Abstract: This article examines Rodney King’s 2008 appearance on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew to illuminate the cartographies of Black trauma and state-sanctioned violence outside of its aestheticized spectacle. Focusing on King’s account of his 1991 beating, I demonstrate how his testimony aligns with the affective labor of reality television’s theater of suffering but also how it ruptures the genre’s neoliberal, colorblind ideologies, through the recursive temporalities of Black trauma and reclamation. This article reveals how King reclaimed a publicly commodified identity, constructing a “televisual archive of self” to approximate a legal recognition and subjecthood previously denied to him.

I knew I was gonna die. I thought I was dead. I was dead and came back to life, that’s what happened.

—Rodney King[1]

Rodney Glen King III died on June 17, 2012, in Rialto, California. The autopsy report named the cause of death as an accidental drowning: a combination of alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, and phencyclidine (commonly referred to as PCP) in his system reacted with a heart condition, resulting in a cardiac arrhythmia. The truth of King’s death is more complicated than the autopsy report’s list of physical processes; his death was an unexpected end to a life made forever infamous, his name and identity a metonym for American race relations when his horrific 1991 beating by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was captured on camcorder video by a bystander and televised nationally. The subsequent acquittal of the officers charged with assault and use of excessive force on King was a stark reminder to Black and Brown residents of Los Angeles—who had long suffered under over-policed neighborhoods, economic disparity and abandonment, and systemic racism—that this was state-sanctioned racial violence. The culmination of these factors led to public outrage, violence, and the protests of the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Rodney King was thus made a reluctant public and historical figure when Los Angeles police officers beat him almost fatally and then again when he plaintively (if not also naively) asked on a televised news conference, “can we . . . can we all get along?” during the riots in May 1992.[2] He then largely disappeared from public view until 2008, when he suddenly reappeared on television in Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew (VH1, 2008–2012; hereafter Celebrity Rehab) for treatment for alcohol addiction.

The haunting epigraph that begins this article is taken from an episode of Celebrity Rehab in which King is asked to describe his beating. That King articulated the event in these terms calls into question the relationship of state-sanctioned racial violence to the act of dying as well as dying’s temporality: “I knew I was gonna die,” the prescient; “I thought I was dead,” the present; and “I was dead and came back to life,” the past. In all three components of King’s statement, he assesses death as inevitable but also as something from which he inevitably returns, articulating to audiences the temporal recursivity of Black trauma.

In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub assert that a testimonial account is a performance intent on carrying forth memories by conveying a person’s engagement between consciousness and history.[3] King’s notoriety was rooted in his beating by police officers in March of 1991 and the subsequent riots in 1992, but his reappearance in the public sphere in 2008 made a different kind of violence enacted upon him visible—the commodification of his beating and of his very identity. When King said, “I knew I was gonna die,” he referred to his own knowledge of the country’s long history of racial violence and illuminated the unseen violence the viewing public’s television screens called into being for audiences. Though the physical impact of the beating may have healed, King’s death reinscribed and made visible the psychic trauma that he carried with him as a result of the incident, manifested through his long struggle with and eventual defeat by addiction. Both his notoriety and his tragic death remind us of what Cathy Caruth identifies as the two stories involved in any remembrance of traumatic violence: “the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival.”[4]

This article investigates these twinned stories by examining the account King offered on Celebrity Rehab. Lingering in the textures and meanings of his testimony, through his addiction and racialized trauma, King affectively labored into a legible subjecthood defined by and through television—a speaking subjecthood previously precluded from legal recognition within official federal court records when he was prevented from testifying in the officers’ trials. I demonstrate how King utilized television as a counterpublic as he sought to construct what I call a “televisual archive of self” to reclaim an identity that had been publicly commodified.

In doing so, I analyze the temporality of his beating, story, and survival, as well as the temporal recursivity of Black trauma. I identify and compare that trauma’s different rhythms and implications—its lingering aftermath but also its anticipatory history. In short, I examine how Rodney King was “stuck in time” but also how, as time passed, the experience of racial trauma was “always with him.”[5] This article illuminates how his testimony not only indexes how the structure and afterlife of anti-Black racial violence haunts and endures but also makes clear how racial violence is always already there as a potentiality, predicting and anticipating its own effects before it even happens. I contrast the visibility and immediacy of a spectacular incident of state-sanctioned racial violence with the harder-to-discern and slower epistemologies of addiction and trauma. King’s televisual testimony demonstrates how state-sanctioned racial violence exists outside of its spectacular aestheticizations; his struggles with addiction, his testimony, and his eventual death demonstrate the protracted afterlife of state-sanctioned racial violence, making apparent to viewers the temporal recursivity and time-shattering relations of Black trauma and death through televisual worlds. Refracted through the neoliberal optics, arcs, and conventions of reality television, the temporalities of Black racial trauma are often exploited, contained, and commodified, but, in certain instances—such as the singular example of Rodney King—they can also be pried open for revision, new testimonials, and processes of reclamation.

Celebrity Rehab and the Scripts of Reality Television’s Neoliberal Theater of Suffering

In October 2008, the second season of Celebrity Rehab premiered with a brand-new cast, yet the show’s premise remained the same: it focused on the journey of celebrity participants within a recovery center as they attempted to become sober, going through the throes of withdrawal and depression, the emotional volatility and anguish of group therapy, and finally (in some cases) to the so-called triumph of recovery. A mash-up between psychological and medical addiction treatment and a behind-the-scenes peek at the daily lives of celebrities, Celebrity Rehab displayed the latter’s addictions as audiences had rarely seen before. Moving beyond the attention-grabbing headlines, the show revealed the granular day-to-day battles of addictions to alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, heroin, painkillers, and opiates and the volatile, and sometimes unsuccessful, road to recovery. Following these semi-notable figures as they attempted to become sober proved to be immensely popular with audiences as well as representing a shift in content for the channel.[6] The philanthropic mission of the show, led by addiction specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky, with his coterie of therapists, counselors, and staff, was to provide the tools to help celebrities self-manage their addictive behaviors, all the while operating under the voyeuristic gaze of the camera. This type of surveillance and management has been the focus of reality television studies scholars, who argue that reality television acts pedagogically, translating sociopolitical ideologies and circulating resources, scripts, and instructions for citizenship.[7]

Characterizing the genre as one that espouses self-governing principles, Brenda Weber posits that this type of “makeover TV” enacts neoliberal ideologies and advances the privatization of the social service network; by employing a cadre of flashy professionals and resources to “make over” private citizens, reality television demonstrates to audiences that private care of the self is not only possible but also preferable and necessary for good citizenry.[8] Whether the targets for rehabilitation are dilapidated houses, unstylish straight men, or unruly pups in need of a human pack leader, this sub-genre of reality television implicitly upholds an ethic of self-care through an edict of privatization, emphasizing individual responsibility rather than infrastructural support and care, the private over the public, and a “zone for the production of everyday discourses of citizenship.”[9] This diminishment of the public sphere continues a decades-long reversal of earlier narratives of the state-as-public-good that previously characterized America’s political center.

By the 1990s, welfare reform, fights to repeal affirmative action, the outsourcing of state powers and services, the downsizing of the public sector, and an emphasis on consumer choice and a heightened expectation of personal responsibility culminated in the undoing of a particular vision of American state social care.[10] What is more, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant write in their analysis of neoliberal politics, these shifts significantly and “deliberately fostered neglect of issues of race. It has, in effect, buried race as a significant dimension of its politics.”[11] It is within this neoliberal, and colorblind, context that the reality television genre became popular. Celebrity Rehab fits squarely within these ideological conventions. The show’s goal of rehabilitation was focused on personal, individuated addiction, as exemplified by its emphasis on famous individuals rather than any acknowledgment of how structural power predisposes particular populations to trauma and addiction. This shift in focus from structures to notable individuals consequently masks the long-racialized histories of addiction pathologization and its contributions to mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex.[12]

As part makeover show and part competition show, Celebrity Rehab both adhered to and violated the expectations of these two sub-genres of reality television. As Laurie Ouellette and James Hay specify, makeover TV performs the “business of social work by identifying addiction as the problem, screening and evaluating cases, documenting their severity, interviewing witnesses, and consulting doctors and other professionals.”[13] And Celebrity Rehab did just this, putting the participants’ addictions on display while also providing them with the privatized social service meant to assist them. The nature of the show’s competition, however, was distinct in that participants were clearly not competing against one another. Rather, they were locked in a deadly contest with their own addiction, a competition that extended far beyond the mediated world of reality television. While other competition shows in the genre build tension in order to provide a sense of closure by the end of the series, in a sense, Celebrity Rehab foreclosed that possibility because of the very nature of addiction: being an addict means that there is always a possibility of relapse. As much as the genre conventions might dictate a narrative resolution, there is no easy resolution for addiction in front of the cameras or the audience within the show. This toggling between adherence to and violation of the neoliberal scripts of reality television within the show was shown even more acutely in King’s participation.

Much like the show’s simultaneous adherence to and revision of the conventions associated with makeover television, King’s appearance can likewise be read easily as conforming to these reality television narratives. As I will discuss, King’s appearance certainly adhered to certain reality television social and neoliberal scripts. King’s affective labor on the show undoubtedly participated in what Anna McCarthy calls reality television’s “neoliberal theater of suffering.”[14] However, I suggest that King’s participation was simultaneously a refutation of these very neoliberal and colorblind logics, troubling and dismantling the present public rhetorics of care ostensibly provided by the state and privatized actors, through the encoding of him as a historical figure and his metonymic presence within the genre. Through his testimony, King was able to articulate a legal subjecthood previously denied to him and craft a televisual archive of self. What emerges, then, are the contrasting and overlapping dynamics between two potential readings of King’s appearance and his explication of the temporal recursivity of Black trauma and racial violence: on the one hand, how reality television demanded that King relive his trauma on television via a “neoliberal theater of suffering,” reinscribing neoliberal narratives of privatized suffering and recovery and, on the other hand, how Celebrity Rehab also relied on King’s trauma and affective labor to lend legitimacy to the genre. At the same time, we have a third dynamic: an analysis of King’s testimony, its temporal recursivity, and its ability to mark the afterlife of state-sanctioned violence can make manifest agentic and empowering implications.

Rodney King: Historical Figure, Totality, Judicial Subject

In order to illustrate these dynamics, I begin by analyzing King’s persona, his celebrity, and how Celebrity Rehab capitalized on his identity at the same time that King utilized the medium in ways that empowered him in unforeseen ways. The show’s participants varied in their registers of fame. From porn star Mary Carey to American Idol contestant Jessica Sierra to Steven Adler, former drummer of Guns N’ Roses, the participants had achieved some level of success within entertainment industries. Rodney King’s appearance, however, called up a categorically different kind of televisual fame, one in which his agency in achieving fame was irrelevant. His presence was exceptional within the celeb-reality VH1 universe; rather than having voluntarily participated in the media industries’ structures of agents, contracts, and marketing, King’s fame was forced upon him. King thus made disturbingly visible the nexus of state-sanctioned violence, marginalized communities, and the psychic trauma of racial terror. His notoriety, an inescapable reminder and a cultural and historical touchstone of state-sanctioned racial violence, thereby disrupted reality television’s neoliberal mandate. And while King did not explicitly critique institutional and structural racism and white supremacy on the show, he did use his appearance to voice his own testimony and, by sifting through his painful memories, to articulate a serious revision of his beating, the 1992 riots, cultural memory, and racial violence itself.

King, in short, was not a typical reality television participant. His fame is that of pseudo-celebrity, one whose life is marked by the under-prosecuted and largely ignored violent experiences of Black and Brown people in the United States. This is precisely what made King’s appearance on reality television so significant. As a figure inextricably associated with racial politics, state-sanctioned racial violence, and the critical potentials and failures of media technology, King imparted a rare historical and cultural value to Celebrity Rehab by extending the cultural memory of the 1992 riots. As a result, he contributed to a larger televisual archive of US racial sufferance through his testimony. But unlike most people classified as human pseudo-events—a term that more often refers to manufactured celebrities such as Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian, whose fame comes from being famous—King’s accidental celebrity was not something he actively sought.[15] In this way, through his very historicity, he upset the classifications and expectations of the reality television genre, particularly those specific to VH1’s branding. As media scholar Marita Sturken asserts, “the videotape of the Rodney King beating is an image that in itself created history. . . . This brutal beating of a Black man by white police officers . . . came to represent all race relations in the 1990s. . . . [It signified] the relentless violence of the present.”[16] VH1 was quick to recognize and capitalize on this notoriety. King’s historical identity was consistently touted by VH1’s promotional materials and by Pinsky, the creator and executive producer of the show. In this way, VH1 utilized King as a historical commodity to rehabilitate the devalued genre of reality television itself as well as advance the channel’s own claims to quality and cultural worth.

King’s touted historical significance represents what Laurie Ouellette has designated “do-good television,” reality television that incorporates into its programming civic aims historically associated with the documentary.[17] Ouellette identifies that this integration enables media outlets to “cash in on marketing trends such as ‘citizen branding’ and corporate social responsibility (CSR) . . . and exploit what business historian David Vogel calls the burgeoning ‘market for virtue.’”[18] Using MTV as an example, Ouellette notes the channel publicly announced its intention to “replace trivial reality entertainment with issue-oriented and civic minded material” in 2010.[19] With both VH1 and MTV as subsidiaries under Viacom, one could speculate that this marketing strategy and intentional programming might have been percolating in the years prior, with VH1 benefiting from King’s appearance and the commodity of historical value his presence afforded the channel.

As an executive producer, Pinsky was very much aware of King’s notoriety and what his presence on the show contributed to televisual and historical archives. In an interview with Pinsky that appeared on VH1’s blog about the second season of Celebrity Rehab, blogger and cultural critic Rich Juzwiak asked about the historical significance and implications of King’s appearance in relation to the medium of television:

In this recognition is an acknowledgment of the historicity of King, that his testimony would be a valuable historical commodity, but importantly one that must exist in relationship to the visibility television can provide. Pinsky’s delineation of “culture commenting on culture commenting on history” was at once an acknowledgment of the show’s place in this interplay of culture and a branding technique. And to be sure, King’s unique historical status and rarefied identity on the show was similarly affirmed in promotional materials found on VH1’s website.[21] In marked contrast the online cast bios for other participants of King’s season such as “Model/Actress” for Tawny Kitaen or “Celebrity Offspring” for Rod Stewart’s son Sean Stewart, the website categorized King uniquely as a “Historical Figure” (see Figure 1).[22]

Figure 1. The VH1 website's biography of Celebrity Rehab cast member Rodney King’ categorized him as a “Historical Figure.” Screenshot from VH1 Website Cast Bio.

The commodification of King’s historicity and racial trauma was further upheld through the aesthetic strategies the show used to introduce King. Celebrity Rehab’s opening credit sequence often relied on montages of films, concerts, or public appearances of the show’s celebrities in order to establish their identity and fame. In this instance, these paratexts—the variety of material that surround and inform a text’s meaning and audience expectation—provide audiences with a context to understand both the participants’ height of success and their subsequent descent into addiction.[23] These clips tend to be within a similar genre of media text: high-quality footage of sold-out concerts for Guns N’ Roses drummer Steven Adler, footage of glamorous photo shoots for model Amber Smith, and network TV footage from American Idol to showcase singer Nikki McKibbin. Viewers saw high-gloss footage juxtaposed with scenes of low-resolution mobile phone video displaying the effects of a drug-induced stroke on Adler’s partially paralyzed face, the bursting pill cases of Smith’s opiate addiction, and the decrepitude of McKibbin’s alcohol abuse. These juxtapositions underscored the dramatic tension and devastating effects that drugs and alcohol have on once-illustrious careers through aesthetic strategies that visually emphasized the stars’ descent.

In contrast, King’s montage begins with the grainy, handheld home video that captured his brutal beating, paired with headline news coverage of the verdict exonerating the police officers, the chaotic and fiery violence of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and, finally, King’s famous plea, “can we . . . can we all get along?” Through this formal reversal, King’s appearance is distinguished from the others, whose fame was generally linked to industry accolades, accomplishment, and talent. As the introductory package transitions to King’s confessional interview, he describes himself as “just a down-to-earth guy,” reinforcing the notion that his was not a story of fame and ego gone awry, but of violent circumstances that forcibly made him into a reluctant public figure. And when the scene switches to footage of a present-day King, it is apparent that his participation on the show was not a mere stunt for publicity to boost an ailing career—a subtext that was thrown into sharp relief as other Celebrity Rehab participants consistently reminisced about their waning fame.[24] King’s celebrity was distinct, one borne from a manufactured set of structural circumstances: from the modern trajectory of racialized policing in collision with the then-new technology of camcorder video, as well as from the long history of racial terror in the United States.

King’s awareness of his cultural status was apparent in the way he acknowledged that he was not an average celebrity. In fact, King’s identity has become a hypertext, a shorthand referent for the totality of racial violence that continues to shape understandings of the murders of Black men at the hands of police officers captured on video today. In a Seattle Times news article on King’s post–Celebrity Rehab life, King made quite clear what the stakes were for him—he appeared on the show to reclaim his very identity, one that had been appropriated by history and corrupted by publicness, an outcome of reality television that is typically suppressed:

King’s public loss of subjecthood—hijacked first by state violence and then by processes of racism and dehumanization—was further exacerbated by the media’s commodification of his name and identity. King’s recognition that his words and experiences had been written out of the public narrative surrounding him describe what Fred Moten identifies as a “totality which I call Rodney King in an effort to indicate the convergence of man, phantom, beating, ritual, mundane occurrence, event, trial, text, negation, principle.”[26] It is this totality of Rodney King and the resulting omission of his subjecthood that drove King to appear on Celebrity Rehab. There is irony here: that the medium through which King lost his name was now the one he turned to in order to reclaim it. “Culture commenting on culture commenting on history” was Pinsky’s summation. This type of reflexivity was similarly mirrored by King’s desire to reappear on television. His chance to show that he, as above, “is not the cowering victim in the grainy videotape” almost twenty years later draws attention to the ways in which, until then, media outlets had been satisfied with the Holliday beating videotape, secondhand witnesses, and the police account of the beating. In this way, King was rendered a Black body, a commodity that symbolized both state-sanctioned violence and its condemnation but who was never given the opportunity for testimony.

Thus, King’s therapy session with Pinsky on Celebrity Rehab served as an alternative testimony and an opportunity for an important historical revision, a contribution to the archive of racial sufferance, and a simultaneous reclamation of identity and testimony denied to him in judicial contexts. In the trial, King was rendered the object of police violence or, as mentioned previously, grossly misread as a warped and illegible subject “in complete control of the situation” due to the exhibitive mode of the beating that reduced the incident to a series of stills rather than moving images.[27] This formalistic change served to change the understanding of the incident for the jurors and in the court trials of Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Theodore Briseno, and Timothy Wind—the police officers charged with the beating—proved to be crucial in exonerating them. By exhibiting the footage as a series of stills rather than as a moving-image recording of the beating, the defense altered the videotape’s formal qualities, evacuating it of its violent and malicious nature, greatly altering its meaning. As Sturken argues, “the stills of the King video reduced the events to isolated gesture; blows became hands raised in anticipation, frozen postures without dynamic violence . . . it rescripted Rodney King as the agent of his interaction with the police rather than object of brutal and unreasonable force . . . an image of Rodney King ‘in complete control’ of the situation, in the words of one juror.”[28] This misreading and rescripting of King, from victim of state-sanctioned violence into aggressive perpetrator who necessitated a beating, illuminates the process of what Christina Sharpe calls “anagrammatical blackness,” or the reordering of signification, wherein bound by blackness, “boy” does not mean boy but becomes “gunman,” “Hulk,” and “thug,” such as in the cases of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown.[29]

Though the status of victim of state violence was conferred to King in the court of public opinion regardless of the court case’s verdict—that much is clear in the culminating rage of the 1992 uprising—King’s account and experience were nonetheless undermined by the silences he was forced to maintain within the official historical record. During the trial, King’s lawyers erroneously believed that the videotape’s horrific violence would speak for itself, thereby denying King the opportunity to rebut these misreadings with his own account. By advising him not to testify due to his previous convictions, King’s lawyers omitted him from the legal record in substantial ways. In other words, King’s testimony and judicial subjecthood were silenced and displaced onto the assumed, definitive truth of the moving image. Thus, his interview/therapy session with Pinsky on Celebrity Rehab serves as an alternative testimony and an opportunity for an important historical revision, a contribution to the archive of racial sufferance, and a simultaneous reclamation of identity and testimony denied to him in judicial contexts.

King’s use of Celebrity Rehab for reclamative purposes is deeply resonant to how AIDS activist Pedro Zamora crafted a counterpublic and an ethics of self on MTV’s The Real World (1992–2019), effecting what José Muñoz identifies as a form of televisual activism.[30] According to Muñoz, Zamora was able to utilize reality television as an activist space in which he labored to make apparent the possibilities of resistance in minoritarian queer subjectivity and sociality under the commodity-making entity of MTV. Where Zamora and King differ, however, is in the already-public identity and totality, as Moten calls it, that Rodney King represents, which predated King’s appearance on Celebrity Rehab. In contrast to Zamora, King revised a concept that Safiya Noble has written about in an algorithmic context, that of the archive of the self.[31] Noble concentrates on the underlying racism of search algorithms and the invasiveness and violation of privacy in producing a searchable self in the age of information. Much of this analysis applies to King, whose strategic reemergence in television constituted a counterpublic act, using television to reclaim his identity and intentionally construct an archive of the self. Stated differently, King, in responding to his own totality (as Rodney King), utilized his appearance on Celebrity Rehab to produce a televisual archive of self that sought to unwind the judicial logics, cultural scripts, and images associated with his name and the grainy images of the violence enacted upon him through television and its associations.

Testimony, Labor, Translation

If King was aware of the potentialities of this televisual archive of self, he was also aware of its limitations and complexities. Reality television participants such as King are encouraged to perform the self in particular ways in front of the camera and to participate in the affective labor that reality television demands. In “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Tiziana Terranova details the rise of free labor, a relationship between the online economy and what she terms “the social factory.”[32] Terranova describes the process “whereby work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine.”[33] This machine, however, is not restricted to the internet or the digital but points to the possibility that the digital economy is a working model for the future (and an oft-forgotten past) of capitalist production. In fact, reality television participants might have anticipated and provided a blueprint for the dominance of social networks and the shift toward the ever-public, voluntary “free” space of the user-generated content of social networks.[34] In other words, if reality television is a pedagogical space to work out the scripts of neoliberalism, then it may also prime audiences for the rewards of selling yourself online, where you participate actively in the performance of self’s commodification and monetization.

In his 2012 autobiography The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption, King articulates a deep discomfort for the type of affective labor required of him on the show. Of his meeting with Pinsky to discuss the beating, he writes:[35]

To the extent that Pinsky’s encouragement of King’s disclosure might have stemmed from the medical motivation to deal with unresolved trauma and addiction, the interaction was shaped as much or more by reality television’s expectations and conventions of affective labor, disclosure, and commodification.

In addition to reality television as one potential antecedent to the commodified online self, how can we parse King’s construction of the archive of self and affective labor on Celebrity Rehab from King’s other explanations for appearing on the show? Take, for example, his stated desire for his children to “understand him” by renarrating his story and identity.[36] Interestingly, his assessment that it would be “easier to show them by being on TV” revealed a recognition that his legacy, for better or worse, was mediated by and through television. His relationship with the medium was a contradictory one: as he pointed out, his identity was co-opted, first by television but then again by those who evoked his name, from hip-hop artists to the public at large. His notoriety and his trauma lived in perpetuity, funneled through the medium of television. But in this instance, by appearing on Celebrity Rehab, King also attempted to use television as a paternal surrogate, in order to force a public intimacy and mediated affect with his own children who were otherwise alienated from him by his addiction and trauma. Through the auspices of the show, King labored not only for VH1’s prestige and commodification but also for the reconstitution of the Black family within the historical and pathologizing shadow of the Moynihan report.[37] In this way, the visibility and opportunity the show provides King could be seen as what Brandy Monk-Payton has called the attempts to address the paradox of Black “unfreedom” through a type of “televisual reparations”—reparations that, in this case, are predicated on King’s affective and commodified labor.[38]

Given reality television’s status as a privatized proxy for state care, the fact that this attempt at familial reconciliation was made through reality television has profound implications for how the project of Black fatherhood is viewed. It seems as though the project of Black fatherhood is beyond the scope of state care: in the Moynihan report and the decades that followed, it has been framed repeatedly as an unworthy project. King’s affective labor, however, attempted to recuperate this. The reclamation of his identity and his relationship with his children was part of King’s endeavor to “get myself, to be me,” to make the transformation from object to subject partially through familial reconciliation and aspirations of paternal connection through televised affective labor.

For the remainder of this section, I continue this examination of King’s labor, illuminating how his account of the beating constructs a televised subjecthood while also illuminating the reiterative nature of racial trauma. Indeed, where King’s affective labor was the most evident within the show was his recounting of the beating itself, which came in the second season’s third episode. Given King’s conflicted relationship to Pinsky and the show’s conventions, King’s reluctance to revisit his memories of March 3, 1991 (the night of his beating) was explicitly addressed for only two episodes. In the third episode, Dr. Drew’s voice-over details King’s reluctance to discuss the beating. But when, later in the episode, Pinsky at last asks King to confront his past and speak of the infamous beating, it is obvious that the trauma of that night still haunts him. At the mere mention of the beating, King’s gaze becomes distant, as if his memories rush in to overwhelm him, demonstrating its perpetual presentness. Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience stresses how trauma cannot be located in a “single place or time”; instead, trauma becomes a reiterative event, with the initial trauma repeating itself and constituting a double wounding “as a result of an experience that finds no resolution within the victim’s mental schema.”[39] For King, this reiteration is evident in how he describes the beating: “Oh, it’s always with me,” King confesses, “but I don’t bring it up unless it’s . . . ,” his voice trails off. King’s personal trauma is clear in this scene, but for both King and viewers, the beating is a cultural touchstone that remains relevant with time.

But more than that, King’s assessment of his own temporal existence as one that is stuck in time indicates that his subjectivity and the issue of history are crucially interrelated. “Frozen postures without dynamic violence” is how Sturken summarized it, but what her analysis did not anticipate was that King himself, like the temporization of that series of frozen images, would be similarly frozen in time, forced to relive the beating and its psychic trauma through his personal addiction. This was highlighted in the show’s introductory montage in which King’s severe alcoholism was put on full display: King is shown too drunk to stand, vomiting out the side window of the truck, and dangerously collapsing in front of the tires of a car he is supposed to be impounding.

In paying particular attention to King’s account and testimony of his beating, I aim to be attentive to the underlying conflicts of testimony’s mechanisms of self-presentation—that is, whatever potentialities exist within King’s account are still circumscribed within the terms of commodity making for the corporate entity of VH1. Moreover, King’s labor in making his trauma and suffering visible aligns with the neoliberal logics and what McCarthy has referred to as reality television’s neoliberal theater of suffering. Tying together ideas of the civic self and the “ineffable, self-annihilating experience of trauma,” McCarthy identifies reality television as a theater in which ideas of experimental torture have always resided while also displaying the aleatory tragedy that reality television subjects are often asked to expose.[40] Thus, to commodify racial trauma’s social and cultural value has been one of reality television’s defining features.

However, it should be noted that the currency and specificity of Black trauma, pain, and suffering’s visual economies are part of a longer history outside of reality television. King’s labor in making Black suffering visible continues a long legacy of collective associations that tie pain, more often but not exclusively physical, to the testament or perception of humanity. In Humane Insight, Courtney R. Baker charts how pain’s commodification has been pivotal to the currency of Black liberation and progressive Black movements in their pursuit of recognition of both humanity and in the “ethical beholding of the black body’s physical sensation.”[41] Thus, the Black body in pain, in her estimation, has often been used as the mechanism of visual and evidentiary proof of humanity in particular ways. In this, King’s testimony aligned with the mechanics of this tradition as well as the commodity making of reality television’s neoliberal theater.

While never explicitly acknowledged, it was evident that Rodney King was aware of the affective labor he was expected to deliver. In a one-on-one interview with Dr. Drew, away from the other patients and staff, King provided the nuanced personal details and context often omitted from official narratives of the night, details also typically edited out of reality television conversations. King’s account of the attack runs roughly seven minutes and is noteworthy for its lack of music cues, the omission of voice-over narration, and a refusal to cut out sections where King stumbles upon his words or where he is unintelligible. Such breaks from reality television conventions clearly mark the testimonial as historically significant, something that deserves to be heard unadorned and unedited. King begins by describing his celebratory mood, how he brought along two of his friends, that drinks were “on him” at the bar, and that he overindulged in alcohol. Interwoven throughout his account are personal details—for example, that King and his friends had decided to take a ride to the dam where King’s father used to take him fishing—that give texture to the event in an unprecedented way.

He continues his account fluidly. He and his friends are “riding, listening to music” when the highway patrol attempts to pull them over. King mentions that, after the beating, he told the press that he did not see the highway patrol, but here he admits otherwise and explains that “I didn’t want to stop since I was on parole for a robbery conviction, so I kept running.” King’s willingness to admit the false narrative that he gave to the press suggests that historical distance enabled him to gain clarity and a form of control over his own story, something that was impossible during the height of media coverage. This statement is significant for its clear revision of his own story and indicates that the format of the one-on-one interview and the consistent cameras around King perhaps fostered an environment and provided an opportunity in which he finally felt able to divulge the nuances of his thought process rather than just recount the facts of the night.

What is more, King elucidates Black epistemologies surrounding state-sanctioned racial terror at the same time he recounts the events of the night. This is evident when he provides more reasoning behind his evasive driving to Pinsky: “I didn’t want to slow down because I already knew that there was a beating there if I stopped.” When Dr. Drew pauses and repeats with a tentative disbelief, “You already knew that they were gonna . . . ?” King explains, “Like I said, I was raised up in the ’70s, the sight I used to see, the way that the sheriffs used to put it down on the guys in Altadena, it wasn’t nothing nice.” When Pinsky interjects, “So, you figured if they pulled you out of the car, that that’s what was going to happen,” King nods his head emphatically, replying, “No, that was what was going to happen. I already knew the routine; I’ve seen it too many times.” King’s foretelling of the future, based on knowledge of how the police “put it down in Altadena” as he phrases it, indicates how King, in a sense, witnessed his own beating before its actual occurrence; his certainty (“that was what was going to happen”) marked the profound psychic violence that predated King’s bodily injury and alluded to the historical continuities and staggering ubiquity of violence perpetrated upon Black communities.

His comment to the effect that the beating was always with him reveals the temporality of the racial violence’s aftermath, just as the way he foresaw his own beating and death indicates the temporality of racial violence’s anticipation. His retelling thus broadened the timeline of state-sanctioned racial violence both backward and forward, beyond his individual experience to collective racial history and drawing upon a well-established archive of anti-Black racial violence constitutive to the foundations of US history and society.

What is more, King’s observation—and indeed critique—punctured the post-racial, neoliberal worldview that makeover reality television often creates and advocates as ideal. In line with the genre’s neoliberal logic, shows such as Celebrity Rehab try to erase the explanatory power of race, class, and gender oppression within their overarching philanthropic missions. Yet King’s statement, “No, that was what was going to happen. I already knew the routine; I’ve seen it too many times” refused this logic. Instead, King’s foretelling, his assuredness in witnessing his own beating, was a dramatic contradiction of the “can we . . . can we all get along?” statement now synonymous with King and his commentary on race relations and racism in general. What is clear is that King’s own history of witnessing police brutality, in combination with his own experience, was not solely a personal trauma, but a historical one as well—one that preceded his bodily injury and the legacy of which continues. Contained in his critique, then, was a refusal of the neoliberal, colorblind, or post-racial logic of reality television and an assertion of predictive truth. King’s anticipatory witnessing and knowledge of racial state-sanctioned violence, as viewers know, was accurate. And King knew this precisely because he recognized the systemic and institutionalized racist policing used against Black and Brown communities as continuous terroristic tactics of domination.

In the episode when King begins to recount the beating itself, his syntax becomes interspersed with pauses and “ums.” King tells Pinsky how, as he was surrounded, he begged one police officer “not to do this. Tell them they don’t have to do this.” He describes the beginning of the brutal attack steadily: getting kicked in the temple, a police officer asking him, “How do you feel now?” and his response, “I feel fine.” As the officers swarmed in, he recalls, “That’s when bam, uh, Koon hit me with the taser,” King’s arm and finger mimics the shooting of a taser gun. “And then he asked me, ‘Well how do you feel now?’ And uh, I couldn’t say nothing and they tased me again, and then they stopped it.” King’s whole body jerks as he says this, imitating the stopping of the taser. “And he said, that’s when he said, ‘We’re gonna kill you n*****.’” When King utters this sentence to Pinsky, he adopts the cadence and the facial expression of Koon, projecting a menacing expression with a slight smile. This statement is followed by King’s description of his desperate attempts to defend himself against the abuse of police officers:

King spreads his fingers wide, grips his head tightly with his hand, and hunches his shoulders. When Pinsky observes, “You must have thought you were going to die,” King’s response is staggering: “I knew I was gonna die. I thought I was dead. I was dead and came back to life, that’s what happened. . . . There’s not a day in my mind that uh . . . I know who I am, but since the world knows me like that . . . and the way I got beat like that, it’s a [unintelligible] memory every day I wake up to know who I am, who I really am in this world. Part of our, some of our country’s bad baggage.” When Pinsky asks him point blank if he’s pissed, King concedes, nodding, “Yeah, it pisses me off. That’s why I’m in the program. I’m trying to . . . get myself, to be me, you know what I mean?”

In King’s envisioning of his death, he theorized death as a social one and placed his existence and experience within an afterlife of slavery, from post-Emancipation to the present, whereby Black life (legible solely as property, “fungibility or accumulation” in Saidiya Hartman’s terms, or as criminal) exists as a state of non-humanness, as mere flesh.[42] His attempt to “get myself, to be me” circles this logic of mere flesh, and the appropriations of King’s identity, through hypervisibility, attempt a particular subjecthood. I argue that this approximates a legal recognition through a televisual archive of self, a recognition denied to him when he was intentionally omitted from testifying in the federal court trial due to his lawyer’s strategies.

An analysis of King’s verbal testimony of the beating, I would argue, must include certain aspects of his syntax that are normally omitted—irruptive or repetitive phrases, words, hesitations, and silences. These utterances punctuate the doubled acts of translation inherent in his account. The first translative act is transcription. Like the watchability of media texts, readability hinges on aspects of fluidity, clarity, and coherence, reflecting the decisions that the work of translation does. An analysis that makes manifest the difficulties of King’s utterances encourages readers to contend with the highly charged nature of his emotional speech and testimony. It creates an account in which the simple words become strange in their context, with incomplete clauses or unfinished sentences marking both the unsayable and the unknowable. The effects of King’s testimony call into question the very way that history is remembered and continually renewed. His testimony also implicates audiences into a process of questioning the very terms in which we know the past. As an epistemological upending, King’s testimony enacts what Emmanuel Levinas calls the “traumatism of astonishment,” or what memory and trauma scholars Roger Simon and Claudia Eppert describe as “the experience of something absolutely foreign that may call into question what and how one knows.”[43]

By emphasizing rather than omitting King’s pauses and moments of unintelligibility or incoherence, I want to reframe his testimony as an act of translation—one in which his account is less significantly a display of factual knowledge but more importantly a process of discovery and disclosure that must undergo a series of linguistic and conceptual translations. Taken this way, his silences or incoherencies are not absences or syntactic hiccups within a retelling but rather critical spaces pregnant with meaning. As Jodi Kim points out in a different context, there can be a coherence to incoherence; the lack of coherence does not reveal a deficiency of logic but rather, counterintuitively, its presence.[44] In other words, incoherence can index certain knowledges and experiences unsayable through language, where the trauma of past experience exceeds language and renders limits to its narration. Indeed, Elaine Scarry has summated that given pain’s inexpressibility and unshareability, pain does not merely defy language, but destroys it.[45] The violence done to King is marked bodily through speech, in the gaps, the hesitations, the silences, the ums, the unintelligible; these should not be discounted as inarticulateness but as evidence of a profoundly fitting expression of the unknowability of twinned psychic and physical violences and how they endure. To read King’s account in this way is to take seriously what Dori Laub calls the “excess” inherent in the testimony of traumatic events. According to Laub, this excess is marked by the multidimensional texture of testimony, “in its emphases as well as its silences, in its outbursts as well as its hesitations, in its pronouncements as well as its uncertainties, and in its narrative elisions as well as its exaggerations.”[46]

Additionally, the intensity of King’s retelling, the way that King stares off distantly, barely making eye contact with Pinsky, the way that his body jerks and moves, simulating a taser gun firing when he says, “they tased me again,” and the way King imitates the cadence and facial gestures of Koon suggest that King was experiencing “a virtual remembrance—what [Lawrence] Langer calls a deep memory in which the past is re-experienced as if it were immediately present.”[47] To articulate pain and trauma in such terms, to translate and reexperience those memories that have impacted one so severely to be driven to deadly substance abuse, is a process that requires an act of translation and affective labor.

Accounting for King’s testimony in such detail and specificity is an act of recognition itself: King’s testimony reemerges as an ethical choice to which one must bear witness rather than simply watch. As Simon and Eppert explain, “‘Bearing’ witness to historical trauma demands (but does not necessarily secure) acknowledgement, remembrance, and some indication that the provision of the testimony has been of consequence. One must bear (support and endure) the psychic burden of a traumatic history, and acknowledge that memories of violence and injustice press down on one’s sense of humanity and moral equilibrium.”[48] To account for, unpack, and parse King’s testimony in detail is to bear witness to the memory work that has been done. Sturken argues that memory takes on the form of cultural reenactment, a retelling of the past as a way to create narrative closures, to promote processes of healing.[49] Although this is true, I argue that this scene—this retelling of the past, a type of cultural reenactment via reality television testimonial—can simultaneously create new possibilities for narrative openings, ones that engage with the perpetual present of the past and the anticipatory nature and epistemological definition of racial violence. If the violence done to King was “undone” by the mode of exhibition of the beating video in court, as Sturken has argued, then King’s recounting of the events, filtered through his struggle with addiction, reinscribed that violence—but from a new perspective.

In all of its detail, King’s account reopened the historical narrative for revision. If, for some, his public narrative ended when he naively stuttered, “can we . . . can we all get along?” then, as I have shown, Celebrity Rehab began it anew. There, he revised his famous statement; the show provided an exceptionally uncommon opportunity for those victimized by the state and those marginalized by King’s specific race and class. As King stated, “I was dead and came back to life.” Proclamations of a post-racial era imply that state-sanctioned violence and racism, the genesis of King’s public story, is dead, a thing of the past. However, like King, this historical narrative has also been revived, brought back to life, revised, and recirculated. Its temporal transcendence from grounded historical event into a recursive and reiterative narrative stands in contradiction to the oft-touted teleological and intertwined discourses of technological and racial progress, or what I have previously called the persistence of the technological rescue narrative.[50] His public narrative represents past, present, and future imaginings of the nation’s relationship with race and policing, one that recalibrates the temporal boundedness and rigidity of spectacular aestheticizations of state-sanctioned racial violence and instead highlights its slow temporalities, refracted arcs, and illegibilities.

Conclusion

The nearly forgotten episode of Rodney King’s reemergence in the public sphere as a reality television show participant seventeen years after his beating by the LAPD announced both the continued state-sanctioned violence of police brutality and the reiterative psychic violence of trauma. This alone, as I have claimed, represented a serious disruption of the neoliberal mandate of the reality television genre. But what makes King’s appearance so exceptional is that he, unlike so many other victims of state-sanctioned racial violence, not only survived his attack but was able to revise the televisual archive and illuminate this temporal recursivity through Celebrity Rehab nearly two decades later.

Yet his exceptionality here must also be tempered with the fact that King’s death, a result of addiction and trauma, can be seen as the afterlife of the attack. His death cast the show as a central chapter within King’s story of injustice and subsequent addiction, immortalizing both the beating and the resulting psychic trauma he suffered. By focusing on the spectacular and the iconic forms of racial violence, this visibility eclipsed the more indistinguishable and everyday forms of violence. The beating’s significance has arguably found renewed, if tragic, relevance given the recent media visibility of the murders of Oscar Grant, Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Renisha McBride, Sandra Bland, and George Floyd.

This article’s analysis of King’s temporal recursivity—the stuck in time-ness of his trauma and his death—seeks to supplement the spectacular visibility of police-sanctioned violence in a spectacular story of racial violence by exploring the epistemologies of racial violence through the slow mortality of addiction and trauma. Indeed, King survived his horrible attack, but his presence on Celebrity Rehab and his eventual death in 2012 complicate this discourse by illustrating how the afterlife of racial violence haunts and endures. In a sense, the King beating and its significance continue to play on a reiterative temporal loop as democratizing media technology captures persistent and enduring state-sanctioned racial violence.

While the focus in this article has been on a specific media genre, a specific show, and a specific figure, I hope that by unveiling the harder-to-discern ways that racial violence operates within a phenomenon as seemingly innocuous as reality television, the less spectacular, slow deaths of Black and Brown lives will be refracted and seen. Examining King’s agency in revealing his experience of addiction and other after-effects complicates the seemingly closed nature of the event of racial violence (because addiction is not an event but an ongoing state) and gives him a rare opportunity to deliver a testimony and thus lay claim to a juridical subjecthood denied to him at trial. His account reveals not just the temporality of aftermath but also the temporality of anticipation—the way he foresaw his own beating and death—thus broadening the timeline both backward and forward, beyond King’s individual experience to a collective racial history. And finally, his account counters the violence of the still images shown at trial (used to villainize him), his verbal testimony on the show acting as a form of affective labor and translation that—unlike the seemingly definitive truth of a still image—compels precisely through its uneven rhythms, pauses, exclusions, and experiences that elude speech. Through this testimony, King reclaimed his commodified identity and crafted something new, a televisual archive of self, and was able to approximate a legal subjecthood. Simon and Eppert argue that by witnessing, “one must bear (carry) and thus transport and translate stories of past injustices beyond their moment of telling by taking these stories to another time and space where they become available to be heard or seen.”[51] What Celebrity Rehab did was astoundingly noteworthy: it enabled audiences to be stuck in time with King, to evaluate and contemplate how history and racial trauma was made and revised in its inadequate totality of truth.

1. Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, season 2, episode 3, interview with Dr. Drew Pinsky, aired November 6, 2008, on VH1. ↑

2. Rodney King, interview, CNN, May 1, 1992. ↑

3. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). ↑

4. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 7. ↑

5. Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, season 2, episode 3. ↑

6. Season 1 of Celebrity Rehab debuted to 1.65 million viewers according to Nielsen ratings numbers. Amy Kaufman, “Rehab Television Shows: Intervention or Exploitation?,” Los Angeles Times, January 2, 2011. ↑

7. Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). ↑

8. Brenda R. Weber, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). ↑

9. Anna McCarthy, “Reality Television: A Neoliberal Theater of Suffering,” Social Text 25, no. 4 (93) (2007): 17, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2007-010. ↑

10. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004). ↑

11. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 152. ↑

12. In relation to the poor and communities of color, addiction is often pathologized and criminalized as an individual choice. White addicts, by contrast, are often treated as medical patients suffering from a disease in need of care and help. This construction of a separate system of classifying and disciplining drug use is upheld by what Julie Netherland and Helena Hansen call the four “technologies of whiteness”: neuroscience, pharmaceutical technology, legislative innovation, and marketing. Julie Netherland and Helena Hansen, “White Opioids: Pharmaceutical Race and the War on Drugs That Wasn’t,” BioSocieties 12, no. 2 (2017): 217–238. ↑

13. Ouellette and Hay, Better Living, 71. ↑

14. McCarthy, “Reality Television,” 19. ↑

15. King qualifies in many ways as what Daniel Boorstin calls the human-pseudoevent, in which “the celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.” Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961; repr., New York: Vintage, 2012), 57. ↑

16. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 38–39. ↑

17. Laurie Ouellette, “Reality TV Gives Back: On the Civic Functions of Reality Entertainment,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 38, no. 2 (2010): 69, https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2010.483347. ↑

18. David Vogel, The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006), cited in Ouellette, “Reality TV Gives Back,” 69. ↑

19. Ouellette, “Reality TV Gives Back,” 69. ↑

20. Since the writing of this article, the VH1 blog has been taken down. However, it is archived on VH1’s Facebook account in their notes section. VH1, “Examining Rehab 2 with Dr. Drew—Episode 3, Facebook, ” accessed December 20, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/notes/VH1/examining-rehab-2-with-dr-drew-episode-3/38325181611/. ↑

21. Ouellette’s article also uses the example of the VH1 show Charm School (2007–2009) as illustrative of such civic-minded branding. She discusses the show’s emphasis on performing community service as well as its allusions to Barack Obama’s campaign. As she puts it, “tellingly, Charm School’s off-screen male narrator not only sounds a lot like Obama, he also punctuates the ongoing question of whether the show can transform party girls into ‘model citizens’ with the slogan, ‘Yes, we can.’” Ouellette, “Reality TV Gives Back,” 69. ↑

22. Indeed, King’s difference was further emphasized when most of his cast members mistook him for a professional athlete or an actor from the movie Boyz n the Hood (John Singleton, 1991) rather than a figure enmeshed within a historical narrative of race relations in the United States. The cast’s misreading of King provided a fascinating glimpse into the expectations the participants themselves had of their relative status within the entertainment industry, as well as the conventions of reality television and channel branding. ↑

23. Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 6. ↑

24. For a more nuanced analysis of Black reality television and VH1, please see Racquel J. Gates, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). ↑

25. Greg Braxton, “Rodney King’s Tumultuous Path Leads to 'Celebrity Rehab',” Seattle Times, October 20, 2008, accessed November 15, 2015, https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/tv/rodney-kings-tumultuous-path-leads-to-celebrity-rehab/. ↑

26. Fred Moten, “Music against the Law of Reading the Future and ‘Rodney King,’” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 27, no. 1 (1994): 56. ↑

27. Sturken, Tangled Memories, 39–40. ↑

28. Sturken, 39–40. ↑

29. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 77. ↑

30. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), 77. ↑

31. Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 122–126. ↑

32. Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no. 2 (63) (2000): 33–57. ↑

33. Terranova, 33. ↑

34. The commodification of King’s story, in which he participates in order to create a sense of intimacy and connection with his family, embodies this shift; as George Lipsitz puts it, “every personal relation is permeated by commodity relations.” George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 84. ↑

35. Rodney King with Lawrence J. Spagnola, The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption (New York: HarperOne, 2012), 203. ↑

36. Braxton, “Rodney King’s Tumultuous Path.” ↑

37. This is of particular note considering the dominant discourse of pathology surrounding Black fatherhood and Black families. Daniel Moynihan’s seminal government-commissioned report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965) crafted an enduring paradigm of pathology within Black familial relations. It contained “frightening statistics about broken Negro families, illegitimate Negro children and Negro welfare recipients . . . [and states that] Negro family instability is a basic cause of the Negro inequality.” William Ryan, “Savage Discovery: The Moynihan Report,” The Nation, November 22, 1965. While Moynihan also argued for governmental assistance in eradicating white racism, a major factor in Black poverty, social scientists and newspapers fixated on his claims that the disintegration of the Black nuclear family stemmed from single Black mothers and the abandonment of Black fathers. Filtered into popular discourse, the report was read as a call for the cutting of social welfare programs by relying on and weaponizing stereotypical and racist notions of Black men and emasculating Black women. Though published in 1965, the report’s ramifications within the public imaginary as well as political legislation have been enduringly disastrous and highly influential. James T. Patterson, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life—from LBJ to Obama (New York: Basic Books, 2010), xiv. ↑

38. Brandy Monk-Payton, “Blackness and Televisual Reparations,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2017): 12. ↑

39. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 9. ↑

40. McCarthy, “Reality Television,” 21. ↑

41. Courtney R. Baker, Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 4. ↑

42. See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81; Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions, no. 5 (2011), https://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/jaredsexton.php; Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); and Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). ↑

43. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Dusquesne University Press, 1969), 73; and Roger Simon and Claudia Eppert, “Remembering Obligation: Pedagogy and the Witnessing of Testimony of Historical Trauma,” Canadian Journal of Education 22, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 180. ↑

44. Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). ↑

45. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4. ↑

46. Quoted in Simon and Eppert, “Remembering Obligation,” 182. ↑

47. Simon and Eppert, 180. ↑

48. Simon and Eppert, 178. ↑

49. Sturken, Tangled Memories, 24. ↑

50. Wendy Sung, “In the Wake of Visual Failure: Twitter, Sandra Bland, and an Anticipatory Nonspectatorship,” Social Text 39, no. 2 (147) (2021): 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8903577. ↑

51. Simon and Eppert, “Remembering Obligation,” 178. ↑