by Karla F. C. Holloway
The phrase is not mine. University of California, Berkeley, literature professor Judith Butler explains the precariousness of life – its ontological vulnerability. Some lives are known well enough and valued highly enough to be grievable. And others are only accidentally noticeable. These differential values are familiar terrain to cultural studies and bioethics scholars where the idea of excess mortality – deaths that exceed the predictive statistics for certain populations – are as familiar as a funeral refrain, “soon one morning death will come a calling.”
For 7-year-old Aiyana Stephens-Jones of Detroit, it was an evening death call when the launch of a flash grenade burned her delicate body just before a policeman’s fatal bullet entered her neck. The circumstances were violent and fleetingly public. A television crew was filming this police raid, as they had been filming others, for “public” programming. Some bodies are more public than others. It is a bit more difficult to imagine that film crew following a police raid into Bloomfield Hills rather than into urban Detroit.
The circumstances of this child’s death are, not surprisingly, under dispute. Was the gunshot intentional, accidental, or careless? Ironically, it will be helpful to the resolution of this question that a film crew was onsite. It does not, however, mitigate against the public invasion of private lives that vulnerable bodies – citizens who are poor or who are minorities or who are children – experience.
It does not change the familiar procession before the open casket of a child, where other little girls and boys will peer into its recesses and see a body that looks like their own and perhaps even marvel at the pretty pink dress she wore, the carefully placed rosary, and the spray of flowers and loving notes and prayers that surrounded her tiny body. It may be one of the loveliest if not most tragic images of their young lives. It may well be the one they romanticize and recall and even imagine for themselves instead of a prom or wedding dress, or a graduation gown or a carefully chosen tuxedo with matching vest and tie.
They will look down at Aiyana and wonder if they will be as pretty and as loved as she was on this day of her obsequies. They will not remember her life. This was not the value displayed at the moment and circumstances, and that made her vulnerable to a killing. Instead, they will recall her funeralizing and imagine the words spoken about them will be as passionate and emotive as those pronounced over the stilled body of this child, whose pitiful death brought her to our notice, albeit briefly.
Read the Full Essay @ the Bioethics Forum
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