How Philando Castile's girlfriend transformed "sir" into a powerful tool for dignity and subversion
How Diamond Reynolds Transformed Politeness into Protest
The officer fired four bullets. Diamond Reynolds fired five sirs. In live-streaming the fatal shooting of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, by police in a St. Pauls suburb last week, Reynolds didn’t just provide dramatic video testimony of police violence: She also transformed a simple term of deference and submission – sir – into a powerful tool for dignity and subversion.
In the opening minutes of Reynolds’ Facebook video, we witness Castile slumped over in the driver’s seat, his white shirt soaked in blood. We glimpse his eyes roll back and hear a low, agonizing groan. The officer, his gun trained on a fading Castile, screams his commands – and his own shock, it seems, at his actions. But Reynolds is narrating with clarity and composure, repeatedly addressing the officer as sir. “You shot four bullets into him, sir. He was just getting his license and registration, sir.” Her unassuming, polite sir counterbalances the horror of the gun, the blood, the officer’s “Fuck!”
But Reynolds’s sir is more than a straightforward act of obedience: It is literally disarming. It defuses the crisis, demonstrating to the officers she is present and attentive: “I will, sir, no worries, I will,” she responds to an order. Her sir levels out the volatility, following a script all the actors know by heart: “Yes I will, sir.” Her sir even helps soothe the initial trauma, as if creating in its extra syllable a breath-catching pause, a pulse-calming rest – for her, for her daughter in the backseat, for the viewer, for the officer. In expressing deference with sir, Reynold stays in control.
While Reynold’s mannerly sir eases the scene, it also focuses our attention. “You told him to get his ID, sir, his driver’s license,” Reynolds says. “You told him to get it, sir.” Each sir refers us back to the officer. In a 10-minute video, Reynolds uses sir five times, four of them within that intimate minute before she exits the car. As she provides this first-person narration, she also pivots to third-person documentation, panning from the all-too-familiar outcome – another dead black male – to the problem: the use of lethal force against black Americans. Wielding the megaphone of Facebook Live, she addresses one sir to address the broader sir of authority and state.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2016/07/14/how_diamond_reynolds_yes_sir_transformed_politeness_into_protest.html
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