scholarly journals Black Lives Matter on Screen: Trauma of Witnessing Police Brutality in Contemporary American Cinema

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 190-204
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Mączko

In the years following the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, American cinema was looking for a way to appropriately address the issue of police brutality against people of color. Filmmakers, often inspired by real-life events, began developing stories focused on the trauma of witnessing lethal police violence. Three films released in 2018 – Blindspotting (dir. Carlos López Estrada), Monsters and Men (dir. Reinaldo Marcus Green) and The Hate U Give (dir. George Tillman Jr.)– emphasize how the aftermath of such experiences affects young people of color and their communities. This article aims to explore the role of witness testimony in trauma-centered narratives and examine how the contemporary American cinema visualizes racial trauma. To achieve that, the films will be analyzed within the context of trauma studies, including theories regarding both individual and cultural trauma. Moreover, studies focused on the socialization of Black children will help demonstrate the transgenerational impact of trauma. All three films share common motifs: they represent the psychosomatic aspects of trauma through similar cinematic techniques and see value in witness testimony, even if it requires personal sacrifices from the protagonists. They also portray parents’ worry about their children’s future within a prejudiced system and the struggle to prepare them for it. All these issues have been previously addressed in the public and academic discourse and are now being reflected in cinema. Film proves to be a suitable medium for representing trauma of witnessing police brutality and cinema will most likely remain a vital part of the debate about dismantling racist systems for years to come.

Author(s):  
Sauro Succi

This chapter introduces the main ideas behind the application of LBE methods to the problem of turbulence modeling, namely the simulation of flows which contain scales of motion too small to be resolved on present-day and foreseeable future computers. Many real-life flows of practical interest exhibit Reynolds numbers far too high to be directly simulated in full resolution on present-day computers and arguably for many years to come. This raises the challenge of predicting the behavior of highly turbulent flows without directly simulating all scales of motion which take part to turbulence dynamics, but only those that fall within the computer resolution at hand.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110086
Author(s):  
Dennis Leroy Kangalee ◽  
Eric Greene ◽  
Nisha Gupta

In this edited interview, psychologists Eric Greene and Nisha Gupta interview filmmaker Dennis Leroy Kangalee about his film As an Act of Protest (2002), which is about a young African American actor named Cairo Medina who goes through a station-of-the-cross journey to find the meaning of his life and eradicate the racism and police brutality that continue to plague the world. In this conversation, Dennis shares the genesis of the film as a response to the police brutality occurring in New York in the late 1990s, the psychological struggles he experienced while making this film and enduring backlash to it, and his desire to convey raw emotional truths about the ugliness of racism and racial trauma through a style of radically honest filmmaking that can foster catharsis, reflection, and transformation.


2007 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kilian G. Seeber ◽  
Christian Zelger

Abstract Simultaneous conference interpreting represents a highly complex linguistic task and a very delicate process of information transfer. Consequently, the notion of truth – which applied to the field of simultaneous interpreting entails an accurate rendition of the original message – is of pivotal importance. In spite of that, an analysis of experimental transcripts and corpora sometimes seems to suggest that interpreters betray the speaker by deliberately altering the original. While we cannot exclude that such instances do exist, we argue that sometimes what looks like betrayal may in fact be a rendition based on a sound ethical decision. In this paper we take a closer look at these situations in an attempt to shed more light on the potential motivations underlying the interpreter’s decisions and actions. Using examples from real life interpreting situations, we take the interpreter’s output and put what at first sight appears to be a betrayal of the speaker on the ethical test bench, both from a deontological and a teleological perspective. Based on this analysis we propose a model suggesting that the interpreter uses three principal message components, verbal, semantic and intentional, in order to come up with an accurate interpretation of the original, which we call “truthful rendition.”


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janaki Nair ◽  

“I can’t breathe.” These are the three words that reverberated in epic proportions across an entire country, resulting in one of the biggest movements for racial equity in decades. It called for action against police brutality in America, and demanded that racially-motivated violence be stopped forever. One would think the right to breathe is an undeniable one, but the year 2020 has disproved that notion in more ways than one. As the relentless COVID-19 continues to spread, I implore you to consider this question – has the pandemic put people of color in yet another situation where they cannot breathe?


Transport ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 291-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saleh Yousefi ◽  
Mahmood Fathy

In the recent years, direct message exchange between vehicles in order to improve the safety of road traffic has been attracting lots of interest in both networking and road safety communities. While travelling on a road, vehicles form an ad hoc network called Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) and deploy life safety applications. Evaluating the performance of these applications is primordial for realizing VANETs in real life. Current literature lacks efficient ways to evaluate the performance of safety applications and mostly leverages on classical networking metrics like delay, delivery rate etc. In this paper, we consider both networking and safety concerns simultaneously to come up with more efficient methods. In particular, we first point out the significance of fairness and coverage from safety viewpoint. Then, we introduce two new metrics called beaconing rate and effective range aiming at providing more facilities for safety performance evaluation in VANET s research. Furthermore, realizing special characteristics of safety applications while disseminating beacon messages, we study the way that beacon dissemination protocols affect the performance of safety applications. We then conduct extensive simulation study to show the usefulness of the introduced metrics and derive some insights on the feasibility of driver‐assistant safety applications. Our evaluation also shows that sending the aggregated status of neighbouring vehicles in addition to vehicle's own status, and instead, increasing beacon transmission interval may be invoked in order to assist safety applications in providing satisfactory services to drivers.


Object detection (OD) within a video is one of the relevant and critical research areas in the computer vision field. Due to the widespread of Artificial Intelligence, the basic principle in real life nowadays and its exponential growth predicted in the epochs to come, it will transmute the public. Object Detection has been extensively implemented in several areas, including human-machine Interaction, autonomous vehicles, security with video surveillance, and various fields that will be mentioned further. However, this augmentation of OD tackles different challenges such as occlusion, illumination variation, object motion, without ignoring the real-time aspect that can be quite problematic. This paper also includes some methods of application to take into account these issues. These techniques are divided into five subcategories: Point Detection, segmentation, supervised classifier, optical flow, a background modeling. This survey decorticates various methods and techniques used in object detection, as well as application domains and the problems faced. Our study discusses the cruciality of deep learning algorithms and their efficiency on future improvement in object detection topics within video sequences.


Author(s):  
Becky Thompson ◽  
Veronica T. Watson

In this paper we will be drawing upon historical work on race consciousness, contemporary work on trauma, and scholarship on activism and social change to offer a vision of what a critical white double consciousness might look like. We juxtapose this critical white consciousness with what Veronica Watson has termed a “white schizophrenic subjectivity” which has been explored by intellectuals like Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. Each of these writers called attention to a whiteness that works to maintain disconnection from people of color and disassociation from their own moral selves, a white schizophrenic subjectivity that prevented white folks from acknowledging or challenging racism while still continuing to think of themselves as moral and upstanding citizens of their communities and nation.


Author(s):  
Yoshiki Tajiri

In this chapter, Yoshiki Tajiri focuses on the connection between trauma and everyday life: a traumatised subject needs to come to terms with everyday life and can find ordinary objects in it unexpectedly significant. By discussing such aspects of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, this chapter will illuminate the ways in which trauma and ordinary life are correlated rather than opposed. It also demonstrates that trauma theory and everyday life studies can stimulate each other: trauma is far from an everyday phenomenon, but it can shed light on the nature of everyday life after calamities of modernity as in the cases of Woolf and Beckett; conversely, there may be ways of enriching trauma studies by incorporating reflections on everyday life.


2022 ◽  
pp. 39-64
Author(s):  
Nena Hisle

Children in America are suffering from an abundance of trauma that many bring to school with them daily. Children, teens, and their families, who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), may have experienced historical racial trauma which is unique to students of color. Professionals working with students of color (SOC) must develop cultural competency around racial trauma in their understanding of trauma informed pedagogy to meet the needs of student populations that are becoming increasingly diverse. The overall purpose of this chapter is to provide professionals working with BIPOC children and teens the necessary skills to meet their needs.


Sexualities ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 136346072096406
Author(s):  
Michelle Liang

Although the separation between “real life” and “play” appears to reinscribe liberal notions of autonomy, BDSM practitioners actually mobilize this boundary to trouble liberal understandings of the liberal autonomous rational agent. Through understandings desires as inextricable from power, and fetishes as displacements of anxieties, BDSM practices recognize “irrational” desires and multiple, fractured selves. In examining kink practices of queer women of color in the Netherlands, this paper explores the transformative potentials of BDSM for queer people of color, especially in resisting colonial discourses that privilege liberal discourses of agency and conceptualize bodies of color as nonmodern, inferior, exotic, and irrational. In the face of discourses that pit Dutch freedom and sexual expression against ethnic minorities and sexual constraint, marginalized kinksters are forming communities that radically centralize marginalized kink experiences and reject pathologizing discourses, as they critically alter the implications of and possibilities for slippages between daily life and kink.


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