This essay speaks to the criminalization of Black bodies via the purported “confession” of wrongdoing that Blackness makes through the interpretive White gaze. Blackness operates as a site of always imminently actualized criminality or pathology that must be quelled or eradicated. Using James Baldwin’s meditation on the function of Wayne Williams’s body as a historical anchor, this essay seks to articulate the contemporary ways in which Black bodies are positioned via the White gaze, as well as demonstrate the continuity of anti-Black violence, itself predicated on what Charles Mills calls an “epistemology of ignorance.”
JacksonR. L. (2006). Scripting the Black masculine body: Identity, discourse, and racial politics in popular media. Albany: State University of New York Press.
10.
JohnsonC. (2001). The phenomenology of the Black body. In Guy-SheftallB.ByrdR. P. (Eds.), Traps: African American men on gender and sexuality (pp. 223-235). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
