Paromita Vohra: All you can see

On Thursday I watched in spite of myself the live video of 32yearold Philando Castile a black man from Falcon Heights Minnesota filmed and broadcast on Facebook Live by his girlfriend after he was shot point blank by a white policeman as he reached into his backpocket to pull out the ID he had been asked forImmediately after the video was broadcast it was unavailable for an hour before Facebook made it available again citing a technical glitch The question raised was should such videos mdash those with graphic violence mdash be available on social mediaDemonstators being arrested by the NYPD after they march through the city calling for justice for Alton Sterling and Philandro Castile in New York PicAFPThe answer is in a world where seeing is itself such a selective act does showing have to be differently selective Can it possibly be that mysterious word lsquoneutralrsquo when itrsquos not what but how we seeAs per a Guardian survey in 2015 black people were killed at twice the rate of white Hispanic and Native Americans About 33 per cent of the African Americans killed were unarmed compared with 15 per cent of white people Young black men are overwhelmingly among those killed though they make up less than two per cent of the overall populationFrom how some white policeman see every back pocket is a black pocket and every hand that reaches into it is reaching for a gun even if unarmed So no matter what those who like to see in selective generalities might say race overwhelmingly influences who dies That is to say the race of the killers for race or class or caste or gender do not reside only in the body of the less powerful member of an equation We cannot see race at play in the black body and then not see race at play in the white body Or in the Dalit body and not the upper caste body Or the female or transgender body and not the male bodyTo see identity only in one part of these equations is part of the violenceAnd when the US system never punishes the killers in this violence it renders unseen the reality of the killed and those of their communities and identitiesSomeone asked how could Castilersquos girlfriend have the presence of mind to shoot while all this was happening Oh these timesHow could she not shoot it If your truth is selectively heard if the realities of your life are constantly falsified by social narratives around you what do you do How do you remind people as the spoken word poet Sarah O Neal eloquently described in her poem ldquoAn Overreactionrdquo about your ldquokin becoming ghostsrdquo and ldquounderstand the seat empty at the dinner tablerdquoThat last line reminded me of an article I read the previous day about Eid in Dadri About how quiet it had been following the mob killing of Ikhlaque Khan His familyrsquos ghostly Eid his neighboursrsquo ghostly Eid with no food sent over either How easily a mob sometimes an administration sees beef in certain refrigerators the way white policemen see guns in certain back pockets And how such events variations on this theme are rendered unseen going unpunishedWhat does one whose truth is hidden in plain sight do to try and make people see it in its most brutal reality The answers to hard questions are rarely easy onesParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at wwwparodevipicturescom