Sutherland’s “Making a Killing” examines the circulation of digital records of Black death in the United States as a profoundly racialised problem of evidence, mourning, memory and commodification. The essay argues that cellphone videos, social media posts and online images documenting the deaths of Black Americans do not merely expose violence; they also reproduce traumatic spectacles within digital economies that profit from repetition, visibility and spectatorship. Drawing on critical race theory, performance studies, archival studies and digital culture studies, Sutherland frames Black bodies as both records and evidence, showing how viral images of deaths such as those of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile and Michael Brown transform rituals of grief into endlessly replayable digital events. Her discussion of lynching photography, Emmett Till, Henrietta Lacks and contemporary social media memorials demonstrates that the visualisation of Black suffering has long oscillated between bearing witness and exploitation. The central case of Michael Brown is especially powerful: his body, left in the street and repeatedly photographed, became part of a digital mourning ritual that galvanised protest while also reinscribing racial trauma through circulation, searchability and algorithmic persistence. Sutherland therefore identifies a crucial tension between memorialisation and commodification, asking who controls the digital afterlives of those whose lives have been stolen. Ultimately, the essay concludes that digital culture’s apparent permanence complicates any simple appeal to visibility or the “right to be forgotten”, because the same images that can support resistance may also intensify white supremacist spectacle. Its decisive contribution lies in insisting that ethical digital memory must centre ritual, consent, context and care rather than treating Black death as infinitely shareable content.
