SIGHTS OF RACIAL VIOLENCE: New Media Technologies and Acts of Watching, Memory, and Legitimation by Wendy Sung A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (American Culture) in the University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee: Professor Lisa A. Nakamura, Chair Associate Professor Colin Gunckel Professor Yeidy M. Rivero Associate Professor Sarita E. See, University of California, Riverside DEDICATION For my mother and my grandmother— for us. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Temporality has been crucial for this project in many ways: the interplay of memory and image, the tenuous writing of history and its inevitable rewriting, but also in the difficulties of thinking deeply about a subject that inspires rage, fatigue, and hopelessness. These feelings delayed the completion of the project in unforeseen ways. If the project had been completed in the ideal time allotted by initial funding possibilities, it would look very different and would be far less rich. Thus, I want to acknowledge the many non-starts, refusals, and reluctancies that inevitably were overcome by the immediacy of the project and many Internet-deprived hours of coffee shop work. This was made possible by the generous support of the American Culture department, without which I might never have been able to see the Black Lives Matter movement make a constitutive mark on this dissertation. It goes without saying but still must be said that I am eternally indebted to my committee. Colin, thank you for being a crucial part of bringing Ann Arbor to our favorite city and for offering many invaluable insights that have made this dissertation better. Yeidy, thank you for the crucial encouragement, support, humor, and guidance, within the classroom and beyond. Sarita, thank you for the many years of immeasurable generosity and mentorship, which continued through multiple locations and circumstances. Lisa, thank you for reading the worst of the worst and yet being generous enough to think with me. It has made a huge difference and I see this committee’s wonderful and critical support on every page of this document. iii Immeasurable thanks to the enduring friendships I was gifted with while in Michigan. My core crew is my affection: Jina B. Kim, Tiffany Ball, Candice Haddad, Meghanne Barker, Paul Farber, and John Cheney-Lippold. Thank you for our scheming late nights, raucous cackling, and small-town adventures that made my time in Michigan so memorable. So much gratitude goes to my colleagues and friends that comprised a network of support and camaraderie within the AC department. A big shout-out is necessary to the friends that were a crucial window to a world outside of academia: Derek Loh, Lisa Hook, Kristina Dobyns, Jane Ly, Jenny Huang, Johnny Calderon, Marlon Hendred, Julie Marcus, Megan Goldstein, Mike Pickles, Raj Patel, Ryan Kucsera, Andy Zumberge, Kristi and Algot Anderson. If it weren’t for you all, I would be far less sane, happy, and snarky. Without a doubt, I must thank Todd Boyd, whose energy and vibe came into my world when it was crucial. You demonstrated what was possible in academia. Early on, you believed in me. As you say, game recognize game, and I am eternally grateful. Last, because they come first, my family is my constellational center. A simple yet heartfelt thank you to my father, Kuo-Li Paul Sung, brother, Eric Sung, sister-in-law, Stella Sung, and nephew, Max. Thank you to my furry companions, Kitty and Benny, for providing constant love and company during the solitude that is necessary in this work. And with the utmost love and friendship, I thank you, Billy Cuddy, for journeying across country and back with me and for being my partner in so many iterations of self. You are my heart and my home, always. And for the mothers in my life, my grandmother Wan-Ching Sung and my mother, Lanping Amy Tseng Sung, it is because of the silences you endured that I am, and that I write. Forever, I must love and thank you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii LIST OF FIGURES vi ABSTRACT vii CHAPTER ONE. INTRODUCTION: New Media and the Spectacle of Racial Violence 1 TWO. THE RACIAL INTIMACIES OF WHITE SYMPATHY: Mad Men, Esalen, and Watching Civil Rights Television 34 THREE. INSTRUMENTALIZING THE SIGHTS OF RACIAL VIOLENCE: The Rodney King Videotape, Multidirectional Memory, and Industry Crisis 91 FOUR. THE EXIGENCIES OF WITNESSING: Rodney King and Celebrity Rehab 136 FIVE. TWEETING THE SITUATED IMAGINATION: Sandra Bland, Visual Evidence, and Acts of Refusal 176 SIX. EPILOGUE 221 BIBLIOGRAPHY 230 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Still of Mad Men characters fixated to a television set. 57 Figure 2: Screenshot of a Mad Men forum comment on the website, Television Without Pity detailing reactions to the Kennedy Assassination, posted September 16, 2008. 74 Figure 3: Still from Mad Men’s “The Fog,” where civil rights activist Medgar Evers appears in Betty’s epidural-induced hallucination. 80 Figure 4: Still from the Rodney King beating videtape, captured by George Holliday, March 3, 1991. 105 Figure 5: Photograph of the March on Selma, Alabama, March 7, 1965. 117 Figure 6: Screenshot of Celebrity Rehab Season 3 cast member, Tawny Kitaen’s Vh1 biography. The show’s website categorizes her as a “Model/Actress.” 147 Figure 7: Screenshot of Celebrity Rehab Season 3 cast member, Sean Stewart’s Vh1 biography. The show’s website categorizes him as a “Celebrity Offspring.” 148 Figure 8: Screenshot of Celebrity Rehab cast member Rodney King’s biography, which is clearly distinguishes from his other cast mates. The Vh1 website categorizes him as a “Historical Figure.” 148 Figure 9: Police Brutality-Related Tweets Per Day, early June 2014 to late May 2015. 197 Figure 10: Screenshot of #IfIDieInPoliceCustody hashtag Twitter feed, July 29, 2015. 209 Figure 11: Screenshot of #IfIDieInPoliceCustody Twitter feed, July 28, 2015. 211 Figure 12: Screenshot of #IfIDieInPoliceCustody Twitter feed, August 3, 2015. 213 vi ABSTRACT SIGHTS OF RACIAL VIOLENCE: New Media Technologies and Acts of Watching, Memory, and Legitimation by Wendy Sung Chair: Lisa A. Nakamura This dissertation explores the relationship between race, technology, and media cultures by examining the phenomenon of watching anti-Black violence in twentieth- and twenty-first- century American culture. Through selected case studies, Sights of Racial Violence excavates a history between spectacular anti-Black violence and new media, revealing how racial violence is instrumentalized as a legitimizing force for new media technologies in moments of instantiation and industry crisis. The questions that guide this historical inquiry are: What are the cartographies of the relationships between new media, social worth, and racial violence? How does the intersection of racial violence and new media affect imaginings of race, technology, and racial progress? And finally, how does this relationship create particular modes of spectatorship in the consumption or witnessing of racial violence? To answer these questions, each chapter of Sights of Racial Violence focuses on an iconic instance wherein highly visible, state-sanctioned racial violence intersects with the emergence of new media technology: television’s proliferation into the American home and civil rights violence in the 1960s; the Rodney King beating tape and camcorder technology in 1992; Rodney King’s appearance on reality television in 2004’s post- vii network age; and, finally, Twitter and the #BlackLivesMatter hashtags memorializing Sandra Bland’s death in 2015. Using primarily textual analysis, I examine televisual representations in tandem with online audience reactions and media industry history. My reading of these sources seeks to understand how cultural memory and the historical and social architectures of spectatorship inform how we watch, witness, and understand spectacular racial violence. From television to Twitter and from the civil rights movement to #BlackLivesMatter, this trans-media history produces dynamic effects and consequences that range from shifts in racial formations and the legibilities of racial progress to critiques of the very nature of the visual and the creation of spectacular “newness” of technology. In the end, this dissertation dismantles the persistent belief that technology operates as a type of public accountability, delivering protection and freedom from racial violence. Instead, Sights of Racial Violence illuminates how racial violence offered opportunities for new media technologies to utilize its images and social importance as a conduit for legitimation. viii CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: New Media and the Spectacle of Racial Violence To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder—a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time. SUSAN SONTAG On Photography We are here to say to the white men that we no longer will let them use clubs on us in the dark corners. We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. In early May 2015, the Obama administration allocated twenty million dollars towards the implementation of police body cameras1 as part of a solution to the highly disturbing incidents of anti-Black police brutality gaining media attention. This growing list included Oscar Grant in Oakland, California, whose death by a BART transit police was captured by mobile phone video on New Year’s Day 2009; Trayvon Martin in Florida, whose devastating final cry was recorded by a 9-1-1 operator in February of 2012; Mike Brown, whose bullet-ridden body lay on a Ferguson, Missouri, street for four hours in August 2014; Eric Garner, whom bystanders recorded dying from an illegal chokehold administered by New York police in July 2014; and Walter Scott, who was videotaped being gunned down by a police officer as Scott ran away from him in April 2015.