"Bring Out Your Dead": Understanding the Historical Persistence of the Criminalization of Black Bodies. (June 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bey, Marquis
• Other Names: Alexander Bryant Keith guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: Cultural studies, critical methodologies. Volume 16:Number 3(2016:Jun.)
• Page Start: 271
• Page End: 277
• Publication Date: 2016-06
• Subjects: James Baldwin -- Black bodies -- Epistemology of ignorance; Culture -- Research -- Periodicals; Popular culture -- Research -- Periodicals; 306.05
• DOI: 10.1177/1532708616634773
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1532-7086

Abstract

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."