Pool Parties, Police Violence, and Viral Videos as Technologies of Race

• In Event: Race and/as Technology - I

Abstract

In June 2015, 15-year-old Dajerria Becton was among the African American teenagers at a pool party in McKinney, TX, in suburban Dallas who were violently suppressed by the police. The incident was captured on cell phone videos that were widely disseminated. Becton appears in a particularly powerful image within the videos, widely distributed as a still image on social media: her small bikini-clad body under the knee of a white male police officer. On one level, the event exemplifies historical continuities: swimming pools have been key sites of segregation in urban and suburban spaces, police have played an important role in enforcing that segregation, and images of police violence have been mobilized to galvanize resistance. Yet close attention to it reveals ways in which race is renewed and refigured in the 21st century. This paper articulates and puts into relation the plural technologies of race that come together in this encounter and its aftermath: gated communities and swimming pools, bikinis and police uniforms, cell phone cameras and social media. In Wendy Chun's classic essay “Race and/as Technology,” she points out that “race has been so key to the definition of public and private as such,” and in this paper, I am particularly attentive to ways in which these technologies operate on and re-articulate public/private binaries. I conclude with what I suggest is an as-yet open question: in an era of Black Lives Matter, to what extent might viral videos of police violence do race differently?

Author

• Anne Pollock, King's College London