In this essay, we situate the murder of Trayvon Martin within the history of the relationship between evidence and anti-blackness, suggesting that evidence and facts are rendered irrelevant when it comes to racialized violence and terror. Through an examination of the circulated “media narrative” images of Martin and Zimmerman, we argue that the failure of evidence is bound up with a racialized optics rooted in U.S. chattel slavery that overdetermines blackness as a political ontology of criminality. One cannot prove blackness innocent because guilt is a foregone conclusion.
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