only tentatively so, Untraceable<\/em> imagined an internet where the bandwidth for death is endlessly expandable and servers are immortal, even if we aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

But it was 2008. Few wanted to believe tech was the enemy in 2008. Few wanted to believe that that world was our world. \u201cMorally duplicitous torture porn,\u201d the New York Times<\/em> called it; \u201csleazy and gratuitous,\u201d said USA Today<\/em>. One critic at the Apollo Guide<\/em> waited a whole year and a half to call the movie \u201cprototype Internet conspiracy drivel.\u201d Altogether, consensus rendered the film\u2019s plot a too-convenient bit o\u2019 techno imagineering for an ultimate pursuit of gore and bits, as contrived as the instruments of death themselves. They were halfway correct. The internet that Untraceable<\/em> envisions exists\u2014the movie was technically accurate\u2014but its victims do not. Untraceable<\/em> is far too white to pass for reality. White death may be sensational, but it never goes viral.<\/p>\n

Viral video was once a much tamer thought, populated by cute baby Brits named Charlie, doped-up unicorns (also named Charlie), and rock bands on treadmills. Nobody feared \u201cgoing viral\u201d because going viral, far from having any sinister connotation, was the goal. We can\u2019t hope to fathom the storage space remaining to this day reserved for the preservation of all the foregone viral wannabes\u2014a regular island of misfit megabytes still searching for their fifteen minutes of \u201cKeyboard Cat\u201d fame. You can\u2019t blame anyone for having tried. This was a golden era, where a working webcam might land you a spot on Good Morning America<\/em> and from there the world was yours, provided you could monetize this newfound relevance faster than public\u2019s capacity to forget. This was before \u201ctrending,\u201d or maybe back when trending rather meant the beginning of something, not someone\u2019s end.<\/p>\n

Blackness gave virality its teeth. Turned it into trauma. Cops killing black people is too traditional, too historical, too common, so that it\u2019s not only clich\u00e9 but writing about it has become so. Newspapers and magazines only, and still reluctantly, cover black death when the buzz borders on frenzy\u2014not because it happened but because it went viral. The media sits and waits for a name to trend that doesn\u2019t belong to a (yet) public figure. Then they make them public. They trot out their Negro writer du jour and the Negro writer produces an aching tribute to being black in America. And another. And another. Et cetera.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t watch the videos. I can\u2019t and never will.<\/p>\n

The clich\u00e9 is so maybe because it seems clich\u00e9 to remind everyone of something so cemented, so much in fact that even academia marks its evidence. \u201cRace-based stress and trauma\u201d is now a concept safe enough for Psychology Today<\/em> to put on glossy paper; for a book of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric<\/em>, to be nominated and robbed; for an album, Lemonade<\/em>, to be nominated and robbed; for Between the World and Me<\/em> to be nominated and win. We know enough what video of this kind does to living black people, what it actuates and what it signifies. What it says about us. Watched or unwatched, black people are over and again witnesses to an event that forms the horizon of our existence. That\u2019s who we are, who we become. We repeat this and we repeat repeating this and marking the repeating in words and data and poetry and find ourselves as we know ourselves to be. We know what going viral says about us. But what about everyone else?<\/p>\n

If someone consumes anything at the pace and frequency that the internet consumes trauma with black subjects, we say something is wrong, that they have a problem. Drugs, hoarding, furries, video games, whatever, the new millennium has invented a myriad of resources to help a person and their loved ones deal with newfound obsessions enabled by the internet age. It seems we only don\u2019t consider gluttony a social sin if the thing gorged on is a black person in distress. In that case, the gratuitous replays and retweets aren\u2019t disordered, just the internet as usual. Topless women and bare asses get deleted from most social media platforms, but videos of black people in trouble are left untouched. Google Search won\u2019t recognize the word \u201cblow job,\u201d but type in Philando Castile\u2019s and Jazmine Headley\u2019s names and the engine autofills an invitation to the abuse.<\/p>\n

America is addicted to hurting black people. America is addicted to watching itself hurt black people. The internet didn\u2019t invent this kind of spectacle, nor is it the source of the disease, but rather collaborates with the country\u2019s disregard for the black lives without which it wouldn\u2019t exist. Black people taught the internet how to go viral. But when virality became enterprise, black people were seldom to be found.<\/p>\n

Logan Paul has more than twenty-one million subscribers on YouTube. He is in his early twenties and part of the class of online stars called YouTubers. He, as does his younger brother Jake, uploads video blogs almost daily, along with short comedic skits and musical numbers. In a video called \u201cNo Handlebars,\u201d the blond, blue-eyed, denim-clad twenty-two year old delivers rudimentary rhymes over a trapified interpolation of the alt-hop group Flobots\u2019 2008 single \u201cHandlebars.\u201d He brags about his ability to have sex with another man\u2019s woman \u201cwith no handlebars\u201d as per the chorus. The video has more than forty-one million views. In another video, \u201cKong Killed Another Animal \u2026\u2009,\u201d Paul talks to the camera while he brings a small dog outside to frolic in the snow, drives around with his brother, and encounters fans who\u2019ve brought him dinner plates, an in-joke referencing a running gag in Paul\u2019s videos where he smashes a plate on the floor in front of his assistant, Ayla, a fellow YouTuber. This is a job. Forbes once estimated Paul\u2019s yearly earnings at $12.5 million, slightly ahead of his brother\u2019s $11.5 million. Apart from millions made on YouTube through high view counts on videos monetized through ad revenue, Paul can earn around $100,000 per Facebook or Instagram post and has been sponsored by HBO, Nike, Verizon, and Pepsi.<\/p>\n

I was introduced to Logan\u2019s work at the nail salon when the owner gave her pint-size relative control over the large smart TV mounted in the back corner. By her deft selection, the room was dragged into the wild world of YouTube\u2019s elite, a colorful, high-energy, pitched-up world that made me feel ancient, although the performers and I are basically the same age. I had heard of Logan only briefly before as the subject of a trending controversy a few months prior. Early in 2018, Logan vlogged his walk through Japan\u2019s Aokigahara forest\u2014a common site for suicides\u2014including the moment he and his friends encountered the body of a person who died by apparent suicide. Though his posse cut the excursion short and contacted authorities, Logan still posted the video, which swiftly attracted attention well beyond his regular viewership. He took a compulsory hiatus, ending a streak of daily uploads lasting from September 12, 2016, to January 1, 2018. He returned a month later, reaping millions of views on videos such as \u201cWe Rescued a Baby Duckling!\u201d and \u201cReleasing My $10,000 Albino Turtle!\u201d<\/p>\n

As I learned that day in the salon, Logan is not a fluke in the system by any means. Though he lives closer to the top of the mountain than most, he merely represents an echelon of YouTubers who are all striving for the same thing. Some are more inclined to pranks, some play video games, some do makeup or orchestrate elaborate DIY crafts, some film heavily choreographed videos on soundstages for auto-tuned songs that sound like they come from a twenty-five-cent candy dispenser. All are reaching for something more precious than gold: attention. They are a long way from their predecessors, more like sophisticated fracking rigs compared to pioneering viral sensations who landed on fame by accident. In a booming market with not enough eyes and ears to go around, they\u2019re vying for a mere fraction of what Kimberly Wilkins struck simply fleeing for her life while a building burned. Unlike Wilkins, though, some from this new breed of internet sensations see themselves paid handsomely for the trouble.<\/p>\n

In the race to figure out just how to make a buck or two or millions from social media stardom, there was never going to be room for everybody. While time and attention seem like limitless quantities when it comes to teens and young adults, they, too, have only twenty-four hours a day and more responsibility to manage that time wisely than any other generation in history. YouTubers are well aware that they need to reel audiences in fast and for good\u2014as are advertisers. In the world of YouTube, money has a way of stratifying things, putting premiums on some content over others. Without it, the playing field would be more level, giving at least the appearance that anyone might get lucky enough to strike a following. YouTube was once this way. Vine, too, while it lasted. When Vine was shut down by Twitter precisely because it didn\u2019t want to make its platform more amenable to creators getting paid, many viral sensations on that app, many young and black, lost their audiences in an instant.<\/p>\n

Companies of all kinds eventually learned how to employ YouTube sensations to the best advantage, not just through the ads we sit through but through coveted real estate in the mouths of the YouTubers themselves, delivered straight to viewers who would take years to develop discernment for that type of thing. When the money got involved, it had that way of doing what money always does, following the path of least resistance en route to more money, more capital. Like Logan spitting bars on a bike in a Canadian tuxedo, many of the most famous YouTube celebrities are very, very white. White and light faces are the safest gamble, the money decided, better yet if they can fashion a creole persona\u2014black aesthetics on a visage that\u2019s anything but. It\u2019s a reciprocal relationship, though advertisers hold the power. YouTubers get an influx of funds to pay for studio time, better equipment, or rent. Companies get a roster of pale to spray-tanned beauty gurus, for example, who speak a snappy heygirlheyohsnapslaytreatyoself!<\/em> dialect learned from hours of internet use and NBC programming. Or, maybe just wiggers like the Pauls, or gamers and comics who do nothing but be safely not black. It\u2019s not guaranteed insurance. In 2017, user PewDiePie\u201493 million subscribers and counting\u2014whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, called someone a \u201cfucking nigger\u201d during a livestream. This was months after Disney and YouTube Red, YouTube\u2019s subscription streaming service, severed ties with Kjellberg for paying two Indian freelancers on Fiverr to write \u201cDeath to all Jews\u201d on camera. (It was not his first dip into anti-Semitism.) And shortly after Logan received scrutiny for his Aokigahara forest video, video of Jake surfaced on TMZ<\/em> showing the slightly less popular Paul freestyling about \u201clittle-ass niggas.\u201d Jeffree Star (fourteen million), Tana Mongeau (three million), and KathleenLights (four million), influencers from the glam corner of the \u2019Tube, have each been caught saying the N-word at least once. The counterbalance to virality is stardom.<\/p>\n

Like the old Negro adage, being black on YouTube means being caught in the mire of twice as good, half as much. Only maybe more like ten times as good for a tenth of the glory and financial security, growing worse as the platform becomes more saturated. The more YouTube wants to resemble traditional mass media, the more old media rules define new media venues. For every Kingsley and Franchesca Ramsey, for every hilarious black person who\u2019s found shine after toiling on YouTube for more than a decade, there are thousands of mediocre white talents fast-tracked to relevance. And to make the leap from YouTube to the more traditional, more solid, better-paying gigs, the work must be the best of the best\u2014akin to Issa Rae or Donald Glover.<\/p>\n

I am at this very moment transfixed by a YouTube channel belonging to someone named Jay Nedaj. Nedaj writes, directs, stars in, and edits an offbeat novella set on a plantation called Word on the Crops: If Slaves Had a Reality TV Show<\/em>. The name itself is a riot, relocating \u201cword on the street\u201d to the cash-crop fields, an irreverent calling-back that defines the terms of the show. In the opening sequence Nedaj walks in slow motion down a suburban deck, which here functions as a sweeping Southern veranda. Here he plays the role of Carla, wearing a sweater, an apron, and a long brown skirt. He keeps his facial hair, mustache, and goatee. Carla twirls in slow motion while the show theme plays, a work song sung by Ed Lewis and recorded by Alan Lomax in the thirties. \u201cI\u2019ll be so glad (uh huh) when the sun goes down (when the sun goes down). I\u2019ll be so glad (uh huh) when the sun goes down (when the sun goes down).\u201d The show\u2019s fifth episode begins with Carla in prayer. \u201cDear God, or whoever you are, why are you doing this to me? I\u2019m trying to believe in you. But it\u2019s hard.\u201d There\u2019s a low, rhythmic hum in the background. The show whips into a musical number: set to \u201cBrown Betty\u201d from a 2015 Broadway cast recording of the musical The Color Purple<\/em>. I\u2019ve never seen anything like it (Tarantino wishes). Nedaj\u2019s following, presently under a hundred thousand subscribers, is modest by YouTube standards. If Nedaj were white, the next season of Word on the Crops<\/em> would surely be slated to appear on Netflix already. Perhaps an exaggeration. Perhaps not.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, it is not so hard for black people to bring in viewers. Just die and die spectacularly at the hands of the state. Don\u2019t rely on the officer\u2019s dash- or bodycam, though; those have a tendency to skip ahead or go dark at the most inopportune moments and then your death will have been in vain\u2014and no, no one will care about some witness\u2019s elaborate statement if the officer can show a ruddy bruise on his upper cheek. Make sure someone is filming. Make sure they have a Twitter account. Make sure they have several, for when the first account is suspended for anti-cop hate speech. Make sure they know the consequences. They will likely be the only one serving time when all is said and done.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Going viral sounds like immortality, but it is ultimately the user who craves it. It\u2019s a short trip to turn black people into bits. Images, mannerisms, language captured forever in looping GIF<\/small>s and autoplay, cycling at inhumane speeds long after lips have stopped moving. It can only be by design that we are uniquely lubricated for the tubules that make up the networks that spider across borders, under oceans, into space, into homes, into hands. We live and die by the internet. The internet asks for more.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lauren Michele Jackson teaches in the departments of English and African American studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of the book <\/em>White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue \u2026 and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue \u2026 and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation<\/a>, by Lauren Michele Jackson (Beacon Press, 2019). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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