Two Visions of 'Black' Evil, One White Gaze: Reading Kony 2012 and the Murder of Trayvon Martin

TwoVisions of 'Black' Evil, One White Gaze:   Reading Kony 2012 and the Murder of Trayvon Martin byDavid C. Leonard | NewBlackMan
Inthe wake of 9/11 and the ongoing war on terror, the United States hasincreasingly relied on national narratives that offer certainty, comfort, andsecurity. In catchphrases and sound bites, pundits and politicians remindAmericans of the importance of protecting the homeland, the role of allAmericans in safeguarding national space and American democratic values, theneed to guard against the enemies of freedom and civilization, and the promiseof spreading democracy throughout the world. As countless bodies fell, injuredand dying, shattering families and communities over here and over there, multinationalcorporations have profited on an increased militarism, diminishing naturalresources, and public panics. Within this climate, many in the United States have sought refuge incomforting narratives of good versus evil, civilization versus savagery.  The power and cultural importance ofthese narratives has been evident with the murder of Trayvon Martin and in thespectacle of Kony 2012.
Ina world where African Americans, particularly black male youth, areconsistently represented as threats, to the security, peace, culture, calm, andorder, how can "threat" be seen outside of the context of race? In a worldwhere racial profiling is routine and where explicit and implicit bias hascreated thecriminalblackman, is it even possible to think about the confrontation andultimate death of Martin outside of the paradigm of a criminalized of blackbody?  The 911 call, theconfrontation, and the ultimate death fits a larger pattern whereupon blacknessis consistently imagined as threat, as danger, and as EVIL; as a cultural andsocial pariah blackness needs to be controlled, discipline, and ultimatelypunished.  According to MichelleAlexander, "Just as African Americans in the North were stigmatized by the JimCrow system even if they were not subject to its formal control.  Black men today are stigmatized by massincarceration and the social construction of the 'criminalblackman' whetherthey have ever been to prison or not" (p. 194).  In a review of Alexander's The New Jim Crow, Max Kanter describes the specterof criminalization as follows:
This is evidenced in part by dominant media andcultural narratives, institutionalized (and legalized) racial profiling, andpolice efforts to build mass databases of "suspected criminals" whichcontain information almost exclusively on racial minorities who have often donenothing criminal at all aside from having been born to black and brown parents.In addition to the numerous studies showing that most white Americans see crimein racial (nonwhite) terms, studies conducted by Princeton University alsoreveal that white felons fresh out of prison are more likely to get hired forjobs than equally qualified black men with no criminal record. African Americanmen without criminal records are more ostracized and widely perceived as beingmore criminal than white men who have actually been convicted of felony crimes.That is how deeply black people have been stigmatized as criminals and socialpariahs in our society.  
Thisis the context that we need to understand what happened to Trayvon Martin notonly on the fateful evening, but also in terms of police response and that ofthe media and general public. 
Thedeath of a child under suspicious circumstances would have thought to have ledto Zimmerman's arrest, yet no charges have levied against him to date. Itrepresents another reminder of whose life really matters.  Tracy Martin, Trayvon's mother, told theHuffington Post that the police basically saw Zimmerman as a good guygiving them reason not to arrest him at this point:
They respected [Zimmerman's] background, that hestudied criminal justice for four years and that he was squeaky clean." Hecontinued: "My question to them was, did they run my child's backgroundcheck? They said yes. I asked them what they came up with, and they saidnothing. So I asked if Zimmerman had a clean record, did that give him theright to shoot and kill an unarmed kid?"
WhileTrayvon Martin is not trending on twitter nor eliciting 500,000 views onYouTube, much less 70 million, Kony 2012 has captured the national (global)imagination.  With millions ofviews on YouTube and Vimeo, with ample donations directed toward the film'sproducer – Invisible Children – and a national conversation about Joseph Konyand his crimes against humanity, Kony 2012 has elicited an outpouring from allcorners of society. 
Noneof this is surprising given its racial and national tropes and narratives.  The video itself, and the subsequentdiscourse surrounding Uganda, constructs Kony as evil, as the source of allpain and suffering for the people in the region.  Whereas (white) Westerners are imagined as saviors, asbeacons of hope, change, and peace, Kony is a despicable criminal who is thesource of all problems. 
Inone of the film's most disturbing scenes, its director shows a picture of Konyto his son so that he can see "evil" and what a "bad guy" looks like.  In what feels like a postmodern twistof Kenneth Clark's famous doll test (h/t to Usame Tungur for making thispoint), where black children were asked to describe black and white dolls (badversus good) as evidence of the consequences of white supremacy.  In this case, a white child and hisfather locates evil in the body of an African man with whiteness remaining asgoodness since he (we) are saving the many African children suffering becauseof Kony.  With "theSoft Bigotry of Kony 2012," Max Fisher highlights the racially comfortingnarrative offered by the documentary. 
The much-circulated campaign subtly reinforces anidea that has been one of Africa's biggest disasters: that well-meaningWesterners need to come in and fix it. Africans, in this telling, are helplessvictims, and Westerners are the heroes. It's part of a long tradition ofWestern advocacy that has, for centuries, adopted some form of white man'sburden, treating African people as cared for only to the extent that Westernerscare, their problems solvable only to the extent that Westerners solve them,and surely damned unless we can save them. First it was with missionaries, then"civilizing" missions, and finally the ultimate end of whitepaternalism, which was placing Africans under the direct Western control of imperialism.And while imperialism may have collapsed 50 years ago, that mentality persists,because it is rewarding and ennobling to feel needed and to believe you aredoing something good.
Similarly,Natasha Jackson (@NatashaTheory) focuseson benevolent racism with her discussion of Kony 2012: "White liberals whohave dedicated their lives to "helping" people of color have a hard timeseeing, let alone addressing, the benevolent racism that can undermine eventheir best intentions. How can they be racist when they want to help so badly?"
Akinto a Rambo, Invisible Children/theWest is reimagined as white savior, as a source of peace and tranquility forthe despair facing Uganda.  As withRambo, the potential violence inflicted above Kony or others is justifiable inthe eradication of evil.  As notedby Susan Jeffords and by RichardManson, in his dissertation on white masculinity, the white savior has beencentral to a national reconstructive project since the 1980s:
Led by the Ronald Reagan cowboy image, thedecade saw the appearance of He-Man, Rambo, and the Terminator, one powerfullyover-muscled white male image after another which relocate the white male atthe center of power in the imagined American community. To this day, the "normativebody that enveloped strength, labor, determination"3 which is "like Reagan's own,male and white"34 has retained if not increased its potency, likely as a result of"winning" the Cold War.
Ina twitter conversation about Ramboand ultimately Kony 12, Sarah Jackson (@sjjphd) rightfully identified the filmas an example of how "white violence is framed as necessary to save humanity,but the black violence...its downfall." The representation of blackness as evil, as threats to humanity andpeace, as unredeemable and perpetually dangerous, especially in comparison to akind, gentle and benevolent white body, not only justifies the mythical Rambofigure or the Kony campaign, but mass incarceration and daily forms of violence.  The white savior complex imagines blackviolence as a threat to civilization and thus any form of state violence,whether international war or the prison industrial complex is repositioned as"saving" and "civilizing." 
Thisleads me back to Trayvon Martin, whose death can be tied to an ideological andrepresentational reality that imagines blackness as a threat to peace,tranquility, and civilization.  Hispresumed unlawful entry into a white-gated community raised suspicion.  His criminalized body, as opposed tothe innocence and bravery afforded to Zimmerman's white body in the nationalimagination, is suspect, helping explain both the media and police response todate.   While Trayvon Martin is the farthest thing from Joseph Kony,the fear they cause, the criminality within the dominant imagination, and theirpresumed threats to civilization leads to similar treatment irrespective oftheir polar existences.  If thiswasn't the case, maybe we could see a nationwide push to bring about justice forMartin.  In this transformativeworld, financial contributions would be directed not to an organization thatseems intent on supporting military intervention in Uganda; instead money wouldflow to groups committed to challenging the criminalization of blackness withinthe United States and throughout the globe.  How about a Justice for Trayvon 2012 movement?  What about a movement committed toeradicating AIDS or infant mortality throughout Africa?  What about one that listens to andworks alongside of those already engaged in these fights for justice? Underthese circumstances we may actually see accountability, justice, and peace formillions of people.
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of CriticalCulture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. Hehas written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing inboth popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy ofpopular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, andpopular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextualanalysis.  Leonard's latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness will be publishedby SUNY Press in May of 2012.