ABSTRACT
Police killings captured on cell-phone video or photographs and the protests that resulted have become the defining feature of present-day United States visual culture. These photographs and videos have revealed the wide-ranging operations of white supremacy, acting under the guise of a law-and-order society. This “America” is made visible the intersection of three streams of visibility: first, the witnessing of these scenes, depicted in cell-phone videos and photographs, supplemented by machine-generated imagery from body cameras, dash-cams and closed-circuit television (CCTV); second, the embodied protests and actions taken to claim justice and to make injustice visible; and finally, the sharing of these images and actions by social media that in turn made. their way into mainstream media. If the strategy is, as it has been for so long, abolition democracy, then these are tactics for the moment between the killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in July and August 2014 and the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017. The tactics deployed were those of refusal, articulated by copresence between digital and physical spaces, persistent looking, and vulnerability. In an epilogue, I will ask how the Trump administration and newly active white supremacists have challenged these tactics.
