The country knew Latasha Harlins primarily by the grainy image broadcasted again and again on the courtroom television and on national news networks: a tussle between Latasha and the proprietor of that Los Angeles convenience store in 1991; a harrowing bang when the shopkeeper pulled the trigger of a gun she took from beneath the counter, and fired a deadly shot into the back of Latasha’s head. The proprietor had mistakenly assumed that Latasha intended to steal a carton of orange juice, and shot her after the physical altercation that ensued, after Latasha had placed the orange juice on the counter, and after she began walking away.
Though it’s been 33 years since the 15-year-old was killed, Latasha is on my mind; I recently read a chapter from Brenda E. Stevenson’s The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins for my American Studies course, History of the Cops: Racialized Policing in the U.S. Gripped by Stevenson’s recounting of Soon Ja Du’s trial — and the key role that that grainy surveillance video of the shooting played in the proceedings — I stumbled on an altogether different videographic representation of Latasha Harlins — her life, not her death: Sophia Nahli Allison’s A Love Song for Latasha (2020).
In the brief documentary film, Allison practices a sort of past and present Afro-futurism that entreats us to imagine how Latasha’s young life might have bloomed. The film is palpable, dreamlike, with images of shoes tossed over telephone wires and Black girls’ gap-toothed smiles, alongside oral histories from Latasha’s cousin, Shinese, and her best friend, Ty. The details of the murder are not mentioned until the film’s final moments, and even then merely on an end card. The ugly video is never shown.
In A Love Song, Allison shows us a new way to remember and cherish Black women through film, after their bodies, their deaths, have been visually commodified. She reclaims Latasha’s memory and grants her a life beyond her death — something, in this era of Black death broadcast on news and social media, we must all aim to do.
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Benjamin Balthaser, associate professor of English at Indiana University, examines the history of images of Black violence. In the current day, Balthaser concludes that in videos of ongoing police violence against Black bodies, and videos taken in their aftermath, it is the presence of a voice — an observer who “refuses to allow the actions of the police to be naturalized” — that may imbue the media with a quality of resistance.
Balthaser treats the video, taken by Ramsey Orta, of Eric Garner’s killing by police. Orta protests the police’s actions, and “focuses attention away from Garner’s body and to the violent actions of the police. [Orta’s] commentary makes it impossible for the viewer to regard Garner’s death merely as spectacle or to remove Garner from a community of people for whom his life matters.” Balthaser concludes that “images of violence against African Americans do not speak for themselves.”
Valid as this method of counter-narration is, Allison provides a more reparative alternative to images of Black brutalization. The documentary is a counterpoint to other films about Latasha, like that of Allison Waite, The Dope Years (2019) that features the surveillance footage in its very trailer.
Instead, Sophia Nahli Allison begins A Love Song for Latasha with a story from her best friend Ty, who sweetly remembers how they first met — when Latasha protected Ty from boys who were abusing her in the neighborhood pool. What follows is 19 minutes of colorful, striking visuals and animations, overlaid by stories from Ty and Shinese, that are deeply rooted in the possibility of Latasha’s young life.
When Ty saw on the news the video in which Latasha is killed, she reflected that “I never knew what terror was until I saw it. And they kept playing that video over and over.”
Indeed, Stevenson writes that in the court proceedings, “The videotape was the center of attention during the second day of the trial. Roxane Carvajal [the district attorney] had an additional tape made in which a portion was slowed and slightly enlarged so that it would be clearer to the viewing audience.”
Of course it was necessary that the tape be replayed in court, but less justifiable that, as Ty says, it was played and replayed on television. We must ask what it does to the memory, to the soul, of a young Black girl when her memory is her death. The surveillance footage lacks a narrator to question the shopkeeper’s brutality — her death is a spectacle; her death is and subsumes her life. This happens again and again when Black people are brutalized by police and others, including even in 2020, the year of the film’s release, when video of George Floyd’s murder proliferated on television and social media. We also must not forget the tragic murder of Sonya Massey by a police officer earlier this year in Illinois. The harrowing video of her death, bodycam footage, circulated endlessly.
Allison furnishes a different, fuller way to remember. Absent photos of Los Angeles on fire in 1992 — spurred by Latasha’s murder and Rodney King’s beating — absent the harrowing convenience store footage, Latasha becomes to us whole. We do not need a voice within the store footage to tell us that what we are seeing is wrong, because in Allison’s documentary, we have the raw and breaking voices of her best friend and cousin. The dream she had of being a lawyer, the love she felt for her late mother. It is a proclamation that her death was wrong, completely independent of an image of it. This, to me, keeps more deeply intact Latasha’s life and her memory.
Her image and memory are not confined to symbols of protest or injustice, though those serve their purpose. Instead, they stand as something whole. What might happen if we reimagine slain Black women and men not through the lens of their deaths or the gruesome videos that document them, but through the boundless possibilities of their lives?
Finley Williams is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at [email protected]. Kaleidoscope runs alternate Tuesdays.