National attention to black suffering requires spectacular violence to break through

Evidence

We should be better than this. But it seems that no matter what we do or what happens to us, African Americans can be seen only in a certain way or at certain times. Either our suffering has to be invisible, or that suffering has to be entirely familiar. Somebody has to call us a nigger, or someone has to shoot down an innocent twelve-year-old child, or someone has to massacre nine black people in a church to remind us of the ugliness of our past and present. Otherwise, the nation is unconcerned with the problems of black America, ignoring the dimming eyes of black children waiting to be warehoused in the nation’s prisons. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 67

Categorization

• QUESTION: The January 6, 2021 Capitol attack and the post-2014 racial reckoning could test whether this binary still holds — worth checking if the pattern shifted.
• XREF: Echoes the plant decision / moral-monopoly logic of white liberal conscience.