Session Abstract
This talk traces the courageous acts of witness/testimony displayed by Darnella Frazier,
the 17-year-old girl who recorded the 9-minute murder of George Floyd and then shared
it on Facebook. The post quickly went viral and ignited the largest collective protest
against police violence in our nation’s history. Tracing the moments before and after her
recording of George Floyd’s murder by then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin
reveals a way of seeing and sensing that affirms the value of Black life and transcends
the constraints of police vision. Frazier’s testimony on the night of Floyd’s murder
challenged the official record released by the Minneapolis Police Department,
demonstrating how police vision and Black Witness/Testimony exist in an ongoing battle
for the public imagination. Ten months later, as Derek Chauvin faced murder charges in
a court of law, Frazier once again used her testimony to defy and refuse the death-
dealing logics of police vision. The evidence produced through her way of seeing and
sensing, especially her video recording of George Floyd’s murder, turned out to be the
key to an unprecedented conviction of a police officer. Darnella Frazier’s commitment to
another way of seeing and sensing facilitates an expansive abolitionist imaginary that
continues to radiate outward from the rupture of Summer 2020.
Speaker Bio
Nikki Jones is a professor in the department of African American Studies at Berkeley. She served as the H. Michael and Jeanne Williams Department Chair of African American Studies from 2021-2024 and has been on faculty in the UC-system for over twenty years. Her work examines how the criminal legal system, policing, and violence impact the lives of Black people in the U.S. She is the author of two books: Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence (2010) and The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption (June 2018), which received the Michael J. Hindelang Outstanding Book Award from the American Society of Criminology in 2020. She is currently at work on her third book, Brutal &; Routine, which examines the enduring legacy of racist policing in the U.S. and the promise of abolitionist dreams.
More recent work includes the analysis of interviews with police officers and the analysis of video recordings of lethal and routine encounters between Black people and the police. Records of these encounters are housed in her research lab. Professor Jones has shared her expertise with numerous print, radio, and television news media outlets, including NPR, KCBS Radio, Axios.com, History.com, BBC World Newshour, Minnesota Public Radio, Time Magazine, KQED’s Forum, Ireland Today, Australia Broadcasting Corporation (The Drum), SF Weekly, The Dallas Morning News, and CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” among others. Professor Jones is also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Race and Gender; the Department of Women and Gender Studies; and the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC-Berkeley.