Presenter: Allison Wiltshire
Registration Number: 039Institution: University of Missouri-Columbia, USA
Abstract: In the late spring and early summer of 2020, only one news story could pry America’s attention away from the growing rampancy and anguish of the COVID-19 pandemic. When footage of the murder of George Floyd surfaced and spread across social media platforms, Americans were offered a rare view of the gleam of death through a focus on a single individual rather than an ever-growing ailing group. In this paper, I analyze the intersection of the pandemic and Floyd’s death, drawing an antithetical yet causal connection between the social distancing of the pandemic and white America’s social media-fueled attraction to the George Floyd case. I argue that during the rise of COVID-19, white American social media users became particularly attached to footage of George Floyd’s death because of their pandemic-driven expulsion from physical public spaces. Through a theoretical framing that encompasses Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the gaze and Frank Wilderson’s theory of Afropessimism, as well as a variety of theoretical and scientific studies related to social isolation, I demonstrate how white voyeurism at George Floyd’s dying body is ultimately an unconscious attempt to soothe anxiety associated with social distancing—a feeling of outcasting to which white Americans have rarely been subject. Additionally, I draw historical connections between the white gaze at Floyd’s body and white voyeurism at the bodies of Sarah Baartman and lynched black men during the Jim Crow era. In the case of George Floyd, social media has served as an antidote for white anxiety, allowing white Americans the chance to both subdue their feelings of social segregation by repeatedly consuming intimate images of Floyd’s dying body and feel a sense of personal pride and social gratification in publicly denouncing the overt racism of Derek Chauvin and his supporters. In my final analysis, I contend that within virtual public spaces, white responses to racial injustice must transcend the typical perception of white silence as a perpetuation of white violence, and I assert that social distancing, even in the form of virtual distancing through social media, is a crucial step for white Americans who are sincerely committed to social justice and civil rights activism.
Bio: Allison Wiltshire is a G. Ellsworth Huggins Fellow, PhD student, and graduate instructor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Wiltshire focuses her scholarship on literature of the African diaspora. Predominantly, she examines themes of race, Afropolitanism, duality, and twinning in contemporary African and African American texts. Wiltshire received her MA and BA from Mississippi State University and began her doctoral studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2019.