Update: According to a press release from the Harris County Sheriff's Office, the girl in the video known as "Sharkeisha" has been charged with Assault with Bodily Injury as a result of the video. She was taken into custody on this class A misdemeanor Thursday morning and is being held by the Harris County Juvenile Probation Department. Video taping assaults is clearly not a good idea.
Original Entry:
People on the Internet love videos of other people getting hurt, punched and kicked, whether it be intentional or otherwise. They also love videos of black people being sassy (ask Antoine Dodson or Sweet Brown). And they really love sharks (Sharknado anyone?). Put them all together and you might have the most talked about T-shirt in ThinkGeek.com history (it would probably also have a wolf, a light saber and a unicorn), or an Internet meme spawned by a sucker-punching girl from Houston with a funny-sounding name.
The cell phone video, which spread virally after it was posted on WorldStarHipHop.com, of a teen named Sharkeisha punching another teen, allegedly over a boy, shows Sharkeisha sucker punching 17-year-old Shamichael Manuel and then beating and kicking her repeatedly outside an apartment complex on Mills Road. The two reportedly were friends who both attended Cypress Creek High School. Manuel, interviewed by KHOU, said the now-viral video of the beat down is increasing the humiliation she feels, not surprisingly.
The scene is as dumb as it is unfortunate. Sharkeisha (it is spelled Sharkeysha in the KHOU report, but because it spread online as the former, we'll go with that for our purposes), 16, is clearly being a punk and fights over boys (or girls) are often the most ridiculous, outside of a stabbing over a parking space at a Walmart on Black Friday.
What makes me most uncomfortable, however, is how quickly it spread and the reasons behind it. First of all, it should be noted that the video is NOT funny. Unless you think it is hilarious when some jackass hauls off and clocks you one in the side of the face when you aren't looking, my guess is you shouldn't be laughing when it is someone else.
Certainly, plenty of us have chuckled if not all-out died laughing over videos of people running into things, falling down, etc. Johnny Knoxville and his moron friends made millions off of their pranks turned into lowbrow movie features. But, many of those were self inflicted or accidents. This was a person deliberately and violently turning on another person, viciously attacking her repeatedly before being stopped.
