A crowd huddles around some TVs. From the clamorous mass of people there rises a single, unified sound – a roar of hungriness, desperation and anger.
American greed has long been something to marvel at. Writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald have skewered it beautifully, and movies like "Wall Street" have brought it to life in all its ugliness and embarrassment. Yet while we digest artistic moralizing about the perils of abject greed, it's not clear that we actually absorb it. There's a part of the brain reserved for appreciating The Great Gatsby, and there's another part rabidly obsessed with discount merchandise. And on Black Friday, the latter brain sector utterly erodes the former. Therefore, year after year, we're left with one great day of shopping pandemonium. But these days, we're able to document that, watch it again and again, and enjoy it.
Loving The Chaos
The tantalizing nature of Black Friday videos isn't something that's been lost on news outlets and other purveyors of viral videos. The one linked at the start of this piece, which is relatively tame, has already garnered more than 400,000 views. There's a more popular video, entitled "Black Friday Shopping Chaos," which has racked up more than 3 million views. Among other things, it shows police regulating a rabid crowd, people erupting in violence over unknown (but presumably shopping-related) disputes, and a group of store employees sprinting away from the opening doors of the business as if they're under siege. This flurry of activity spanned the globe, and The Telegraph UK reported the following instances of Black Friday violence:
- A man was busted after claiming that he'd "smash" an employees face in.
- Some London teenage shoppers attempted to take a TV out of a woman's hand.
- A staffer at one store nursed a black eye after an altercation.
It would be very hard to argue that Black Friday resembled anything remotely like holiday spirit. By almost all accounts, it was a violent, police-heavy, hard-to-regulate day with lots of indignation, hurt feelings and even a few black eyes. In some instances, Tasers were used. Many spent their Black Friday in jail. And now, all we're left with are …
The videos. So many videos. If you're a Facebook user, the odds are likelier than not that one or more videos showing the craziness of Black Friday popped up on your feed. Perhaps you even clicked "share" on one such clip. For many people disseminating videos like these, the implicit feeling was perhaps one of superiority: Man, I'm glad I didn't embarrass myself like that. But is enjoying the videos just as bad as participating in what they depict?
The Unfortunate Impulse To Shame And Mock
In a piece for The Washington Post, Luke O'Neil argued that the collective interest in Black Friday brawl videos is far from an innocent one. That's because such videos have quickly become a platform for people to espouse offensive and often racist comments. And by watching such videos, O'Neil argues, we're complicit in such vitriol.
As O'Neil states, Black Friday videos boil down to this: "A privileged segment of the population sits back and dehumanizes [shoppers] for its collective amusement … The message is the same: this is shameful, materialistic behavior. And by pointing it out, we differentiate ourselves, reaffirm our class status as being above the fray of the lowly and desperate."
Maybe you didn't consciously think about this when you clicked on that crazy Black Friday brawl video. And you're not a bad or intolerant person just for watching such coverage. But it is important to consider how these viewing tendencies point to a bigger problem of classism and racism, and how continuing to watch such videos reinforces backward thinking.
