ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the animalization, that is, the dehumanization, of African Americans as an ideological tool to mistreat blacks and deny them the most basic human rights so as to make black bodies killable, and their deaths ungrievable. It argues that the animalization of blacks that places them below and thus outside of the law, and allowed whites to kill them with impunity. The animalization of African Americans has long history that was ultimately legitimized by the anthropological sciences and which had important political implications in post-slavery United States. The chapter provides relatively brief historical overview tracing how African Americans were animalized in the nineteenth and twentieth-century United States as a political tactic designed to justify their oppression. It argues that lynching is a biopolitical and necropolitical tactic of political subjugation that helped construct the white community through the death of blacks. Thus, lynching and lynching photography possess an exchange value that constructs American identity buttressed by white supremacist ideology.
