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Dashal Moore (Ethnic Studies Major)
Richmond's "State of Emergency"
Sponsor: Professor Victoria Robinson, Ethnic Studies
Project Description
Dashal’s project will use a recent debate in the Richmond City Council over the proposal to declare a “State of Emergency” as a focus for questions dealing with violence and politics in the deindustrialized and racialized American landscape. She will investigate how violence and crisis are constructed in various discourses, and how those understandings are deployed in governance. Although the State of Emergency was purportedly proposed in response to a spike in homicide rates, Dashal believes it actually stemmed from a more hidden and deep crisis. In the context of the neoliberal retrenchment of state services and the general financial crisis in deindustrialized municipalities, racialized minorities are increasingly portrayed as dangerous to society, thus providing a rationale for their differential treatment by the law. Using interdisciplinary methods and multimedia, Dashal’s research will reexamine the notion of violence within this more expansive framework.
Scholar's Photo
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Dashal Moore
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Scholar's Journal
Yesterday I attended another day of a murder trial. From the expert medical witness this is what we learned: That when a gun is shot while pressed up against a person’s head, it has a “star” effect in their brain, pushing smoke, gunpowder, dirt, and the bullet in a more spread pattern than when shot from a distance. When blood is in someone’s stomach from a wound in the face, it means that they must have been alive enough to swallow it. The medical community does not agree on the exact definition of death. It takes about three seconds to die when the aortal sac fills with blood. One’s heart pace may quickly rise after one’s body is shot, but then, if the shot is fatal, the heart will slow. “But,” the prosecutor pressed the expert, “can a person still open a car door when the heart has begun to slow?” “Can that person open the door and slump his body out onto the street while his assailant approaches and shoots him, at close range, in the back?” Can it happen this way?
Terrance Kelly’s body was represented in four angles on a poster board, with the entry points of the bullet wounds marked by Xs. He was represented by eight photos of the car he was sitting in when he died. He was represented by his attorney, who cocked the guilty rifle in slow motion while stepping closer to the jury. He was represented by a mannequin’s head, with long nails inserted by the medical witness to demonstrate the trajectory of the bullets that entered his head. In the silent courtroom we could hear each nail pushed into the foam of the mannequin.
The seats of the courtroom were sparsely filled: a few court reporters, a county-appointed victim’s advocate, a woman taking notes for a crime novel, Reverend Shumake who I carpooled with, three of Terrance’s family, and the defendant’s, Darren’s, parents. In the row in front of me, Darren’s mother wore a nurse’s uniform with cartoon characters and his father wore a crisp white shirt, their hands gripped tightly together. Darren himself looked thinner and more worn since he shot Terrance two years ago. Now, at 17, he is being tried as an adult.
Three or four weeks of macabre theater-as-trial will hinge on this question: Did Darren Pratcher kill Terrance Kelly in cold blood? But no one will ask the medical expert if it is possible for a human to have cold blood.
The summer is ending. I am going through a mental inventory of the stories and ideas I’ve accumulated over the past three months. I close my eyes; I feel my intellectual grip slipping away into the endless complexity of this thing “violence.”
In the three years since I moved to Richmond I’ve been kept awake at night by gunshots and sirens. Richmond is “violent,” that is taken as a given by those who live here…but what is violence? What counts? I began this project because violence was happening “out there” and I wanted to know what was going on. Violence was on every politician’s lips and I wanted to know what those politicians are really doing. Now, at the end of three months of research, I’ve learned much but I still don’t know how to turn these idea/feeling/data heaps in my mind into words. Watching those parents in the strangle hold of violence, sitting only seats apart, two sons lost—this isn’t an easy thing to turn into a thesis statement. It isn’t an easy thing to takes notes and construct arguments while one’s subject’s lives are falling apart.
This summer of research has not only brought me deep into the city where I live, it has also awakened me to the intellectual space I want to move toward. I’ve gone from the theory and books of the classroom to the messy, contradictory, and evasive “real” world—not an easy transition, but one that has clarified for me what I want from academia. I still don’t know how I will construct a thesis, but I believe more strongly than ever that it is crucial to continuously stress the relationship between ideas and the worlds in which we live. Violence is an idea around which policy is shaped—an overly simplified assumption of what violence is underscored the courtroom theatrics, and that assumption will probably guide the jury’s decision. While I won’t be able to “make sense” out of violence, my greatest hope for the products of my research is to help expand and deepen the idea of violence in Richmond, and to challenge the simplistic good and evil framework that divides this city.
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