Abstract
A series of Supreme Court decisions in the past 40 years transformed the legal standard for police use of force, centering officers’ assessments of a suspect’s potential for violence. Using the oral arguments from three landmark SCOTUS cases, I trace the development of a legal discourse of potential violence. Using Judith Butler and Robert Gooding-Williams’ frame of a “racial field of vision,” this paper juxtaposes the colorblind legal narrative of potential violence with cultural narratives of race that mark Black masculinity with the signifiers of threat and criminality. I argue that the intersection of legal and cultural narratives of potential violence is an important site for understanding the disproportionate use of police violence against Black men and boys.
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