Visual Profiling as Biopolitics

This essay examines the crisis of American policing through a close reading and critique of the visual rhetoric that circulated in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s untimely death in Ferguson, Missouri. By drawing on recent work in visual and media criticism, Black Studies, and Foucault, we analyze and critique what we call “vernacular visuality” as a site in the unfolding politics of racial representation. Because practices of policing cannot be divided from visual culture and the politics of representation, we argue that the vernacular visuality of race can deepen our understanding of late capitalist policing because it illustrates how the racial logics of late capitalism operationalize it as a mode of biopolitical intervention on the racialized body.