Last year, I came home from class to find my roommate and a few of my friends glued to a laptop. “This fight comp is crazy; come see this,” my roommate said. I sat down and watched a series of brutal videos of people fighting. Some were alcohol-fueled altercations outside bars, others were neighborhood events with dozens of local spectators.
However, there were some common themes: Most of the people in these videos were black, and all of them came from impoverished backgrounds.
The host website of this fight compilation was Worldstar Hip Hop, a content-aggregating video blog founded in 2005 by Lee “Q” O’Denat. While the site features some hip-hop content, it is best known for uncensored videos of fights and public sexual acts set in low-income areas. In an interview with Vibe magazine, O’Denat himself referred to the website as the “CNN of the ghetto.”
It is not the existence of these videos that troubles me. After all, Worldstar is a content aggregator and is therefore likely to attract material with high shock value. What troubles me is the popularity I’ve witnessed it gain among my peers: suburban, middle-class college students.
This is not to say they are intrinsically racist or classist for watching these videos. They are simply detached from the reality of what the videos depict.
In a time when the Internet provides a constant stream of spectacles, it is all too easy for us to get caught up in the voyeuristic pleasure of watching street fights in neighborhoods we didn’t grow up in. In doing so, we choose to treat the subjects of these videos as caricatures of race and socioeconomic status as opposed to actual people with real struggles.
Worldstar is not the first to perpetrate these negative images of race and poverty. Television segments such as Maury Povich’s “Find Your Baby Daddy” and reality TV shows such as “Cops” are consistently guilty of the same thing.
Both Worldstar videos and these television programs dehumanize the people they show and will continue to do so unless we, as viewers, choose to stop watching.
Therefore I urge anyone reading this to think twice about what you consider entertainment. Watching a certain video or show may seem passive and harmless, but in doing so you are actively promoting damaging stereotypes. All the while, you are reducing the very real lives of people into sources of shock and amusement.
Namwan Leavell is a UF economics junior. Her column usually appears on Fridays.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 4/21/2015]
