Surveillance footage revealed racial violence as performed private-fantasy theatre

Evidence

In the footage that has been released we see the group prancing about the living room, brandishing knives, and chanting racist obscenities. It is a pantomime of racial violence, and many observers have been struck by the histrionic quality of the whole episode. These are young men getting off on the racial fantasies that bond them together as a gang and acting “as if” they were performing for each other’s benefit a script written to be staged for quite another audience - only to discover retrospectively, of course, that this mimicry was in reality being observed and that having apparently got away with their public misdeed because no witnesses would come forward, they had “unwittingly,” as a result of a “private indulgence” made themselves into the object of the whole world’s fascinated, and officially horrified, gaze. The video was not admitted as legal evidence in the case but it leaves us with a series of unresolved questions: just what can be reliably inferred from such material about racist states of mind? What does it tell us about the role of fantasy in the committal of racial violence, and about the complicity of certain kinds of prurient and moralistic stances in the construction of the anti/racist spectacle? — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1235

Categorization

• QUESTION: Opens a methodological question: what can be reliably inferred about racist states of mind from performative behavior?
• XREF: connects to: Concealed police footage reveals racial violence as performed fantasy for the group; Covertly filmed racist fantasy performances become public spectacle, blurring intention and display — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1235; Racist violence becomes sexually charged to sustain the fiction of permanent racial difference (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Concealed police footage reveals racial violence as performed fantasy for the group #corroborates (0.90)
• Covertly filmed racist fantasy performances become public spectacle, blurring intention and display #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1235
• Racist violence becomes sexually charged to sustain the fiction of permanent racial difference #expands (0.78)
• Prisoner abuse functions as a publicly enacted sexualized ritual of racial violence #expands (0.75) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 191