Staring at the eye: biopolitical racism and digital hate speech

Following the mediatized death of Jamel Dunn in Florida in 2017, this paper situates the event of death within familiar cycles of moral condemnation, on the left, and the context of recursive circuits of mediatized and racialized violence, on the right. As we watch ourselves watching the boys watching (and filming) his death, the paper hopes to complicate our understanding of digital hate speech, moral subjectivity, and culpability. Between the curse of death and its recursive afterlife, it advances a tentative claim about ethical complicity across our digital media ecologies.