Trigger Warnings and Content Notes; When and Where?
When I was in grad school, we didn’t have trigger warnings per essay but an entire class early in the semester devoted solely to preparing ourselves. For example, graduate-level Human Sexuality is a rough course. So one whole class, the first one, was dedicated to preparing for sensitive content. The only graduate-level course where I didn’t have half of a class or a full class dedicated to preparing for a semester of triggering material was Research Methods. Thus, no, I don’t think professors should warn before each essay or lecture. I do think that in the beginning of the semester, expectations must be set. And if people are being trained in the helping professions specifically, yet professors cannot help students prepare for a semester of possible triggers, that’s a disconnect. Many of my graduate school professors let students know that we could walk out of class at any time. No explanation needed. Leave for a break or for the full day if desired. Just that permission alone and the early semester preparation was enough for me. It let me know that I was human in those classes, not just a tuition check. (Though of course I was just a tuition check; the academe is a business first and foremost.)
A lot of types of media has content warnings/ratings. Films are rated. Warnings come on before most TV shows to warn of “mature” content. Video games are rated. Channels with the most sensitive content are usually cable channels, not network ones. Music has parental advisory. This is not “political correctness” as a pejorative, which is the privileged way of skirting accountability. Thus, early classroom discussion about the nature of what will be taught in addition to people choosing to add trigger warnings to their own tweets, essays, blogs or articles, or whatever they post makes sense. It is not automatically sanitization; context matters. The warning is to notify and prepare a person, not to alter the content. The idea that people want lack of preparation to exist for content online when it already exists offline is interesting and seems more about the myth that any small amount of respect shown to the abused and/or oppressed means a loss of “rights” for someone else who has not been abused and/or is privileged.
However, not all conversations and experiences are the same. And since White supremacy means that violence is automatically associated with my existence and the political space that I occupy as a Black woman, no, I do not want Whites adding trigger warnings to my content especially when the title itself already states what the post is about. (If a title includes “rape” it is about rape.) Whites regularly Whitesplain and seek to dominate my experiences, especially ones that they cause such as racism; it is a clear example of trying to sanitize and “calm” the “savage” content to make it palatable for Whites; context here matters. When Black women, my actual audience, come to me and state that there was not enough warning for what I shared, things they experience as well, that’s something I consider. And the discrepancy between White women policing my writing versus Black women telling me that something I wrote did not have enough notice for them is stark. Also, I refuse to add trigger warnings to each tweet in back in forth conversations that I have with Black women online. When we speak our truths to each other, I don’t want them to feel like they have to worry about if Whites will approve of them speaking to me. Whites derail my conversations anyway solely because they occur online (although they do the same offline anyway). White entitlement to Black bodies and spaces is very old; Black people have a history of not even being able to legally congregate once upon a time. Even now, Black people congregating is automatically deemed “violent” anyway; McKinney anyone?
Whites regularly are paternalistic, ready to sanitize my experiences–while co-opting them through generalizations to make them usable for Whites–while erasing my existence from them. Thus, this being taken a step further through their determination that their input is needed on my essays/tweets where sometimes a trigger warning already exists or is not content directed at them is about White supremacy. I discussed these passive aggressive behaviors before in 10 Ways That White Feminist and White Anti-Racism Allies Are Abusive To Me In Social Media. Between them trying to determine what of my content is “inappropriate” to them sending me unsolicited triggering content, Whites regularly interfere with my words and violate my space in dominating ways.
Finally, even as my years work on post-mortem media violence is lied on, plagiarized or erased, I don’t desire “trigger warnings” on images of Black death; a bandage isn’t going to work for anti-Blackness. I want the hyperconsumption of images of Black death to cease being conveyed as “awareness” altogether. It is a lie that this is needed to be “aware.” It is violence on both the victims who experienced police abuse or extrajudicial execution, and violence on many Black people who tire of seeing the same images over and over in every media outlet no matter how progressive and pro-Black those outlets claim to be. (I literally had to log off completely when McKinney happened, for example. I try to maneuver around such “activism” and I no longer retweet/reblog anything like this.) Black death is not just a metaphor for consumption. In this aspect, there is no amount of warning that I will ever deem acceptable because I want the consumption to cease being “proof” of activism. It is voyeurism and little else. The same kind of people who expect Black people to instantaneously forgive White terrorism are often the ones who feel nothing when images of Black death are traded in the first place. (And…why is it okay to trade images/video of State violence on minors?) There is no one person responsible for this since this is how most people–activists or not–are socialized to engage in the consumption of Black death as “activism.” Activism can trigger. This is the price of anti-Blackness. I want the dehumanization in the media–proliferating the narrative that Black death is always deserved–to end. (This doesn’t mean that videos/images should be excluded from actual trials; that’s hardly the same as Black death visual memes for retweets and hourly news stories, re-traumatizing Black people by the minute and calling this traumatization “activism.”)
In essence, there is content and context to consider for when content notes and trigger warnings matter. I’ve never opposed them completely or endorsed them completely because context matters. Who is speaking? Who are they speaking to? Who is at risk? So many questions come into play and none of these questions are hard for me; probably because I am used to people both trying to control my conversations with other Black women and using my mentions/emails as a dumping ground for unsolicited violent content. The odd thing is that people often try to tell me that a television show that I choose to watch as a grown ass woman is “triggering” (they don’t necessarily know what my triggers are to automatically tell me that a show I in fact chose to watch is) when I didn’t ask them for an opinion, yet these same people will dump unsolicited violent images and video of Black death and other topics directly into my mentions/email. Can’t they figure out that both of these actions are wrong? Allow me to choose my own media as an adult. Also, keep unsolicited violent images of Black death away from me. How is paternalism activism? How is hyperconsumption of Black death and forcing me to consume it activism? Respect people enough to consider privilege, content, context and consent for trigger warnings and content notes. Respect Black life enough to know that no amount of warning will justify using visuals of Black bodies as fetishistic death metaphors to “prove” what we already know has been true for centuries.










