It’s My Job to Watch. With George Floyd’s Death, I Had to Look Away.

Devastated by the Rodney King verdict decades ago, our critic refused to view the video of Floyd’s murder. But she found solace in the art it inspired.

I’ve never watched the video of George Floyd’s murder. My decision wasn’t premeditated or preordained, but rather an improvised refusal. I did not want to be another spectator of that oldest of American rituals: the killing of a Black person in public. My resistance was not heroic; I’ve just learned not to trust what I see. My doubt started 30 years ago when I, like much of the country, saw another recording, this time a videotape in which four white officers of the Los Angeles Police Department mercilessly beat Rodney King on the side of a San Fernando Valley street. During my senior year of high school, my mainly white classmates and I argued about the case. I believed the grainy black and white footage, shot on a home video camera by George Holliday, a 31-year-old white plumber, to be incontrovertible evidence, and that a guilty verdict was inevitable. But, when, on April 29, 1992, on their seventh day of deliberations, the predominantly white jury acquitted the four men on nearly all charges in the beating of King, their decision taught me a vital lesson: To be Black in this country is to be gaslit almost all the time.