The Purity of Scraps

Abstract

Many will recall with ease the murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 whose untimely death was a flash point in the ongoing protest against state-sanctioned deaths in the new century. Following the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Tamir’s death joined a cadre of other high-profile police killings that rallied national outcries and birthed new political movements largely formed by the digital age in which they occurred, such as #BlackLivesMatter and the Movement for Black Lives. The 9-11 call from the person who first speculated that a “Black man was throwing a gun around,” visualized the scene of Rice’s death for listeners. In many ways, the lasting legacy of the digital footprint of Tamir Rice’s death is the most material thing we have of his memory. Stills from this video are what replays the actual events and normalizes the mass viewership of Black death, remnant of lynchings in our not so distant past that once attracted crowds of over ten thousand people. In the same era in which videos of the death scenes of Korryn Gaines, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice circulated the web, a concurrent public memory crisis erupted around the institutional and structural legacies of the Civil War and Confederate “heroes.” The ire to remove Confederate monuments was part and parcel of the same social fabric of this time, displacing the impossibility to erect physical memorials for slain Black folks while the digital allowed us to re-live their deaths over and over—sustaining grief as a permanent condition of Black life. This condition is often defined as the social position of being Black. Critical Black theorists engage in mourning in a myriad of ways; most applicable here are their contributions to the ways it contributes to a “slow death” of Black mothers and how mourning continues the spectacle created by Black death. These spectacles manifest physically in memorials, monuments, and in the bodies and minds that contextualize them within their own experiences with mothering and parentage. Material memorials for Black people, meaning three dimensional sites, statues, or plaques commemorating the slain, were defunct for a society that was still living the original event at the click of a button and the never-ending evidence of gratuitous antiBlackness. What is less frequently recalled about the murder of Tamir Rice and those also killed by state-sanctioned violence in the digital age is the difficulty to erect material memorials of their lives. The abhorrent circumstances through which they died challenge attempts to materially manifest Black memorial. The public resistance to figure state culpability within the grammar of memorialization continues to demand critique. A critique of the memorialization within the context of the Black maternal relies on Samaria Rice’s grief as a framework to understand the object of the gazebo as a generative object for a multitude of efforts including healing for Tamir’s mother, but