They Left Us Dead: Anti-Black Violence, Black Evidence, and the Insistence of Black Life

Ward, LaCharles Travell

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-cxr5-dk90

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They Left Us Dead: Anti-Black Violence, Black Evidence, and the Insistence of Black Life

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They Left Us Dead: Anti-Black Violence, Black Evidence, and The Insistence of Black Life examines the mercurial, though seemingly fixed, notion of evidence as it is brought into relation with anti-blackness, Black death and, ultimately, Black life. They Left Us Dead queries how and why certain forms of documentation and witnessing of anti-Black violence and death continue to fail as legible evidence in defense of Black people. To undertake such an investigation, it charts the complicated relationship between blackness and evidence by detailing how Black people have been disallowed historically and contemporarily from proffering evidence within the arena of law. At the intersections of visual culture, Black studies, and law, They Left Us Dead argues, then, that whiteness and what it calls legal seeing structures what can and cannot appear as evidentiary and, just as importantly, who can and cannot produce evidence. The dissertation offers an “aggressive reading” of evidence in order to expose its internal and conceptual limits as well as to point to new possibilities for theorizing evidence that is not tethered exclusively to the legal or jurisprudential and, importantly, whiteness. It argues for nothing short of a complete disassembling of our extant socio-legal conception of evidence. They Left Us Dead produces a new theory of evidence—Black evidence—that is grounded in a sustained commitment to Black life and people. Black evidence focuses our attention on how Black people are not only producing alternative archives of evidence but are, fundamentally, theorists of terms such as evidence and testimony and, in effect, the pitfalls of Western law. They Left Us Dead considers iconic and non-iconic cases of anti-Black violence starting in 1991 with the Rodney King beating, trial, and riots, the killing of Michael Brown and the subsequent Grand Jury in 2014 and concluding with the killing of Lt. Richard Collins III at the University of Maryland in 2017. Each chapter engages the notion of evidence from three different registers: the visual, the rhetorical, textual or testimonial, and the speculative and performative. Ultimately, They Left Us Dead is preoccupied with thinking evidence otherwise in order to insist on the mattering of Black life.

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