5 Police Brutality

Enforcing Segregation at a Pool Party

In June 2015, fifteen-year-old Dajerria Becton was among the African American teenagers at a pool party in the Dallas suburb of McKinney, Texas, who were violently suppressed by the police. The incident was captured on cell phone videos that were widely disseminated, which included a powerful image of the small bikini-clad girl’s bodily vulnerability under the knee of a police officer. Close attention to the McKinney incident—both the violent policing of the suburban pool itself and the dissemination of the viral video—provides a window into how racism and antiracism are renewed and refigured in the twenty-first century.

This chapter is a bit of an outlier in the book as a whole, because it is the one least directly related to health, as generally defined in fields such as medical sociology—this event did not take place in a health care setting, and it did not cause an acute instance of illness or death. And yet control of bodies in space, including through police violence, is interconnected with health. It is certainly biopolitical. As discussed in the book’s introduction, in a biopolitics following from the French philosopher Michel Foucault, more is at stake than the state killing people—that has become rarer (albeit still all too common, especially in the United States). But the state is involved in setting up relations in which some bodies’ flourishing is fostered and other bodies are relegated to conditions of suffering and death.1 As quantitative sociologists have shown through analysis of zip code–level data, both segregation and intensive policing have tremendous impacts on health.2 Differentially depriving Black bodies of access to recreational facilities and of the ability to move freely through space is part of the deprivation of flourishing. As many have become increasingly aware in this era of viral videos of police violence against Black people, police brutality is a source of acute injury and death. Even more pervasively, police brutality enforces segregation and stratifies well-being.

In this chapter, I take the opportunity to engage more directly with nonmedical technologies that foster and constrain bodily well-being. I will articulate and put into relation the plural technologies of race that come together in the McKinney encounter and its aftermath. As in the previous chapter on the Flint water crisis, some of these technologies are infrastructural elements of the built environments—here, recreational swimming pools rather than the pipes through which the water flows. The definition of technology includes but is not limited to the products of scientists and engineers, and it is inclusive of all of the tools with which humans shape and navigate our environments and which at the same time also shape us and constrain and facilitate our movements. I will attend to technologies that are lower tech, including swimsuits and police uniforms.3 Particularly important here are media technologies—that is, technologies that both capture images and sound and distribute them—including cell phone cameras and social media. Surveillance is also fundamental to Foucauldian biopolitics, and the efforts to reverse the lens of observation have become a site of contemporary resistance.4 At the end of the chapter, I connect the analysis of this case with media theorists’ concepts of the “liberatory imagination” and “race as technology,” to highlight not just constraints of racism but also creativity in antiracist response.

The Incident and Viral Video

It was a hot Friday afternoon in June 2015 in McKinney, Texas—a middle-class suburb of Dallas. Fifteen-year-old Dajerria Becton was among the African American teenagers celebrating the end of the school year at a pool party at the Craig Ranch neighborhood pool, a facility managed by the homeowners association. Multiple people called the police complaining about a disturbance there, but the nature of the disturbance was contested. Some called to report that uninvited teens were climbing over the pool’s gate to access the already overcrowded space, defying the security guard.5 One of the party’s hosts described a very different originary flash point: Tatiana Jones, a nineteen-year-old African American woman who lived in the neighborhood and had invited classmates to enjoy a cookout outside the pool, described her guests being denigrated by two white women, who she recounted called her guests “black f-ers” and other slurs, and told her to “go back to [your] Section 8 home” and “go back where you’re from,” and who responded to Tatiana’s defense of her younger guests by hitting her in the face, instigating a fight.6 Tatiana and her mother also placed calls to the police, to report being attacked by these white women.7

Police response at the McKinney pool party was captured on a cell phone video by a white teen in attendance and was widely disseminated.8 In the video, an enraged police officer named Eric Casebolt first chases down a group of Black teenage boys. Once he rounds them up and has them seated on the grass, he berates them: “Don’t make me run around with fucking thirty pounds of goddamn gear on here in the sun, because you want to screw around out here.” At a certain point he goes up to a group of girls that includes Becton and tells them, “Y’all keep standing here running your mouths, you’re going to go, too.” The girls initially talk back indistinctly but then start to disperse, Becton going a different direction from the rest. Inexplicably, the officer pursues her and pulls her down to the ground.

The images of the assault are distressing, and yet I include a pair of illustrative stills, because images will be focal objects of analysis in this chapter. In the video’s most compelling moments, widely disseminated as still images online, the thin, dark-skinned teenage girl in an orange and yellow bikini is thrown to the ground by the white male police officer in uniform. In the video, we see Black boys rush over and shout at the officer in Becton’s defense, and Casebolt points his gun at them to ward them off. Other people mill about. The officer pins Becton down and yells “on your face,” kneeling on her back as he handcuffs her. Becton calls out for someone to call her momma and sobs under the weight of the officer’s body.

The incident sparked outrage and protest, as well as compelling artistic responses to which I will return. It would become one among many viral videos of police violence that would catalyze the Black Lives Matter movement, which had been founded in 2013 after the acquittal of the vigilante killer of Trayvon Martin in Florida and had grown with protests against the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.9 At the McKinney pool party, there was no loss of life, and yet it is an evocative case through which to explore the role of police violence in the enforcement of white supremacy and the urgent vitality of antiracist response.

The Suburban Pool as a Technology of Segregation

Segregation—the systematic separation of groups of people in space—is a fundamental element of structural racism. Its operation generates a terrain by which members of privileged groups have differential access to coveted resources, ranging from well-funded schools to safe and comfortable leisure spaces. Police and vigilante violence, and even the threat of it, is a mechanism by which racialized exclusion and control is enforced.

Swimming pools have functioned as sites of exclusion that are important both symbolically and literally. For social scientist of computing Jane Margolis and colleagues, in their influential book Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing,10 the lack of access to pools both leads to an increased risk of drowning and operates as an analogy for lack of access to computing. They argue that a violently enforced history of exclusion has created a present situation in which Black children are assumed to be “not interested” in or “not capable” of swimming and that these assumptions about Black lack of interest and capacity are also made with regard to the white (and Asian) space of computer science.11 Their focus is on unequal access to the space to develop skills, because students of color are more likely to have access only to basic computer skills at a young age, but it’s also worth noting that part of what is differentially lacking in both swimming and computing is the space to play. Play is a vital part of how young people learn to explore the world, and being excluded from play spaces structures senses of belonging.

When public pools were introduced in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, they were austere places framed in terms of “hygiene.” They were meant to be places in which the urban poor of industrializing cities could access baths—and although sexes were segregated, races often were not.12 By the 1950s, pools had transformed into the kinds of places that we recognize today, intended to promote “leisure,” and had become the domain of white families—an exclusivity that the civil rights movement would contest.13 If demands for access to pools were no longer framed as a health issue in the same way as they might have been in the hygiene era, the differential access to these pools and other spaces for physical activity has been and continues to be an element of differential access to both health-promoting physical exercise and simple fun.

Recreational spaces in general and pools in particular have long been central contested ground for segregation and resistance—and when African Americans successfully gained access to urban recreational facilities in the civil rights era in the second half of the twentieth century, whites largely abandoned them, and many public facilities closed or were privatized.14 The white flight from the urban core in that period is an inextricable part of what spurred both the development of suburban communities like McKinney and the placement of homeowners association–controlled pools within them. The Craig Ranch neighborhood pool is a homeowners association pool and as such can be thought of as public only in a very restricted sense: it is for use by an exclusive public.15 The contested distinction between public and private pools operates as a technology of race.

The racialization of the suburbs, especially in the South, has become more complex since the initial era of desegregation and white flight, and McKinney is an archetypal suburb of the New South. That is, its appeal does not necessarily draw on a backward-looking nostalgia for an antebellum South but on a forward-looking aspiration for an ascendant space of economic opportunity. McKinney had been named “best place to live” by Money magazine in 2014—with a median family income of $96,143 and a median home price of $217,879, with a combination of “Southern charm” and “growth-industry jobs” in defense and technology.16 McKinney is overwhelmingly white—77.3 percent white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, though that number decreases to 61.4 percent for “White alone, not Hispanic or Latino”; there is a significant minority “Black or African American alone” population of 11.5 percent.17 These statistics are not too far off from the national averages, and that suggests the community has broad appeal. Yet segregation exists even in places like McKinney, which are far from the inner city and somewhat racially mixed: the newer, more upscale west side (in which this pool party took place) is much whiter and more prosperous than the older, less upscale east side.18

Segregation is precisely a reaction to the transgression of space.19 It was Black affluence that motivated the intensification of segregation after the Civil War, on the trains and in so many other semipublic spaces that the small but emergent Black middle class might buy its way into.20 The segregation of pools and the contestation thereof operates as a literal site of the enactment of racism.

The rules of the Craig Ranch neighborhood pool were that each member could bring in two guests.21 Thus, the segregation being enforced is not total, but a racially loaded division between private and public still shapes the space. Although individual Black bodies of neighborhood members are allowed in the space, and even allowed to bring a limited number of guests, there is a tension underlying the inclusion that points to deeply engrained concerns that the space not be overrun. Assumptions about “who is and who is not ‘from the neighbourhood’” are inextricably connected to racism.22

Ambiguity about whether people with the requisite amount of money could buy their way in spurred both suspicion as to whether Black people in middle-class spaces had indeed paid their way in and vigilantism and calls for authority control. This extends to the arguments that precipitated the McKinney incident, when white people at the pool hollered to “go back to Section 8 homes”—referring to a governmental rental assistance program that provides vouchers to low-income families to rent from private landlords, implying that the Black attendees must not be living there on equal terms with the white revelers. As sociologist Barbara Harris Combs has argued, the McKinney pool party incident is certainly part of a “Jim Crow State of Mind” in which Black “bodies out of place” are subjected to surveillance and violence.23

Sexual Terrorism Enacted by the Man in the Police Uniform against the Girl in the Bikini

The racialized control of space in pools is inseparable from control of gendered space, and technologies of race are also technologies of gender. Until the turn of the twentieth century, pools were segregated by sex, but as pools increasingly allowed men, women, and children to swim together, there was a more prominent impetus for racial segregation—part of a broader panic over interracial intimacies and miscegenation.24

Swimsuits are blatantly technologies of gender, sorting and performing bodies that are on display, in ways that present normative bodies that are necessarily simultaneously gendered and racialized.25 Even as the Miss America pageant has recently ended its swimsuit competition,26 and “body-shaming” advertising featuring women in swimsuits has become increasingly marginalized,27 the imposition and defiance of bans on burkinis in France underscores the stakes of swimsuits as sites of control over women’s bodies.28

And yet bikinis can also be experienced as a site of fleeting freedom, as Black feminist historian of fashion Tanisha Ford highlights in her “Black Girl Song for Dajerria.”29 Ford describes Becton’s suit as an “eye-catching” “multicolored neon bikini with a long fringe that hung from its top” and speculates about how Becton might have felt upon trying it on and deciding that it was “the one.”30 The suit would allow her to “stand out from the crowd,” receive compliments from her friends, and even embody the affirmation “I am black girl magic.”31

In the images at McKinney, we see the juxtaposition of the bikini and a radically different type of clothing: the police uniform, arguably a technology of racial terrorism insofar as it represents a key armed wing of the structurally racist state. Ford also highlights the contrast, arguing, “The very material restrictions and weight of the oppressive uniform against Casebolt’s skin serves as a symbol of state violence. His words communicate a rage shrouded in envy of the black teens who frolicked around in more heat-appropriate attire, who dared to take pleasure in their own black leisure.”32

Many Black feminists have put the McKinney incident into the context of sexual terrorism. How can we tell that the terrorism is both racial and sexual? One way is by considering what a different response there would have been if a Black police officer had pinned down a white teenage girl in this way—as Sikivu Hutchison has point out, “little black girls can never occupy the space of carefree, feminine innocence that little white girls expect as their birthright.”33 Black girls don’t get the chance to be children. This is connected to one of the many elements that Ruth Nicole Brown, a leading voice in Black girl studies, describes as creating barriers to the freedom of Black girls: they are “routinely disciplined into taking up less and less space.”34

The smallness of Becton’s body calls our attention to the ways that racialized fantasies of Black dangerousness operate in police logics. What can explain the act of an officer throwing a child in a bathing suit on the ground? What can explain a grown police officer sitting on the body of a fifteen-year-old and publicly humiliating her? Helplessly on the ground and in a two-piece bathing suit, Becton screamed out for her mother as Officer Casebolt pulled on her braids and pushed his knee into her back. Becton herself attributed the response to the officer feeling disrespected by something that the girls said—as quoted in the Guardian, “He told me to keep walking and I kept walking and then I’m guessing he thought we were saying rude stuff to him,” Becton told local news. “He grabbed me and he like twisted my arm on the back of my back and he shoved me in the grass, he started pulling the back of my braids and I was like telling him that he can get off me because my back was hurting really bad.”35 Nothing Becton might have said would have justified that response: as leading Black feminist cultural critic Brittney Cooper remarks in her essay about the event, “citizens have a right to ‘mouth off’ to the police.”36 And, as lawyer and Black Lives Matter organizer Nnennaya Amuchie points out, “barely 100 pounds, Becton presented no threat to Officer Casebolt, yet he grabbed Becton like a wild animal that needed to be tamed.”37

Of course, it is also true that the threat perceived by police officers from unarmed Black men is rooted in fantasy. This was a particularly outrageous element of the self-justification for mortal force in the case of Michael Brown, in which the police officer justified shooting an unarmed teen at close range by describing the menace of his victim in animalistic or even superhuman terms.38 Becton’s treatment on that day in McKinney underscores the continuity between the experiences of Black boys and girls—although the majority of the attention to police brutality has focused on Black boys and men, Black girls and women experience disproportionate authoritarian control as well.39

Mobilizing Images of Police Brutality to Spur Outrage and Demand Equality: Then and Now

On a few levels, paying attention to the juxtaposition between the bodily vulnerability of Becton and the aggression of the police officer 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. At the same time, the images and their mobilization also reveal important elements specific to the twenty-first century.

Consider: here are images from the New York Times of a “swim-in” at a motel in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964, in which both the hotel manager and a plain-clothes police officer intervened to enforce segregation—the manager pouring in toxic levels of acid cleaning fluid near the swimmers, the officer jumping in to physically disrupt the desegregated swim.

The heavy-handed police action against Black swimmers in private public space is in a sense a twentieth-century legacy that McKinney follows. In her classic essay “Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things with Race,” to which I will return, media theorist Wendy Chun points out that “race has been so key to the definition of public and private as such.”40 That is, race undergirds the very constitution of both public spaces and private spaces and the idea of public and private as distinct and separate spheres. A key desegregating maneuver since the civil rights movement has been to hold private businesses to standards of public accommodations. Thus white supremacist responses have contested Black demands for inclusion in both public and private spaces, imposing barriers through rules and through vigilante and police violence.

Yet there are two key differences worth highlighting. First, the use of cleaning fluid in the 1964 incident implies a biopolitical logic of hygiene and contamination that does not seem to be operating at McKinney. Second, whereas the “swim-in” was an organized protest that was professionally photographed by invited journalists, as was the norm in the civil rights era, the McKinney incident took place at an otherwise mundane end-of-year party, and the video was shot and distributed by a white teen who was a fellow pool party attendee. In the era of Black Lives Matter, how is visual media creation and distribution mobilized to interrupt contemporary racism?

“Police Officer Jumps into Monson Pool to Break Up Swim-In,” June 18, 1964. In this iconic black-and-white photograph, a fully clothed white man is jumping into the pool of the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida, to disrupt a group of integrated swimmers—two white men, three Black men, and two Black women—who are gathered in the center of the pool. In the background, we can see onlookers, the motor lodge sign, parked cars, and palm trees. Photograph by Horace Cort/Shutterstock.com. Reprinted with permission.

During the civil rights era, activists together with their professional photographer allies contested and reconfigured public–private binaries as they demanded Black freedom to exist in and move through community spaces. Today, those mobilizing for racial justice by insisting that Black lives matter do so through the lenses of cell phone cameras—and through artists’ pens.

Artistic Interventions toward a “Liberatory Imagination”

Police officers (and their supporters) often justify the use of force by invoking the purported danger of the job, but with her slight build and exposed body, Becton obviously could not possibly have posed a physical threat to a police officer. This palpable absurdity became the subject of creative artistic response. Here, I turn to ways in which the cell phone video of the McKinney pool party incident was not merely distributed but also reimagined. Doing so builds on Ruha Benjamin’s vital insight that “technology captivates” in multifaceted ways: capturing bodies on police cameras and crime prediction algorithms, capturing the imagination with regard to the allure of the technological fix, and also operating as a site for a more expansive “liberatory imagination.”41

One critical take that circulated on mainstream media was a faux news report presented on the late-night comedy news program The Daily Show, with correspondent Jessica Williams in full body armor and helmet accessorized with a pink bikini and blue floaties, which she referred to in the segment as a “McKinney Bikini.”42

This six-minute segment titled “Assault Swim” featured a wide-ranging back-and-forth between the show’s white host, Jon Stewart, and Black contributor Jessica Williams, referred to in the clip as the “Senior Texas Aquatics Correspondent.” Host and correspondent discussed water guns—fun staples for white pool-party-goers, in a state in which white people famously carry real guns freely but Black people face mortal danger if suspected of having a gun. Stewart asks whether these kinds of police incidents are actually becoming more common or whether it only seems that way because of the presence of cell phone cameras. Williams responds, “I don’t know, but either way, it’s progress.” She elaborates, “It’s progress because the cop pulled a gun on a group of Black kids and nobody is dead.”

In addition to the photographic images and video clips, the incident inspired captivating drawings. These kinds of images circulated widely online and often operated by illustrating the absurdity of the fantasy of racialized threat.

Consider this movie poster spoof that figures a Black teen in a bikini as the monster in a remake of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, by Chicano syndicated cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz.43 The giant girl does not really look like Becton, besides having long braids—both her skin and her swimsuit are lighter in shade, and her face is expressionless. She holds a police car with a flashing light in one hand as she stands, crouched and ready to attack, one foot up to her ankle in the pool and the other foot on the road. In the background, we see abstracted panicked white swimmers, pool chairs, a fence, and rows of cookie-cutter houses. There are three pieces of text: a small “McKinney Texas Police Productions presents” at the top, the headline “Attack of the 14 Yr. Old Black Girl” in the top left corner, and the pseudo-threat “No cop is safe!”

This cartoon resonates with another compelling drawn inversion of positions, by Markus Prime, that was featured in Teen Vogue.44 In that cartoon, a Black female figure in an orange bikini stands with her foot on a subdued and handcuffed white male uniformed police officer—the girl’s stance like that of a successful trophy hunter or conqueror. The color of the girl’s skin and bikini are more similar to Becton’s, and yet in this cartoon, too, the image is not literalistic: both the girl and the police officer are drawn without faces, figured as archetype rather than representation.

These kinds of images operate as a commentary on contemporary racism and illustrate that race is being done a bit differently in an era of cellphone video–enabled social media than it was in the civil rights era. Unlike the 1964 St. Augustine swim-in, the McKinney pool party video was shot not by a professional journalist serving as an invited witness of activists but by a (white) teen who happened to be at the same pool party. Whereas the iconic images of the civil rights era are organized of events that were professionally mediated by observers who were purportedly “objective” yet obviously sympathetic, the McKinney images, like many iconic images of the Black Lives Matter era, have been unplanned and mediated by amateurs who are openly taking sides with the victims. The materiality of the images is different, in ways that matter for how the injustices that they depict are framed and disseminated: the swim-in photograph needed to be developed and printed before it could be distributed along well-defined media channels; the digital video of the McKinney pool party incident was ready for immediate upload and nearly immediate, widely dispersed distribution. Even as a few voices within the mainstream media—notably on the right-wing Fox News network—resisted seeing the humanity of the victims and sided with the police even after being confronted with the damning video,45 broadcast and print media broadly followed the narrative as it was structured by the amateurs.

It’s worth noting that in many of these artistic reimaginations of the McKinney pool party incident, an abstracted Black girl is represented, rather than Becton as a recognizable individual. In civil rights–era depictions, we don’t for example just see a Black woman sitting on a bus; Rosa Parks is always specifically Rosa Parks. Abstraction makes it more possible to imagine different Black girls in the same situation, and this generative layering of the concrete and the imaginative is a strategic tool in the era of Black Lives Matter. The use of less recognizable images here captures something of a tension between #SayHerName, which underscores the individual identities of Black women who have suffered violence, especially at the hands of the police, and the politically powerful extrapolation that frames specific violence as simultaneously a broader condition of Black women’s experience even for those whose names are not known.46 As communication scholar Sherri Williams observes, “#SayHerName forces people to recognize the humanity of Black women victims of violence”47—a recognition of humanity that is not circumscribed but rather strives to encompass and extend.

Communication technologies are important here but are not somehow inherently on the side of justice. As communication studies scholar Armond R. Towns argues, “#SayHerName operates as a Black geography because it both relies on and contradicts Western modes of communication. It is a digital usage of the master’s tools to challenge ‘his’ supremacy, but feminists like Audre Lorde might question whether such a challenge is indeed effective.”48 Because technology is designed by and for elites, inequality and injustice cannot be solved simply with technology. Yet the creativity itself is worth appreciating, and to embrace technology as a tool of resistance is not necessarily to buy in to a fantasy of a technological fix.49

Whereas some have argued that increasing the ubiquity of cameras will somehow automatically decrease racially disparate policing,50 we should be skeptical. Indeed, technologies presumed to be less biased than people have often operated to intensify inequalities, in what Ruha Benjamin has termed the “New Jim Code,” an “insidious combination of coded bias and imagined objectivity” in which “innovation . . . enables social containment while appearing fairer than discriminatory practices of a previous era.” A riff on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which argues that mass incarceration has allowed the continuation of racial segregation and discrimination in purportedly color-blind form, the New Jim Code “considers how the reproduction of racist forms of social control in successive institutional forms (slavery, Jim Crow, ghettoization, mass incarceration), now entails a crucial sociotechnical component that hides not only the nature of domination, but allows it to penetrate every facet of social life.”51

The noninnocent quality of technology is one reason why, for those who advocate for justice, art becomes a vital complement to technology. The deprofessionalization of video representations of racism-in-action is importantly extended as the images are appropriated, reinterpreted, and reinvented in irreverent ways. These irreverent moves are, I think, of a piece with what Ruha Benjamin points to in her call for “abolitionist tools” for the New Jim Code—inverting the hegemonic logics by which technology reinforces long-standing racial hierarchies. Benjamin points out that these antiracist interventions are often in the realm of the speculative or the fictional, and indeed, it is revealing that it is not just the cell phone camera footage itself but also the speculative inversions in the artistic interventions inspired by it that seem to capture something important about both the world in which we live and the world as we would have it be.

The Constraint and Creativity in “Race as Technology”

This foregrounding of media brings in opportunities to analyze race in new ways, informed by media theorists such as Beth Coleman and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, who have explored how race can be understood as a technology rather than as a natural fact.52 As Chun argues, the idea of “‘race as technology’ shifts the focus from the what of race to the how of race, from knowing race to doing race by emphasizing the similarities between race and technology.”53 The kinds of creative interventions that emerged in response to the McKinney pool party incident focus attention on race as technology—that is, not on ontological questions about what race is but on more procedural questions of what race does.

Chun uses the phrase “race and/as technology” to highlight the inseparability of being and doing, and both authors foreground how technological infrastructures are a constitutive part of racialization. The opportunities that this approach offers come later in Chun’s piece: “race as technology is both the imposition of a grid of control and a lived social reality in which kinship with technology can be embraced.”54 Within science and technology studies, this approach has been more common among those who study media and information technologies rather than those who study biomedicine. Media theorists of race tend to be more open to the generative potential of technology than to biomedical theorists of race, yet contemporary biopolitics needs this attention to technologies as well, especially as the analysis moves beyond explicitly medical spaces.

Considering race as technology reframes what it means to articulate or contest the reality of race, such that the stakes are not about essences but about actions within a system of constraints that have real-world impacts. As Coleman explains, “the claim of race as a technology recognizes racialized identities as constructed—understanding that, within the construct, if you die, you really are dead. If one is caught on the wrong side of the law with the wrong color or accent, then it may be curtains, lights out. That is the ‘reality effect’ of race.”55 That is, Coleman embraces the now-conventional idea in humanities and social sciences that “race is socially constructed” but wants to put the emphasis on what that construct does in the world and how we navigate it. It’s striking that Coleman draws on a term from literary theory—the Barthesian “reality effect”—to describe how the constructed notion of race has material effects. Importantly, it points to a particular sensibility in which there exists a potential for reinvention, for repurposing the tools of race for another world that might be possible.

If we understand racial inequality as fundamental to the simultaneously material and imaginative world in which we find ourselves, we should see ourselves as both characters and authors. Coleman argues that “race as technology also grasps a prosthetic logic in which local agency—yours and mine—depends on what we make of the tools at hand.”56 In this pool party incident and in the artist and activist response, the tools at hand include suburban swimming pools and cell phone videos, white police bodies wielding handcuffs, and Black teen bodies in bikinis. The existing structures are powerful, such that communities almost always stay segregated and exposed Black bodies are almost always vulnerable—and yet artists and activists point to the potential for alternative realities.

The technologies that came together in this incident are both involved in the imposition of control and involved in technologically mediated activist and artistic tactics that seek to intervene on that social order. This is true of the making and the dissemination of the video itself, which is a mode by which a white boy can take some modicum of action in the face of police violence against his Black friends, and it is true of the wide-ranging artistic responses.

It is important not to overstate the transformative nature of amateur videos of police violence, but it is worth attending to how the videos do things with race that both build on the role of professional journalistic photography in the civil rights era and reconfigure visual media production and dissemination for differently participatory pathways. The channels through which these videos circulate, including but not limited to YouTube, do not have the same kind of gatekeeping as does mainstream media, and they allow a kind of peer-to-peer sharing that can be useful for activism.57 Insofar as videos like this provide mobilizing resources for Black Lives Matter, they offer potential tools for making race do different things: illuminating operations of power precisely to resist and subvert them and to affirm the humanity of Black people in the face of a dehumanizing society. Coleman elaborates with a suggestion of what race might do otherwise: “in asking the reader to consider race as technology, I also participate in the critique of racial instrumentalization, but in a fashion that exploits the nature of technology toward the human and the affective as opposed to toward dehumanization.”58

I’d like to conclude by drawing on one final point from Chun that is useful for scholars of racism and health. She writes that understanding race and/as technology “displaces ontological questions of race—debates over what race really is and is not, focused on separating ideology from truth—with ethical questions: what relations does race set up?”59 Scholars of race and biomedicine in science and technology studies are still overwhelmingly engaged in the debunking move—adjudicating what race is and is not—with the notable exception of those who work at the intersections of biomedicine and Afrofuturism, such as Ruha Benjamin and especially Alondra Nelson.60 Broadly, scholars of media are much further along in considering race and/as technology than are scholars of health and medicine, and these analytical domains and approaches should be more fruitfully brought together to understand how bodily well-being is stratified in a structurally racist society. Attending to technologies does not distract from the human stories here but elaborates them. Whereas so much of the scholarship of racism and health focuses on how technologies divert our attention from fundamental inequalities,61 we can see in this case that technologies can foreground rather than obscure human experiences. Indeed, technologies ranging from swimming pools to video-sharing platforms are inseparable from human experience and as such are vital sites for understanding both the constitution of race and the contestation of racism.