"There is dramatic moment in the film Cadillac Records, when musician Muddy Waters, portrayed by Jeffrey Wright, has just watched the body of fellow musician Little Walter (Columbus Short) taken away to the morgue. Little Walter was more than Waters’ wingman—he was critical to how Waters literally heard himself in the world. Trying to come to terms with Little Walter’s death, Waters walks upstairs into a bathroom, off-screen, and utters a series of bone-chilling howls that sound like death itself. It is simply the most arresting moment in the film, and tellingly a moment in which the sounds of death are disembodied from the Black man who is so tortured by the loss of a brother.

I immediately thought about that scene in the film, hearing the 911-tapes that capture—unquestionably in my mind—the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, at the hands of George Zimmerman. In a world in which Blackness is visually over-determined—both as hyper-visible and invisible—there is no ocular meme more pervasive in American society than that of the so-called violent and dangerous Black male, who is always already in need of pursuit, capture, incarceration and inevitably extermination.

So powerful is this script, that the fact that such levels of surveillance—from the classroom to the interstate—is un-American, is rarely disturbed in the minds of most Americans, including far too many Blacks. That more than a few corporations, often with direct input from Black men themselves, have turned the image of the menacing Black male into a cottage industry (dating back Birth of a Nation’s “Gus”) only speaks to how normative such an image has become."