E-Racing Identity? Black Bodies On and Off the Technological (Chopping) Block

Abstract

Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, boldly articulated the ongoing pain of her son’s absence to a packed audience at Lehigh University in fall of 2014 during a Rap Session panel entitled “America’s Most Wanted: Hip-hop, the Media & the Criminalization of Black and Brown Youth.” Among other things, Fulton notes the dizzying reality of reliving the death of her son through recursive virtualized depictions of misrecognition—she palpably noted that she had “seen more than 50 different pictures that were supposed to be Trayvon Martin that wasn’t actually him, um, I just heard so many different things that I really didn’t know who they were talking about at one time ‘cause I’m like … It’s just so degrading.” What’s more—such visual replays of posthumous identity theft not only left Fulton vulnerable to witnessing the continued dehumanization of a child that had died at the hands of the state, the technological chopping block chipping away at her dead son’s reputation, as well as hers. To this compounded reality, she noted, “it’s as if, I had done something wrong, as if … I was a victim of a crime … and now they blamed me. So, a lot of times people like to justify what happened, they like to justify by [sic] the murder by making the person seem like they were so bad, nothing my son did should have caused his death.” For many, Trayvon has become an icon for social change; many others, in the wake of intense efforts to justify what happened to him, villianized him and a technological character assassination took place after his actual murder. For Fulton, each of these efforts to situate Trayvon as somehow deserving of what happened to him causes the grieving mother to relive the news of his murder. Fulton continues to relive her son’s murder by way of daily and purposeful virtually mediated misrecognition that is, above all, racialized in nature.