When Black Grief Becomes a Headline: The Violence of Misinformation and Spectacle

Black death in America has always been more than tragedy — it has been a commodity. From the auction block to the lynching postcard to the evening news cycle, our pain has been packaged, sold, and consumed. Today, in North Carolina, the same systems continue to prey on us, transforming our grief into spectacle and our lives into headlines stripped of truth.

When my family lost a loved one to violence this week, newsrooms rushed to our doors with condolences in one hand and deadline-driven requests in the other. “Legacy,” “impact,” “a quick interview before 3 p.m.” — the language was polished, professional, but it was also transactional. Not one commitment was made to correct the false information already circulating. Not one promise was given to slow down, to listen deeply, or to resist the urge to convert fresh Black grief into consumable content.

This is the pattern. Local media in North Carolina has long aided and abetted anti-Black violence — not always through overt lies, but through omissions, distortions, and the lazy repetition of official narratives. How many times have we seen police statements aired unchallenged while community voices are buried at the margins? How many stories spotlight “crime” without context — without the history of state abandonment, housing discrimination, underfunded schools, or systemic neglect that created the conditions? Each decision is not neutral. Each choice reinforces a story that Black suffering is inevitable, individual, and detached from state accountability.

We cannot afford to accept this as journalism. Journalism without accountability is complicity. Journalism without truth is violence.

As an abolitionist, I know our liberation requires dismantling not only prisons and police, but also the media structures that uphold them. The same logic that cages our people in cells cages our stories in soundbites. The same system that profits from mass incarceration profits from sensational headlines. If the press wants to claim credibility, it must do more than package Black grief; it must confront its role in perpetuating the very conditions it reports on.

I demand that our grief not be reduced to 90-second segments. I demand that our pain not be mined for ratings. I demand that our voices be centered in full, not cut down to what fits neatly between commercial breaks. We are not spectacles. We are not tragedies to be consumed. We are people, and our stories belong first to us.

We grieve as resistance. And in that resistance we are building something freer, more truthful, and more liberatory than this state has ever dared to imagine.