Steve Locke’s ‘#Killers’: facing the inhumanity of whiteness

Abstract

This article explores the critical reflection on whiteness initiated by Steve Locke’s series of drawings entitled ‘#Killers’, which depict the white perpetrators of lethal violence against Black victims in graphite on paper. Locke presents a subjective take on media and social media images that he reframes as portraits of pathological whiteness. The article argues that, while other artists have powerfully memorialized Black victims, Locke’s drawings critique the ideology of whiteness that defines the perpetrators and determines their public reception. Locke’s careful attention to the perpetrators interrogates not only the relationship between whiteness and power, but whiteness and humanity itself. In focusing on its most pathological embodiments, Locke’s drawings propose an existence beneath and beyond the racialized subject positions that have historically defined and violently enforced whiteness as the face of the human.